I’ve read a lot of shitty contemporary books over the past year, including Normal People, The Topeka School, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Flesh. These books all have something in common, and it’s exactly what makes them so empty: they all glorify emotional restraint. Such is the great disease of contemporary literary fiction, and its symptoms are sparse prose, flat dialogue, emotionally detached characters, and an absence of philosophical depth. For some reason, however, we’ve decided that these hallmarks are the epitome of literary sophistication. All of these novels are observational rather than transformative; their characters no longer grapple with the great questions of human existence but simply drift through their petty lives: they have sex, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and exchange banal observations about their miserable circumstances. Never do they experience spiritual or emotional transformation. Literary minimalism strips literature of the only thing that makes it worth reading: the human soul.

Again, inaccurate. Students actively engage with what they are learning. Instead of passively listening to a lecture, students are taught to think the way scientists think. Inquiry. Hypothesis testing. Evidence. Direct observation. Comparing their data to existing data.

"The character can carry the entire novel." Dean Koontz binged 34 John D. MacDonald books in 38 days fresh out of college. This is what he learned: "He'd wanna tell you about this character, so he'd just stop. And he'd write three to five pages about this character." "The first time I hit this, I went, 'what is this? I wanna read the rest of the story.' And then by the time I got to the end of page five of the character stuff when the story started again, I actually was saying, 'No! I wanna know more about this character.'" "Kurt Vonnegut actually said about John D. MacDonald, if thousands of years from now, some alien race came to Earth, and they stumbled across the work of John D. MacDonald buried under the ruin of a house, it would be the greatest finding they could ever make to understand how the human race works."

Yes, they do. Everyone absorbs that knowledge to their own capacity and interest to do so.

I really appreciate Carl's skepticism of the "pyramid myth"—the widely recognized image of Bloom's Taxonomy as a six-tier triangle, with "knowledge" at the base and "evaluation" or critical thinking at the top. Nearly every teacher has seen this pyramid on classroom walls or in textbooks, treating it as the definitive representation of how learning progresses from simple to complex. What Hendrick uncovers is that Bloom himself never created this pyramid, and it appears in neither the original 1956 taxonomy handbook nor the 2001 revised version. The actual document was a neutral classification system built by a committee of examiners to standardize test questions—more like a library's filing system than a hierarchy implying knowledge is somehow "lesser" than higher-order thinking. Nobody even knows who drew the first pyramid or when. Hendrick traces early pyramid-like references to a 1963 writer, Leon Lessinger, and finds what may be the earliest literal drawn version in a 1972 University of Georgia training document. By the late 1970s and 80s, it spread into mainstream textbooks, eventually becoming the oversimplified symbol we all recognize today—despite having no real basis in Bloom's original work. carlhendrick.substack.com/p/…