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For more than two decades Intelligence Squared has brought together the most brilliant minds in the world to debate the issues that matter – in a respectful and civil manner. We’re thrilled to announce that we’ll be bringing this mission to the world of print with a new book series called THINK AGAIN, published in partnership with The Bodley Head, one of the UK’s leading publishers of nonfiction.
The books will address today’s most challenging and important questions in a uniquely constructive format: two expert, contrasting and equally persuasive views in a single volume.
Our first title will be Is Free Speech Under Threat? This is a topic that always generates debate. But perhaps now, more than ever, it feels like a particularly heightened conversation and one of huge importance. We’re pleased to be starting our series with such a fundamental debate.
By Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley
In Is Free Speech Under Threat? two leading thinkers tackle the issue at the very heart of the culture wars.
Suzanne Nossel (CEO of PEN America) puts the case that even though there is an important rebalancing of power taking place in society today, rightly giving minority voices the space and prominence they have long been owed, even so the uncompromising intolerance of a left-leaning minority crosses the threshold of an important principle on which free speech relies. In the process, they play into the hands of outright censors, further harming free speech.
Charlotte Lydia Riley (editor of The Free Speech Wars) argues that the right to free speech has always been enjoyed by the powerful and denied to the powerless. Accusations of cancel culture and defences of free speech are attempts to fuel a culture war and so inhibit an important progressive realignment in which the right to say hateful, offensive and harmful things is at last being called out for what it is.
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Join us for the launch of the first instalment of Intelligence Squared and Bodley Head’s new book series THINK AGAIN. CEO of PEN America Suzanne Nossel and historian Charlotte Lydia Riley will debate the state of free speech today.
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