Social Media Buzz: Snowstorm, Joni Mitchell, Book Ban

(Bloomberg) -- What’s trending on social media this morning: 

A powerful winter storm is hitting the U.S. Northeast, forcing the cancellation of thousands of flights, and the National Weather Service Prediction Center is forecasting as much as two feet of snow in parts of New England. New York City could get around nine inches of snow while New Jersey and Long Island could get double digits.

Joni Mitchell is joining Neil Young in protest against Spotify and has asked that the streaming platform remove her music. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” she wrote in a statement on her website. “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”

• Young accused Spotify of spreading “fake information about vaccines” through its podcast deal with Joe Rogan.

A school district in Washington State has voted to remove Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” from required ninth grade reading lists, KIMA-TV reports. The Mukilteo School District Board will allow teachers to choose whether to keep the book in their curriculum. 

The book has regularly been banned in U.S. schools since its publication in 1960.

• Earlier this month, a Tennessee school board removed the graphic novel “Maus,” about the author’s experiences surviving the Holocaust, from an eighth grade curriculum.

President Joe Biden announced this week that the next Supreme Court justice will be the first Black woman appointed to the nation’s highest court. In a radio interview, Republican U.S. Senator Roger Wicker said the next justice will be a “beneficiary” of affirmative action, Mississippi Free Press reports. Wicker also said that the new justice will “misinterpret the law.”

• Biden said this week that his nomination “will be someone with extraordinary qualifications, character, experience, and integrity.”

The late actress Elizabeth Montgomery is trending on Twitter, to the puzzlement and delight of fans of the sitcom “Bewitched,” which ran for eight seasons ending in 1972. Montgomery died in 1995, and tweets focused on her beauty and whether anyone still remembers her. Apparently so.

The No. 1 ranked women’s tennis player, Ashleigh Barty, has won her maiden Australian Open in her home country, being the first Aussie to win it in 44 years. 

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