Why a Holocaust app for kids is not a great idea:
The father says goodbye, smiling and waving, and promises that tomorrow they will be together again. (Poke the screen, and make barbed wire appear, blocking the father from his kids!) The children are herded into a changing barracks and then toward showers. (Poke the screen to make flames shoot up from the crematoria chimneys!) In the barracks, the little girl narrator remembers “the roundup,†when she and her fellow Jews were herded from their town. (Poke the windows, already helpfully graffiti’d with “JUIFS,†and watch them shatter! Touch the people on the street wearing yellow stars, and watch them fade away!) We see the children’s naked backs—the rest of their nude bodies hidden by angry gray brushstrokes and swirls of paint—as they’re sent into a gray smear full of “flakes of soap.†(Poke the flakes! They fly up into the sky, creating a hole in all the gray, a view to heaven with fluffy clouds!)Â
More here.Â
In other news, I whined like a little baby about Mother’s Day for sandwich-gen moms, and sighed over the awesomeness that is Michelle Obama. I also NOBLY MANAGED NOT TO READ THE COMMENTS on Tablet’s FB page on the latter, which I have been promised are hateful.
On SorryWatch, I analyzed a good apology from a publisher and a shitty apology from a writer — both in the wake of non-amusing racist putridness in the author’s book.
My 11-year-old made me this artwork for Mother’s Day — she knows my obsessions.
I like the giant water droplet, which adds a certain Georgia-O’Keeffian je ne sais quoi to the proceedings.
I got my mom this Mother’s Day card by a delightful artist on Etsy.