[Julie Steiner]

Most of my brief but glorious career as a librarian was in the Geisel Library at the University of California at San Diego, which occasionally presented a display of the anti-Japanese propaganda that Theodor Geisel created during WWII. Geisel's dedication of Horton Hears a Who to his "Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan" is widely seen as a sort of atonement for some of that.

People's views evolve. Geisel's did. That of the managers of his estate now has, too, although the cynic in me suspects that this was done because they saw it as a smart business decision, more than for any other reason.

Of all the terrible things going on in the world right now, the "censorship" of a few of Dr. Seuss's minor books doesn't crack my personal top ten. If it cracks John McWhorter's, he has every right to feel that way, and to say so. But I also have the right to think his priorities might be a little out of whack, and to say so, before I turn my limited attention to things that are more important to me.