Florida just passed a new law that empowers residents to challenge the use of school textbooks that they find lacking in any number of ways. At issue is the way the textbooks cover such (sadly controversial) topics such as climate change and evolution. Members of the Florida Citizens’ Alliance that pushed the bill cited their review of more than 60 textbooks: “We found them to be full of political indoctrination, religious indoctrination, revisionist history and distorting our founding values and principles, even a significant quantity of pornography.” The examples of pornography included Angela’s Ashes and works by Toni Morrison. This kind of wrongheaded book-banning has been around for a long time. But it’s been a while since the movement away from science, reason, and truth has had this much momentum.

+ “Traditionally the attitude has been that science is above politics, and therefore scientists shouldn’t get involved in politics, and what that ignores is the fact that politicians are unashamed to meddle in science.” More scientists are deciding to run for office. (Now we just need some humanities majors to help them hone their tweets.)