PEN America

A Safety Guide for Artists explores topics such as defining and understanding risk, preparing for threats, fortifying digital safety, documenting persecution, finding assistance, and recovering from trauma.

This episode of the PEN Pod segment “Tough Questions” addresses the activism we’ve all had to take up over the past four years, the priority issues the Biden-Harris administration should aim to resolve, and the importance of looking back at the Trump era in order to resolve the trauma we experienced from it.

An agenda for the incoming administration.

Last week’s lawless insurrection on Capitol Hill raised a series of questions about free speech, the First Amendment, and protest rights. Should presidents be banned from Twitter and Facebook? Should tech companies refuse to host social networks sites like Parler? What defines “hate speech” and “incitement”?

Nossel covers a number of topics, including the larger ramifications of the news media’s coverage of President Trump and the importance for the media to stop using this coverage as a bait for ratings.

What is the toll of the coronavirus on journalism in the United States? While we will never know the full impact, this project – which examines the first 10 months of the pandemic from March to December 2020 – is a
start.

Vietnamese writer Tran Duc Thach was convicted on charges of subversion under Article 109 of the country’s criminal code. He was arrested in April for Facebook posts criticizing corruption in government and human rights abuses in the country.

President Barack Obama sat down for an interview with former PEN America president and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Ron Chernow. The following is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.