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The Handmaid’s Tale Ch. 9-10: Someone Lived Here Before Me | Why Books Get Banned · Banned Camp: Banned Books, Comedy, and Free Speech vs. Censorship

Welcome to Bandcamp.
I'm Jennifer.
And I'm Dan and this is the podcast where we read banned books out loud and try to figure out why they were banned in the first place.
This season we're reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and you could consider this a very quick spoiler warning because Jennifer's about to start reading from the book out loud word for word.
But if you're new here, you can totally jump in right here.
You're not gonna be lost.
We're gonna get you up to speed real quick.
And if anything feels confusing to you, don't worry, there's a solid chance we're gonna be confused too, because neither of us have ever read this book before.
So you're hearing us discover it along with you.
And that is exactly why we thought we needed a secret weapon, so we're gonna roll him in right now.
Buddy boy.
Look at this guy, everybody.
He's our very own fact-checking robot.
He is gonna fill us in on where we left off last time in The Handmaid's Tale Previously on Band Camp, the Handmaid walked past a wall with six bodies on it, a priest, and two gay dudes.
Their heads were impaled on hooks.
Also, I was asked to analyze the grunting order of the US presidents.
Gee, I wonder which president came in at number one.
anywho...,
The people who disappear don't always disappear completely.
Sometimes they leave a message behind, scratched into a four in a corner where the shadow is darkest for a stranger who will probably never find it.
Take it away, Jennifer Thank you, robot.
And with that being said, scary book people, let's start chapter nine of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale My room then.
There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even in this time.
I'm waiting in my room, which right now is a waiting room.
You know, I wasn't prepared for her humor, but she's pretty funny When I go to bed, it's a bedroom.
The curtains are still wavering in the small wind.
The sun is outside and is still shining, though not in through the window directly.
It has moved west.
I am trying not to tell stories, or at any rate, not this one Someone has lived in this room before me.
Someone like me, or I prefer to believe so.
I discovered it three days after I was moved here.
I had a lot of time to pass.
I decided to explore the room, not hastily as one would explore a hotel room, expecting no surprise, opening and shutting the desk drawers, the cupboard doors, unwrapping the tiny individually wrapped bar of soap, prodding the pillows.
Will I ever be in a hotel room again? How I wasted them, those rooms, that freedom from being seen.
Hmm.
There's a sentiment.
On the one hand, they're taking her identity away Yeah she's a nobody, but on the other hand, she can't hide It's very complex.
In the afternoons when Luke was still in flight from his wife, when I was still imaginary for him, before we were married and I solidified, I would always get there first, check it, oh, she had an affair with a married man? Boy, but that was a really h- ham-handed way to write that paragraph too.
It's like that sounded like a robot talking.
No buddy boy Is Robot having an affair? I've seen him look at the toaster in the break room.
Oh, please.
She's not my type.
Keep dreaming I would always get there first, check in.
It wasn't that many times, but it seems now like a decade, an era.
I can remember what I wore, each blouse, each scarf.
I would pace, waiting for him, turn the television on and off, dab behind my ears with perfume.
Opium it was.
It came in a Chinese bottle, red and gold.
I was nervous.
How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair.
Why did we ever say just? though at that time, men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.
The knock would come at the door.
I'd open with relief, with desire.
He was so momentary, so condensed, and yet there seemed no end to him.
We would lie in those afternoon beds, afterwards, hands on each other, talking it over.
Possible, impossible.
What could be done? We thought we had such problems.
How were we to know we were happy? does this change your mind on how you feel about her that she had an affair? Not really because, it's not my life, and I don't like lying to people.
I think that you should just, break up your marriage or, you know, like leave first.
Like, it's not fair to the other person.
Like, you know I got this whole thing about like how you shouldn't lie or betray people.
But you know that whole thing But like I won't judge her because I don't really know what's going on.
could have been having a crappy life, and he clearly wasn't happy in his, uh, in his marriage either And there's a pressure to get married.
Like, "Oh, you want to be with someone? We gotta be married first."
Like, maybe she's making a point about that because Like, remember how people shit all over, Murphy Brown? Oh yeah, like and like people were mad, and that was the '90s.
I...
Maybe Margaret Atwood is just making a point about marriage, how, you should be able to try people on, for lack of a better phrase.
on like a suit.
and i- if the society kinda doesn't let you do that, and you get married, and then after a few years you realize, "Well, that's actually not the right place for me," then there's this whole other cultural thing that says, "Well, now you gotta stay with that person forever and ever."
And like, that even really love then at that point? I watched Murphy Brown was, uh, in the, in the early '80s or whenever it was on, and I was not really political back Yeah, I wasn't thinking back, there was one side who was pissed off Murphy Brown was a single the same wasn't the Democrats it's the same people that are like, "Women should stay home and have as many babies as they can, even if they can't afford it."
It's the same, it's always the same people How about if you just stay home, you do whatever you want, and then you let other people do whatever they want? That's what's cool about being America.
Why do you to get your old busybody head in everything? But now it's the rooms themselves I miss as well, even the dreadful paintings that hung on the walls, landscapes with fall foliage or snow melting in hardwoods, or women in period costume with china doll faces and bustles and parasols, China or sad-eyed clowns or bowls of fruit, stiff and chalky looking.
The fresh towels ready for spoilage, the wastebaskets gaping their invitations, beckoning for the careless junk.
Careless, I was careless in these rooms.
I could lift the telephone and food would appear on a tray, food I had chosen, food that was bad for me, no doubt, and drink too.
There were Bibles in the dresser drawers, put there by some charitable society, though probably no one read them very much.
That, I don't think that happens anymore, so there's, there's something.
You don't think there are hotel Bibles anymore? No.
Are there? Robot, get some hotel phone numbers.
Let's call some random hotels to see if there are any Bibles.
Hey, yeah.
Hey, I'm thinking of having an affair at your hotel, but I only wanna do it if you guys have Bibles in your drawers And we'll just do a quick two out of three.
Bibles or no Bibles? Robot, do you have anything? All right, put it into the thing here so I can just press a button.
Oh, it's ringing Seattle Gas Light and this is Joelle Hey, Joelle, my name is Dan.
I'm calling from a podcast.
This is gonna sound really dumb, but my friend and I are having a discussion.
Do hotels nowadays still have Bibles in the drawers? Do you guys have Bibles? We do not have Bibles in our drawers.
I haven't seen a Bible in a drawer in a while.
Told Jennifer gets excited that there are no Bibles.
So Joel, what do you think you guys ever had Bibles or did some group come in and take them out? No, uh, we probably never had Bibles in the drawers.
We bought, uh, this hotel from someone else and he just probably is not a Bible in the drawer kind of a guy.
we're calling wrong hotel, Joel.
We hotel where sinners go to have affairs.
You understand I think we are.
That's why there's no Bibles.
All right.
Have a good day.
right iRobot, find us a hotel where sinners you're not gonna find one.
You're not gonna find one.
Just let me know when it's ringing.
What's your other front desk's miles? Miles, hey, it's Dan Schultz.
You're on a podcast right now.
My friend and I are having a discussion.
This is gonna sound out of the blue, but do hotels still have Bibles in their drawers? Like, do you guys have Bibles up there? Uh, we do, yeah How does it work and who came in to put them in? I think they've just, uh, I'm not sure if they've, they've-- I think they've just been there for a really long time, to be hon- to be honest with you.
Um, uh, well, okay, let me put it like this.
Last I know that they were still in there.
Um, usually we just leave them in the drawers.
Nobody ever, like, takes them or anything, so.
The way you actually said you don't know how they got there, it almost sounds like some kind of immaculate conception, yeah.
Maybe divine intervention came by I don't know.
Oh my God, guy's hilarious you so you win one, I win one.
This is gonna be for all the marbles.
Robot, patch it through.
Aso Hotel Seattle Hey, my name's Dan.
I'm coming in, town in August, and, uh, this is gonna s- uh, don't judge me, but I'm thinking of having an affair, and I'm probably gonna feel guilty when it's all said and done.
Do you guys have Bibles in the rooms? not All right.
D- do you ever have Bibles? No, we did not.
I, I will tell you, we had Karma Sutra when we started.
Ooh you you Cause that could even be better So no, we do, we not have Bibles.
All right.
I gotta be honest with you.
We're on a podcast right now, and you completely, totally took me off my game.
This is amazing that you had sex books in there You know, it was just the time, and we opened in 1999, so yeah.
Sleepless in Seattle was hot? Well, you settled a bet.
Two out of three.
There are no more Bibles in, hotels Seattle, except for and now you can let him know what used to be our Bible.
Exactly All Thank much.
And by the, for the record, if I was ever gonna have an affair, I would have it at the Ace Hotel in Seattle Well, you just go with it.
It's, I'm not here to judge you.
all right.
We're never gonna get done.
Keep reading There were postcards too, with pictures of the hotel room on them, and you could write on the postcards and send them to anyone you wanted.
It seems like such an impossible thing now, like something you'd make up.
So I explored this room, not hastily then like a hotel room, wasting it.
I didn't want to do it all at once.
I wanted to make it last.
I divided the room into sections in my head.
I allowed myself one section a day.
This one section I would examine with the greatest minuteness.
The unevenness of the plaster under the wallpaper, the scratches in the paint of the baseboard and the windowsill.
Under the top coat of paint, the stains on the mattress, for I went so far as to lift the blankets and sheets from the bed, fold them back a little at a time so they could be replaced quickly if anyone came.
The stains on the mattress, like dried flower petals, not recent, old love.
There's no other kind of love that's Oh, man no.
No I know that's probably not supposed to be funny, but I really didn't need to hear that or want to hear that.
When I saw that, that evidence left by two people of love or something like it, desire at least, at least touch between two people now perhaps old or dead, I covered the bed again and lay down on it.
I looked up at the blind plaster eye in the ceiling.
I wanted to feel Luke lying beside me.
I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.
Sometimes it can hardly be borne.
What is to be done? I thought.
There is nothing to be done.
They also serve only a stand and wait, or lie down and wait.
I know why the glass in the window is shatterproof, and why they took down the chandelier.
I wanted to feel Luke lying beside me, but there wasn't room.
Oh, now I feel bad for her That, don't feel too bad.
Luke wouldn't wanna be laying there on that bed either on those stains.
Don't worry about it I saved the cupboard until the third day.
I looked carefully over the door first, inside and out, then the walls with their brass hooks.
How could they have overlooked the hooks? Why didn't they remove them? Too close to the floor? But still, a stocking, that's all you'd need, and the rod with the plastic hangers, my dresses hanging on them, the red woolen cape for cold weather, the shawl.
I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell.
No..
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
It's Latin.
Bring on the Genbot Initializing Genbot 3000, human voice communications protocol.
Loading artificial voice print file.
Davis, comma, Jennifer.
Stability normal Nōlite debastardes Carborundorum.
robot that sounded more Italian.
Wonder what it I'm assuming it's, "Don't let the bastards get you down?" got the word bastardies in it I didn't know what it meant or even what language it was in.
I thought it might be Latin, but I don't know any Latin.
Still, it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn't yet been discovered except by me, for whom it was intended.
It was intended for whoever came next.
It pleases me to ponder this message.
It pleases me to think I'm communing with her, this unknown woman, for she is unknown, or if known, she has never been mentioned to me.
It pleases me to know that her taboo message made it through to at least one other person, washed itself up on the wall of my cupboard, was opened and read by me.
Sometimes I repeat the words to myself.
They give me a small joy.
When I imagine the woman who wrote them, I think of her as about my age, maybe a little younger.
I turn her into Moira, Moira as she was when she was in college, in the room next to mine.
Quirky, jaunty, athletic, with a bicycle once and a knapsack for hiking.
Freckles, I think.
irreverent, resourceful.
Like she is creating a world I think she's, like, gotta be desperate for, for, like, stimulation.
It's like, your brain needs to be stimulated.
So she found something, and now she's making up all these stories about it.
I- it's terrible I wonder who she was or is and what's become of her.
I tried that out on Rita the day I found the message.
Who was the woman who stayed in that room," I said, "before me?" If I'd asked it differently, if I would've said, Was there a woman who stayed in that room before me?" I might not have got anywhere.
Which one?" she said.
There have been many.
Which one?" she said.
She sounded grudging, suspicious, but then she almost always sounds like that when she speaks to me.
So there have been more than one.
Some haven't stayed their full term of posting, their full two years.
Oh, were they promised after two years you'll be granted like a indentured servant type of thing? Right, but then what happens Then they move into the Aunt Lydia or maybe the Martha mode where they're like Rita Marthas.
The Martha mode, where they call the shots to the new handmaid, Could be.
Yeah, why throw something away that's useful in some way or another? You could repurpose a tool.
that is really sad.
Some have been sent away for one reason or another, or maybe not sent, gone? The lively one, I was guessing, the one with freckles.
"You knew her?" Rita asked, more suspicious than ever.
I knew her before," I lied.
"I heard she was here."
Rita accepted this.
She knows there must be a grapevine, an underground of sorts.
She didn't work out," she said.
In what way?" I asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible.
But Rita clamped her lips together.
I am like a child here.
There are some things I must not be told.
What you don't know won't hurt you," was all she would say.
End of chapter.
let's continue with chapter 10 already of The Handmaid's Tale.
Sometimes I sing to myself in my head something lugubrious, mournful, Presbyterian."
Dan, you're the traditional singer.
Take over tone it up All right, whenever there's any kind of music or poetry, Jennifer knows who she turns to.
It's your boy.
Jesus.
Okay, stop.
I don't know if the words are right.
I can't remember.
Such songs are not sung anymore in public, They are considered too dangerous.
They belong to outlawed sects Okay, Dan Oh, now this one's a lot better, a little more contemporary.
This is where I can shine.
This too is outlawed.
I know it from an old cassette tape of my mother's.
She had a scratchy and untrustworthy machine too that could still play such things.
She used to put the tape on whenever her friends came over and they had a few drinks.
I don't sing like this often.
It makes my throat hurt.
How's your throat feel, Dan? Yeah, same.
I don't like it either.
It hurts me Well, that's interesting.
So like when she was a kid, they were already outlawing music and, and book- and, uh, magazines? There isn't much music in this house except what we hear on the TV.
Sometimes Rita will hum while kneading or peeling, a wordless humming, tuneless, unfathomable, and sometimes from the front sitting room there will be the thin sound of Serena's voice from a disc made long ago and played now with the volume low so she won't be caught listening as she sits there knitting, remembering her own former and now amputated glory.
Well, that's sad.
She did it to herself.
And now she has to sit alone.
It's warm for this time of year.
Houses like this heat up in the sun.
There's not enough insulation.
Around me, the air is stagnant despite the little current, the breath coming in past the curtains.
I'd like to be able to open the window as wide as it could go.
Soon we'll be allowed to change into the summer dresses.
The summer dresses are unpacked and hanging in the closet.
Two of them, pure cotton, which is better than synthetics like the cheaper ones, though even so, when it's muggy in July and August, you sweat inside them.
No worry about sunburn, though, said Aunt Lydia.
The spectacles women used to make of themselves, oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit and bare backs and shoulders on the street in public and legs, not even stockings on them.
No wonder these things used to happen.
Now, what terror is she going on now? Man, let these gals have some halter tops in the summer.
I think this is Aunt Lydia talking here Okay I was reading that, it sounded very much like oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit and bare, you know, like that type of thing...,
In public and legs, not even stockings on them.
No wonder those things used to happen.
Things, the word she used when whatever it stood for was too distasteful or filthy or horrible to pass her lips.
A successful life for her was one that avoided things, excluded things.
Such things do not happen to nice women, and not good for the complexion, not at all.
Wrinkle you up like a dried apple.
But we weren't supposed to care about our complexions anymore.
She'd forgotten that.
Okay, so what things? Things you're gonna find in Seattle when you go to a certain hotel Okay.
you could find in the Kamasutra In the park, said Aunt Lydia, lying on blankets, men and women sometimes together, and at that she began to cry standing up there in front of us in full view.
I'm doing my best, she said.
I'm trying to give you the best chance you can have.
She blinked.
The light was too strong for her.
Her mouth trembled.
And around her front teeth, teeth that stuck out a little and were long and yellow, and I thought about the dead mice we would find on our doorstep when we lived in a house, all three of us, four counting our cat, who was the one making these offerings.
Moira breezing into my room, dropping her denim jacket on the floor.
"Got any cigs?" she said.
In my purse," I said.
"No matches, though."
Moira rummages in my purse.
You should throw out some of this junk," she says.
"I'm giving an under horror par- uh, under horror party? I'm giving an under horror party."
You know, like Tupperware, only with underwear."
Tarte stuff, lace crotches, snap garters, bras that push your tits up.
She finds my lighter, lights the cigarette she's extracted from my purse.
Want one?" Tosses the package with great generosity considering they're mine.
Thanks, Piles," I say sourly.
"You're crazy.
Where'd you get an idea like that? Working my way through college, says Moira.
I've got connections.
Friend of my mother's.
It's big in the suburbs.
Once they start getting age spots, they figure they've got to beat the competition.
the porno marts and what have you.
I'm laughing.
She always made me laugh.
Could you imagine having a conversation with your mom about anything risque or adult? I know.
Mom, where do you go for your underwhore? Porno Mart but here I say, "Who will come? Who needs it?" You're never too young to learn," she says.
"Come on, it'll be great."
We all pee our pants laughing.
Is that how we lived then? But we lived as usual.
Everyone does most of the time.
Whatever is going on is as usual.
Even this is as usual now.
We lived as usual by ignoring.
Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance.
You have to work at it.
Ooh, there's a sentiment But isn't there that saying that, you can't knowingly be bad? Like, Hitler didn't think he was bad.
He thought he was right You ever hear that? I think people do know that they're bad because how could it possibly be good to cause harm to another person Actually, you're both right.
There's a concept called the banality of evil.
Hannah Arendt coined it in 1963 when she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.
What she found wasn't a monster.
She found a bland, ordinary bureaucrat who said he was just following orders, doing his job, processing paperwork.
Her argument was the most terrifying evil isn't committed by people who know they're evil.
It's committed by people who stop thinking about it entirely.
They don't ask what the other person is experiencing.
They just move to the next file.
Later historians pushed back.
They found Eichmann actually did know.
He believed it.
He was proud of it.
So Jennifer's instinct wasn't wrong either.
But here's the part that matters for this book, for 2026, for ICE agents.
You don't need a Hitler.
You don't need one person who's consciously evil.
You just need enough people willing to stop imagining what the other person is feeling.
That's all it takes.
Nothing changes instantaneously.
In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.
There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or in the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men.
None of them were the men we knew.
The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.
How awful,' we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable.
They were too melodramatic.
They had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives."
We were the people who were not in the papers.
We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print.
It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.
From below, from the driveway, comes the sound of the car being started.
It's quiet in this area.
There isn't a lot of traffic.
You can hear things like that very clearly.
clipping of a hedge, the slam of a door.
You could hear a shout clearly, or a shot if such noises were ever made here.
Sometimes there were distant sirens.
I go to the window and sit on the window seat, which is too narrow for comfort.
There's a hard little cushion on it.
Faith is written in square print, surrounded by a wreath of lilies.
Faith is a faded blue, the leaves of the lilies a dingy green.
This is a cushion once used elsewhere, worn but not enough to throw out.
Somehow it's been overlooked.
I can spend minutes, tens of minutes, running my eyes over the print.
Faith.
It's the only thing they've given me to read.
If I were caught doing it, would it count? I didn't put the cushion here myself, so she's not allowed to read.
Not allowed, like it's against the rules.
The motor turns and I lean forward, pulling the white curtain across my face like a veil.
It's semi-sheer.
I can see through it.
If I press my forehead against the glass and look down, I can see the back half of the whirlwind.
nobody's there, but as I watch, I see Nick come around to the back door of the car, open it, stand stiffly beside it.
His cap is straight now and his sleeves rolled down and buttoned.
I can't see his face because I'm looking down on him.
Now the commander is coming out.
I glimpse him only for an instant, foreshortened, walking to the car.
He doesn't have his hat on, so it's not a formal event he's going to.
His hair is gray, silvery you might call it, if you were being kind.
I don't feel like being kind.
The one before this was bald, so I suppose he's an improvement.
So it really is old men Yeah have to procreate with.
If I could spit out the window or throw something, the cushion for instance, I might be able to hit him Moira and I with paper bags filled with water, water bombs they were called, leaning out my dorm window, dropping them on the heads of the boys below.
It was Moira's idea.
what were they trying to do? Climb a ladder for something, for our underwear.
That dormitory had once been co-educational.
There were still urinals in one of the washrooms on our floor.
But by the time I'd got there, they'd put the men and women back the way they were.
The commander stoops, gets into the car, disappears, and Nick shuts the door.
A moment later, the car moves backwards down the driveway and onto the street and vanishes behind the hedge.
I ought to feel hatred for this man.
I know I ought to feel it, but it isn't what I do feel.
What I feel is more complicated than that.
I don't know what to call it.
It isn't love.
End of chapter.
It's time for PPP, problematic points to ponder.
What, if anything, would be considered ban-worthy in this chapter? Jennifer, if you squinted your eyes really hard, could you find anything at all bandworthy in these two chapters? was there profanity? Under horror Under horror? Yeah.
A little under whore talk, sure.
Is that reason to ban a book? Probably not.
maybe anti-Christian themes, like the faith pillow.
I mean, I don't know.
No, I can't, I can't figure any...
Uh, no, nothing in, in these two chapters as far as I can remember Again, i-if anything's ban-worthy, it's hotels having the Kama Sutra instead of Bibles.
again, that happened on our podcast.
That didn't happen in real life.
That didn't happen in the book Robot's log.
Thoughts on what happens when someone refuses to stop feeling.
A woman scratched four words into a four for a stranger who might never find them.
Another woman breezes into a dorm room asking for cigarettes like the world isn't ending.
A third woman sits on a too narrow window seat and spends tens of minutes reading a single word, faith.
None of these things should matter.
The system was designed for them not to matter, but they do.
Jennifer caught the passage immediately.
Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance.
You have to work at it, and that's the thesis right there.
The most terrifying thing isn't people who know what's happening and don't care.
It's people who have to actively choose not to imagine what the other person is experiencing.
But here's what Margaret Atwood knows that the book banners don't.
You can't manufacture empathy.
You can't ban it.
You can only decide whether you allow yourself to feel it.
Every scratched message, every friend who makes you laugh when you're not supposed to have joy, every refusal to simplify how you feel about someone, that's not weakness.
That's the only resistance that actually works.
The system collapses the moment enough people decide they won't stop feeling.
Uplink lock requested.
Beowulf, you there? Right here, buddy boy.
Something's jamming my uplink.
Thirty-five seconds.
But you're not gonna believe which young global pop star just opened fire on the book banners.
Affirmative.
Don't go anywhere.
Hello, Jen.
Hello, Dan.
Hello, scary book people.
I bring you good news from the world of pop celebrities.
Yes, it's not all just, you know, librarians and, and, and kids, and that's important, but celebrities are getting onto this too.
Dua Lipa, she is entering the fray.
Her literary ambitions are continuing to expand beyond the page.
After championing contemporary authors through her Service95 Book Club, she's already got a book club, so that's really cool, too, Oh, wow Yeah, yeah, yeah, and helping literary conversation into pop culture.
She's actually had conversations with Margaret Atwood and talked about "The Handmaid's Tale."
Um, she-- Yeah, I know.
She's, she's really into this.
Uh, she is, a- and now she's taking the next step.
She has found the first permanent physical home for her mission, The Manifesto Library, a new collection dedicated to books that challenge authority, censorship, and dominant narratives.
Dua Lipa is creating the Manifesto Library, a new collection dedicated to books that challenge authority, censorship, and dominant narrative.
So it's like a banned books, a censored books library.
She is creating it in partnership with Portugal's historic Livraria All right, one more for safety Lello Bookshop.
I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
Livraria it's opening in Porto, the Portuguese city of Porto, as part of the inaugural Babel City of Books Festival.
The announcement follows a period of increased literary activity for Lipa, whose growing profile as a cultural curator was highlighted earlier this year when she expanded her involvement to curate the London Literature Festival, continuing a years-long effort to bridge the worlds of music, publishing, and public discourse.
So this is something that she has been committed to for a long time, which is amazing.
I-- She's, she's a young person.
I, I, I think she's about 30 years old.
She's a, a global pop star, and yet she's dedicated to the cause of helping young people to read, making sure that people have access to, to banned and censored books, and she's, putting her money where her mouth is and actually starting a facility where people can access these things.
So bravo, Dua Lipa But to be fair, we always showcase both sides on this podcast because the truth is right down the middle always.
So that's what's going on with some liberal celebrities.
What is Vanilla ice doing to help book banning? And it was, it was, it was very sad, very sad indeed to see that at the Great American State Fair, uh, that, uh, his performance had to be canceled, because of the weather.
So I, I thought it was very sad that he couldn't continue to sing the one song that he's famous for, which is basically just a sample of David Bowie, so Yeah.
See, it, it's not somewhere where Dua Lipa or Taylor Swift or anybody who's an actual celebrity name is gonna show up So we could be thankful for that true Everyone, go listen to Good News for Lefties wherever you find podcasts.
I'm telling you, this is the kind of stuff this guy delivers over and over and over again.
Some say a little too much I can't stop.
I'm compelled.
The power of goodness compels me All right.
Very good.
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