Maus takes the form of two parallel stories. In the present, Art Spiegelman is trying to learn about his father Vladek’s experience during the Holocaust. In the past, we see his father’s story come alive. The artwork depicts Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, Americans as dogs, and other nationalities as other animals.

“White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.”

The 1619 Project is a collection of essays, flash fiction, and poetry from a variety of writers concerning the experience of Black Americans. Black history is not well taught in US schools. Unbelievably, in 2017, only 8 percent of high school seniors named slavery as the central cause of the Civil War!

When it comes to errors in human judgment, we tend to focus on bias, but noise is also a cause of error. Bias is the average of errors committed by a group. You need to know the right answer to know what the bias is. Bias is systemic and predictable. Noise, on the other hand, is variable amongst a group of judgements. You can tell there’s noise even if you don’t know the right answer. It’s unpredictable and not easily explained.

The world is better today because of the Enlightenment, yet people attack reason, science, humanism, and progress when these things should be celebrated.

One of the bits of wisdom from the Scientific Revolution is that misfortune is no one’s fault. Bad things sometimes happen for no reason other than the universe is indifferent to human suffering. There’s no point looking around for someone to blame when an earthquake happens. Entropy ensures there’s more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go right.

In the introduction, we’re given a description of Andrew Jackson Davis which would appeal to a phrenologist, as well as testimonials from his acquaintances. We’re told he was poor and barely educated, only attending a few months of school, so he only knows the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Although we’re also told he knows all the technical medical terms, so maybe he’s not as ignorant as they want us to believe. He’s only 20 years old.

According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the Pentateuch was composed in stages. The first source, written sometime between 850-800 BC, is called J because it refers to God by the name Jehovah/Yahweh. The second source, called E because it uses the name Elohim to refer to God, was combined with J between 850-750 BC. The third source, mostly the book of Deuteronomy, is called D and was written in 621 BC, if you take 2 Kings 22-23 at face value. The final source is the priestly source, or P, and was written in 458 BC if you take Nehemiah 8-10 at face value.

However, one of the problems with the Documentary Hypothesis is that it uses the Bible to date itself, rather than using external evidence like archaeology and other ancient texts. Also, biblical source criticism tends to assume the earliest possible date a text could have been written is when the text actually was written. In this book, Gmirkin applies classical source criticism to the Pentateuch to consider not only the earliest possible date, but also the latest possible date, using not just the Bible itself, but also external references to the Bible.