Hello reader,Books have a way of revealing what states are most afraid of. That felt especially clear over the last few weeks with the Sri Lankan government’s continued detention of multiple titles by the Tamil writer Theepachelvan Piratheepan. Published in...

IN TIBETAN, the word for satire is zurza (ཟུར་ཟ་), which literally means “eating from the sides”. It is an art of indirection, inversion and wit. In Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo, the scholar Timothy Thurston...