Aaron Tracy

And that's, you know, that's a real opportunity for us to sort of think with that knowledge and engage with the work in light of it rather than saying, oh, I'm not going to read this anymore because it's all anti-Semitic.

I'm going to come back to my conversation with Eric in a minute.

Before I do that, I want to dig into a separate, somewhat related topic.

And that's the giant, fascinating censorship controversy that swirled around Dahl a few years ago.

In 2023, 33 years after Dahl's death, his publisher went through his books and removed all language that people might take offense to.

The Hollywood Reporter laid it out really well in a long article.

They explained that Dahl's fatphobia, for instance, was suddenly at odds with changing sensitivities around body image issues.

So Dahl's publishers removed the word fat from all of his books and issued new editions.

Augustus Gloop, the gluttonous boy from the Chocolate Factory Tour, is now referred to as enormous.

In James and the Giant Peach, Dahl's lines, "'Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat and tremendously flabby at that' is now, "'Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute and deserved to be squashed by the fruit.'"

And the censors didn't stop there.

Any time Dahl wrote that a character was crazy or mad, they took it out.

The Oompa Loompas in Willy Wonka's factory are no longer tiny, titchy, or no higher than my knee, but just small.

In Matilda, our hero no longer reads the problematic author Rudyard Kipling.

In the revised version, she now reads Jane Austen.

So in that instance, the censors kind of got a twofer, not only changing Dahl, but also erasing the very existence of Kipling.

Uh, what else?

The fantastic Mr. Fox?

He now has three daughters instead of three sons.

I absolutely cannot explain that.