Bodycams, First Amendment, Live PD, law and order: police work has been in the news a lot lately, and I have been thinking about how the police order, organize, and control all of that information when literal life and freedom are on the line. I sat down with Snowden Becker, formerly of UCLA, and a researcher into police archives and work to talk about these topics and intellectual freedom.

The works of Donatien Alphonse François (1740-1814), better known as the Marquis de Sade, were banned nearly-immediately upon publication by both the King of France Louis XVI and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and remained so for over two centuries. Combined, his books have been banned for nearly 1000 years (more than 200 years apiece). Who was the man alternatively called the “Divine Marquis” and the author of the “most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination?"

Liana Zhou, Director of the Library and Special Collections of the Kinsey Institute, shares her story and discusses the past, present, and future of the Kinsey Institute, sexuality, archiving, and intellectual freedom.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation has included the American Library Association on their annual "Dirty Dozen" list of sexual exploitation enablers. You might be led to believe that the ALA was promoting open, free, and unfettered access to pornography—it’s not. Instead, NCOSE is targeting something alltogether different--the freedom of library patrons.

The Freedom of Information Act, an invaluable tool for democracy, is under attack. New Interior Department regulations are targeting those who use it the most--journalists, academics, researchers and more. Furthermore, the shutdown is compounding the issue and allowing the possibly-illegal and definitely-unethical change to happen unnoticed.

Tumblr and Facebook’s decisions to censor and remove any adult or erotic material on their platforms has set the internet atwitter (pun intended). There were, of course, thinkpieces lauding or decr…

A while ago I had the opportunity to interview Brian M. Watson, historian of obscenity and pornography.

One man's private collection of Victorian pornography is now an important historical source.

Review by Katelyn Smith In his first full-length book, Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad (2016), Brian Watson traces the long history of pornography in the West, reiterating throughout hi…

Under the scrutiny of the British legal system, no work was safe from being deemed obscene.

He calls himself "Reddit's resident historian of pornography"—and now he's got the book to prove it. After debuting his first tome—a well-researched romp through "the bawdy and forgotten corners of Western civilization"—Brian Watson (username vertexoflife) invited redditors