Book Passage Presents

Tuesday, May 11, 2021 • 1:00pm PT • Live • Online

In conversation with Judy Muller

A fascinating examination of how restricting speech has continuously shaped our culture, and how censorship is used as a tool to prop up authorities and maintain class and gender disparities.

Through compelling narrative, historian Eric Berkowitz reveals how drastically censorship has shaped our modern society. More than just a history of censorship, Dangerous Ideas illuminates the power of restricting speech; how it has defined states, ideas, and culture; and (despite how each of us would like to believe otherwise) how it is something we all participate in.

This engaging cultural history of censorship and thought suppression throughout the ages takes readers from the first Chinese emperor's wholesale elimination of books, to Henry VIII's decree of death for anyone who "imagined" his demise, and on to the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the volatile politics surrounding censorship of social media.

Highlighting the base impulses driving many famous acts of suppression, Berkowitz demonstrates the fragility of power and how every individual can act as both the suppressor and the suppressed.

Eric Berkowitz is a writer, lawyer, and journalist. For more than 20 years, he practiced intellectual property and business litigation law in Los Angeles. Berkowitz has published widely throughout his career, and his writing has appeared in periodicals such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, and LA Weekly. His previous books include Sex and Punishment and The Boundaries of Desire. He lives in San Francisco. 

Judy Muller is an Emmy, duPont-Columbia, and Peabody Award-winning television correspondent and National Public Radio commentator. Working for ABC News in 1990, Muller covered—among other stories—the 1992 Rodney King trial and ensuing riots, for which she received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award; the 1994 Northridge earthquake; and the O.J. Simpson criminal and civil trials, for which she received an Emmy Award. In 2011, she received a second duPont-Columbia Award, as well as a Peabody, for her reporting on medical marijuana dispensaries in Southern California. A regular contributor to NPR's Morning Edition, she also wrote a book about her experiences as a journalist titled Now This: Radio, Television and the Real World. Before joining the ABC News team, Muller was a CBS News correspondent who contributed to CBS News Sunday Morning and the CBS Weekend News, as well as anchoring First Line Report and Correspondent's Notebook on CBS News Radio. She was also a summer anchor for The Osgood File. Muller developed her individual reporting style during stints at The Colonial News and WHWH-WPST, both in New Jersey, and KHOW-AM in Colorado. She is currently a faculty member of the USC Anneberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her most recent book is Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns.

Eric Berkowitz photo by Hillary Goidell; Judy Muller photo by USC