Where Censored Words Find a Safe Haven: Inside Minecraft; The New York Times, March 11, 2026

Will Bahr, The New York Times; Where Censored Words Find a Safe Haven: Inside Minecraft

"I’m standing in the middle of a cavernous hall, watching the Statue of Liberty drown in a pool of her own tears. Twin blue streams run from her emerald eyes, collecting in a reservoir that submerges the statue up to her waist.

A series of lecterns line an observation deck beneath this tableau. Each displays a divisive text: Stephen Colbert’s interview with a Senate candidate that he said CBS barred from television; a report on sea-level rise that was scrubbed from government websites in President Trump’s second term; a two-volume interactive timeline of the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol.

On the far wall, flanked by torches, is a mural of Ann Telnaes’s rejected cartoon for The Washington Post, featuring tech moguls like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg bending the knee to Trump, offering up bags of cash. Hanging just above is an enormous American flag, stars and stripes rendered in pixel.

Welcome to the new United States wing of the Uncensored Library, an unlikely stronghold of online press freedom within Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time."

Time for journalists to fight back, not play party hosts; The Washington Post, April 30, 2018

Dana Milbank, The Washington Post; Time for journalists to fight back, not play party hosts

"Olivier Knox, the incoming president, has said he wants to make the dinner “boring.”

How about better than boring? Move the dinner back a week, to honor World Press Freedom Day, and cancel the comedians. Instead, read the names of journalists killed doing their jobs over the year; people such as Daphne Caruana Galizia , who reported on government corruption in Malta, killed on Oct. 16, when the car she was driving exploded; and Miroslava Breach Velducea , who reported on politics and crime in Mexico, shot eight times and killed on March 23, 2017, when leaving her home with one of her children. Also, read the names of some jailed journalists and their time behind bars: Turkey’s Zehra Dogan, 323 days; Egypt’s Alaa Abdelfattah, 1,282 days ; China’s Ding Lingjie, 221 days; Kyrgyzstan’s Azimjon Askarov, 2,877 days; Congo’s Ghys Fortuné Dombé Bemba , 475 days.

Media companies and personalities, instead of hosting glitzy parties, would make contributions to and solicit funds for groups that protect the free press. And they would pledge to devote more air time and column inches to exposing abuses of press freedoms at home and abroad. The Post did this, successfully, during my colleague Jason Rezaian’s imprisonment in Iran. We should all pledge to be unabashed advocates: to shine light on the journalists languishing in prisons, the unsolved murders of journalists and the erosion of press freedom at home."