An Intensively Researched, Finely-Crafted Educational Program Intended To Teach Children Values Like, Say, Curiosity
Last updated: 4/18/2026 | Originally published: 4/18/2026
If necessity is the mother of invention, then what is boredom? The midwife?
First and most important: my friends and I are making another zine, and we’re looking for submissions! The theme this time is “shenanigan(s)” — feel free to check out the last one for inspiration. For Bay Area folks, we will probably (?) have some kind of launch party?
So Phil Christman had a great post about Helen DeWitt and Your Name Here (recall).1 It’s behind a paywall, but Christman is a fantastic critic, so it’s well worth it. The main point he makes2 Other than the observation, which I shared, that Ilya Gridneff’s emails are just not as interesting as DeWitt seems to think. is that DeWitt is a paradox: she is thoroughly democratic, in the sense that she writes novels that treat the reader with respect, like the reader is just as intelligent as the novel, novels that say that it’s okay to be an idiosyncratic autodidact, that good taste can be learned. But she’s also a snob, a real snob, who genuinely seems to believe that her interests are obviously better and more interesting than the average person, who genuinely seems to be basically unable to function in a world that is less than perfect.
That perfectly encapsulates a deep vein of discomfort I have with DeWitt’s work, which has only increased the more I read. Another great example is the running joke in The Last Samurai that everyone thinks “Sesame Street is about the right level” for prodigy protagonist Ludo. That always struck me as a low blow3 And, obviously, written by someone that probably hasn’t spent all that much time around children. — Sesame Street is, after all, an intensively researched, finely-crafted educational program intended to teach children values like, say, curiosity. It’s unfortunate that people keep trying to force it on Ludo, but for most children Ludo’s age, it really is about the right level!
That said: Christman comes down pretty hard on The English Understand Wool, a novella I actually quite like. I have a softer reading on the novel, because:
a.) I’m not convinced we’re supposed to take the protagonist’s actions as necessarily the most moral or efficient to get what she wants — she was, as we repeatedly told, raised by sociopaths
b.) but also, she has a real pain point — the climax of the novel is an exploitative publishing contract that she gets out of by simply bothering to read it (and edit it without informing the counterparties, which is where the “raised by sociopaths” comes in)
For me the moral of the story is (as with many of DeWitt’s stories) that the world could be so much better if more people took the extra ten minutes to bother to read the contract4 Or took the extra ten minutes to think through design details, which you really can’t disagree with if you’ve been reading a lot of, say, Marcin Wichary’s Unsung on software craft and quality. . In that sense, she’s the heir to the tradition of English “gripe fiction” like Douglas Adams and Terry Gilliam, about the myriad inconveniences of modern life. That can look a lot like snobbery — “why didn’t you just read the contract? why didn’t you just take your wool to a competent English tailor?” — and the productive tension in her fiction is about when that tips over into actual snobbery.
I also read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women this week (also on my 12-books-for-the-year list). It has aged a touch oddly — it is, after all, didactic children’s literature pulling on the now-defunct sentimental genre, written by a woman that was just gunning for the money — but it’s still worth reading at least once. I found it pretty special for two reasons:
- The feminist, pro-agency, pro-happiness stance of the novel is still pretty radical, even in 2026. Alcott treat’s Jo’s desire to be an unmarried writer as completely valid, but she also treats Meg’s desire to be a competent homemaker and loving mother as just as valid.
- Alcott is one of the all-time-great character writers. Within a paragraph readers get a strong sense of all four of the girls’ personalities, and then get to watch them all evolve over the next half-decade of their lives as they grow up. It’s (deservedly) a core touchstone of the entire genre of Bildungsroman.
Anyway, excited now to watch the Greta Gerwig adaptation, and excited to move on to the next book on my list, which is… gulp… Infinite Jest.
You may notice footnotes are back. I tried to resist the siren call of the digression, but: alas. I should just accept that I drank deep from the DFW-poisoned well as a child.
That said: I’m almost more comfortable with footnotes because my site now has spiffy Tufte-inspired sidenotes. So consider clicking the link up top to read on my site, eh?
I also set up a “wander” page, which is what kids used to call a blogroll. If you’re bored and looking for more to read, check it out!