While people object to books all the time - there are, apparently, cranks in the world with lots of time on their hands, as well as some controversial titles - only a few are found universally insulting enough to warrant the "Form 286" that brings it before the panel. if the panel rules against a book, it will in some cases be taken out of circulation and, in the case of Brooklyn, "tucked away in the Hunt Collection, which are kept in a vault-like room accessible only to staff members" and made available by appointment only.

If you worry that this sounds like shades of Fehrenheit 451 - or at least Banned Books Month - you're not alone: the ALA, after all, states on its site, "Policies should not unjustly exclude materials and resources even if they are offensive to the librarian or the user...Toleration is meaningless without tolerance for what some may consider detestable." But that's easier said than done, especially for those working with children's material: some public schools have rendered controversial titles to be "parent checkout book only" while one former librarian quoted in the piece claims that some of his colleagues would take such touchy titles out of circulation on vague pretexts. (Although this would be anathema, I should add, to the librarians I know, difficult as dealing with people can be.)

There are very few people who would argue that Tintin au Congo's relegation to the "Hunt Room" - especially in its original, unexpurgated form - is "unjust." By any standard, the portrayal of Africans is racist. And the truth is, a children's section should be a place of some safety. But it's a slippery slope; the article mentions that objections have been lodged to the presence of everything from Beloved to Eloise in Paris. And while obviously these complaints have been dismissed, censorship is always just that. The problem with the system is that you won't find such a book - indeed, know it exists - unless you look specifically. And a library should be about discovery, too, even if it is not always pleasant. Racism and ugliness existed, and exist, and hiding history somewhat arbitrarily is a form of white-washing. Tintin has come to people's attention because it's famous: how many other old books, as offensive, more offensive, remain on the shelves? No one thinks that this book should be where a child can stumble upon it (there's a difference between adult and kids' books) but even something so overtly ugly is an opportunity for questions, discussion, and facing the reality of cultural heritage. Maybe we have enough teachable moments in this world without needing to introduce more: but maybe that's a library's job.

A Library's Approach To Books That Offend [NY Times]

• Saberi said she was moved to hear that so many people worked for her release. She added, "I think that if somebody is supposed to speak about my case from now on, nobody knows about it as well as I do, and I will talk about it more in the future." • Tennessee has nullified the 18-month marriage of a transgender woman and a man because the state considers them both men. The woman was born a man and had a sex change operation, but the state does not recognize gender change (or gay marriage) even after sex reassignment surgery. • A Sacramento woman survived a car crash because she was hurled out of the car, over the the highway sound wall, and landed in a plum tree in a backyard. Firefighters say she survived because the tree cushioned her fall. • A Turkish court has ordered that an employer give a woman her job back after she was fired for kissing her boyfriend at work. The kiss was brief, and no customers say it, but her boss caught it on a security camera and fired her. • The banning of four books of French erotic literature in Turkey has caused debate over the qualifications of committee members to determine what is literature and what isn't after they decided to ban a book by the acclaimed French poet Apollinaire. • A new study suggests chemicals and hormones produced from our changing moods can affect eggs and sperm, altering the patterns of genes that are active in them and thus how a child develops. • Scientists have found that by observing the pattern of activity in the brain they can tell whether a person heard words spoken in anger, joy, relief, or sadness. This is the first study to show that emotional information is represented by distinct spatial signatures in the brain. • Scientists in Australia have figured out why there is an obesity epidemic: we eat too much food. They calculated how much people are eating today as opposed to three decades ago by comparing agricultural data. They determined that based on the total amount of food that is grown and imported, humans are actually less fat than we should be based just on changes in consumption, which may be explained by exercise. • A McDonald's in Alabama pulled Kidz Bop CDs from the store's Happy Meals because parents complained they could hear an obscenity in a cover of Gavin DeGraw's "I Don't Wanna Be." McDonald's says there's no obscenity in the song, but a parent says, "In the song the word is supposed to be 'looking,' but they're saying the f-word with the -ing on the end." • A stripper working at a Times Square peep show caught an ex-con who was counterfeiting money. She noticed that the two $10 bills he handed her looked like they were made on an Ink Jet printer and alerted her manager. When confronted, the man panicked and dropped 21 more bills. The man was arrested and is currently out on bail. • A British man was arrested after he drove up to a police officer posing as a prostitute and how much she would charge to have sex with his 14-year-old son, who was sitting in the car. The man won't serve jail time because of his "previous excellent character" and the boy will be allowed to live with his father, but the man will be put on the sex offender registry for five years. • A study found that in many police units in England and Wales female officers have to wear uniforms and stab vests designed for men. Maria Eagle, the justice minister, said, "It does make a very clear point, doesn't it? How welcome would you feel as a woman in a police force like that, if you can't even get clothes that fit you? It's crazy." • Police are investigating whether a Russian gynecologist, Igor Ivanov, purposely sterilized his pregnant ex-fiance, Olga Sokolova, when she was admitted to a hospital with abdominal pains. Sokolova had called off their wedding on the night before they were supposed to get married because she believed he was cheating on her. She started dating someone else and got pregnant. Ivanov was the only doctor on duty when she was admitted to the hospital, and he told her she was miscarrying and performed emergency surgery, causing serious internal damage that will prevent her from having children. • On Saturday Sister Mary Elizabeth Lloyd will run a 100-mile marathon in Florida while wearing her nun's habit to raise money to help orphaned children. ''I'm like Johnny Cash,'' Lloyd said. 'I wear black to draw attention. And when people ask me: 'Why in God's name are you doing this?' I can say, 'For the orphaned children.''' • A video posted by the U.K. National Health Service in Leicester was banned by YouTube after 24 hours for showing what looks like a teenage girl giving birth on a playground while students watch. The NHS was trying to get their anti-teen pregnancy message to young people with a viral video. • Business is booming at Cryos, the world's biggest sperm bank. In 2008 the number of donors tripled, from 30 a day to 100 at its four offices in Denmark. The worldwide demand for sperm surged in the past three or four years and Cryos "can't meet the avalanche of demand from the western world, in particular the United States," said Chief executive Ole Schou, "We help a tsunami of highly-educated single women who are more demanding and who prioritised their careers and who want to have a child before it is too late." • Vietnam is experiencing a boom in male births, which researchers believe can be blamed on the tenfold increase in the availability of ultrasounds in the last decade. They believe women being able to know the sex of their unborn child is increasing the number of sex-specific abortions. • A scientist who writes under the name "Mike The Mad Biologist" blogged that he perceives a double standard in how female scientists are viewed when they party after work. "If a female scientist at a meeting parties hard and flirts, she is viewed as a 'party girl.' In other words, she is no longer viewed as a scientist with an interesting social life, but as 'a good time' (although perhaps not sexually)," he writes, adding, "Mind you, I think this double standard sucks. But... I'm not sure what we (including male scientists) can do about it, other than not be assholes (which would be a good start)." • Here's a letter to the Princeton Alumni Weekly from an alum of 1945: "Gone is the distinct masculine flavor of an all-male college. The maleness of the Nassau Inn's Tap Room has been replaced by a female, dainty, tearoom atmosphere... My fear is that the Princeton University I knew has been taken over by a female majority (for better or worse). I am surprised that other male graduates are not upset by these developments." • English ice cream maker Frank Frederick is reviving his Italian family's 100-year-old gelato brand, along with his grandfather's practice of singing opera to his cows to make them produce endorphin-rich milk. Frederick flew in opera tenor Marcello Bedoni from Italy to serenade his cows. "The cows are such gentle beasts and have a good ear for opera," said Bedoni. •

•  Dr. Fabiola Carrieri says she was not offended by the comment made by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ("I wouldn't mind being resuscitated by you") while she was working in an Abruzzo field hospital. She said it was merely a "gallant" compliment intended to lighten the drama of the situation. •  Police in Saudi Arabia are investigating an elaborate hoax that involved sewing machines, cell phones, and a non-existant substance called "red mercury." •  A Swedish man has announced that he plans to display what he calls "Scandinavia's largest collection of erotic items" in his Stockholm garden. He owns over 15,000 "erotic items" to combat society's "anti-sex" leanings. • If you're looking to build your own erotic collection, be one of the first 100 people to stop by Babeland on tax day and receive a free Gold Digger vibrator. • Dr. Aronne, author of new dieting book The Skinny, explains to the Wall Street Journal why a big meal makes you want to eat more. He also sets up a daily diet plan that advises groundbreaking weight loss measures like breakfast and salads. •  The Houston Chronicle explores yet another stupid trope for ladies in Hollywood: the high powered, but still mentally unstable, career woman. • Judith Krug, the founder of Banned Book Week and former director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, has sadly passed away. •  The Iraqi government has been working quietly on a draft law that seeks to protect victims of sex trafficking and punish the abusers with fines and prison sentences. Currently Baghdad offers no protection to victims of trafficking. • Allen Andrade, 32, is scheduled to go on trail today for the murder of Angie Zapata, a transgender woman. Andrade is believed to be the first person tried for a hate crime under the sexual orientation section of Colorado's hate crime law. •  The Parks and Recreation office of Spokane, WA, have employed an exterminator who plans to detonate some 100-150 squirrels that hide in the ground with a special machine called the Rodenator Pro. •  A man from Texas has been ticketed for cursing at his neighbor about his cat, who liked to "defecate" in his yard. "I used the slang word, the four-letter word to describe what the cat was doing," he later explained. • In attempts to escape prosecution in a fatal drunk driving case, the defendant published his own (fake) obituary. He was later found alive, hiding under a pile of rocks in New Mexico. •  A polar bear from Chicago has been brought all the way to Detroit to mate with two females at the Detroit Zoo. • Spokesmodels at the New York Auto Show have been forced to field questions about the bailout from attendees, despite the fact that they are employed by temp agencies and don't actually have anything to do with the auto industry. • 

Here's the story: In 2005, FBI agents demanded that a group of Connecticut librarians on a committee of a librarian association present them with "any and all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person or entity". The agents didn't have a court order but something called a national security letter, designed to "protect against international terrorism" and rendering the librarians unable to reveal "to any person that the FBI has sought or obtained access to information or records." Admirably, librarians George Christian, Peter Chase, Janet Nocek and Barbara Bailey decided to fight for their patrons' privacy and challenge the constitutionality of this practice, becoming the unlikely center of an FBI investigation themselves. As Chase explains to Mother Jones, "People say very confidential things to our reference librarians...They have medical issues, personal matters. What people are borrowing at a public library is nobody's business."

About those national security letters: The MJ writers, Amy and David Goodman, describe them as "a little-known FBI tool originally used in foreign intelligence surveillance to obtain phone, financial, and electronic records without court approval." Since 9/11, they've been employed a lot — and, unsurprisingly, often abused. "An investigation last year revealed that the FBI had broken regulations governing NSLs in more than 1,000 cases... Even when an investigation is closed, information gained through an NSL is kept indefinitely in the FBI files," say the Goodmans. And because the four librarians had read the letter, they were now "a threat to national security", legally barred from appearing at the hearings or from speaking publicly, and had to be known as "John Doe" when they engaged the ACLU to challenge the NSLs and lift their gag order.

Although the Patriot Act was subsequently reauthorized, soon thereafter the Justice Department dropped the gag order case and was ordered by the Supreme Court to unseal the court documents in the case. Then, last September, a federal court ruled NSLs to be unconstitutional, calling them "the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values." Not shockingly, the Bush administration has appealed the decision.

Everyone loves a good "little guy takes on the Man" story, and this is a great one. In combination with Ms. Baker, frankly our profession-crush on the library sciences is growing by the second. Obviously it's not all heroics, but when you consider the cultural importance of the library in our history — it's a real trust, kids. It would have been so easy to have given up records that were,for the most part, probably pretty innocuous - the fact that anyone is willing to put themselves at this kind of risk for principle makes me actually choke up a little bit. (And for the first time, kind of get the point of Banned Books Week, which always struck me at my school as kind of preaching-to-the-choir-ish.) Sexy librarians, indeed!

America's Most Dangerous Librarians [Mother Jones]
Mayor Palin: A Rough Record [Time]
Sarah Palin, Book Banner? [MediaBistro]