A week ago, I did not anticipate that I would spend so much of this week thinking about the Holocaust. Sure, Thursday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, but that usually comes and goes without me paying much attention. This year, though, a Tennessee school board’s decision to take the Pulizer-winning Holocaust-themed graphic novel Maus out of their curriculum went viral, and for a couple days that was all anybody on my social media feeds wanted to talk about.
A lot of people jumped to one conclusion or another, but it turned out that you didn’t need to speculate that much about what was going on: The minutes of the board’s meeting were available online, and so were PDFs of Maus. I do my best to sort it all out in “McMinn County’s Maus Problem”, which should be out by 10 EST.
Not that the week lacked for other news: Justice Breyer announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, so the partisan wrangling over his replacement has already begun. Every day brings new speculations about whether the Russians are about to invade Ukraine. The Omicron wave of Covid began to recede. A blizzard hit the Northeast. GDP and inflation numbers came out.
So the weekly summary has a lot of ground to cover. I’ll try to have that out by noon.
The Weekly Sift 