Censorship
Censorship on Spoot baby... spooooooot!: a running collection of 2 stories we have gathered and hand-picked because they are worth your time. Every post here touches on censorship in some way — the news, the analysis, the deep dives, and the occasional surprise find. # Spoot. New stories are added to this page as we find them, so check back if you want to keep up with what is happening around censorship, or subscribe to the RSS feed to get them as soon as they are published. Browse the collection below, or head back to the homepage to see everything Spoot baby... spooooooot! is covering right now.
Languages of A City of Sadness.
The February 28 Incident is a whisper that learned to shout. Hou Hsiao-hsien finally lets it, and the sound is devastating. I'd been bracing for this film for years, and it still managed to burrow sideways into my chest. It doesn't hand you history on a plate; it makes you sift through the shards of a family dinner, a photograph, a language you almost understand. That's the razor clam hiding in plain sight: the violence isn't just in the massacre, it's in the silence that followed. You feel the weight of every word not spoken. It's a dense, beautiful, angry thing, and it earns its sadness. For more on how language carries that buried weight, our piece "Still You, Just With More Vocabulary" digs into the same soil.
1905: The Linguistic Renaissance.
January 1905 cracked the Russian Empire open, and for two years the whole thing refused to close. Protests and strikes rippled out like someone kicked the anthill of history, and the tsar, cornered, coughed up October's concession. That's the kind of moment that makes you want to check the footnote, the razor clam buried in the mud of geopolitics. Zachary Mazur, via Joel of Far Outliers, hands us the good stuff, and we're the ones who'll take it and run sideways with it. Language, after all, is just another revolt waiting to happen. If you're circling back for more, our piece on whether vocabulary changes who you are, "Still You, Just With More Vocabulary," fits the obsession neatly. Stay spooty.