Bleak House

"The End of Reading Is Here"

Plain English with Derek Thompson, 28 July 2026.

Derek Thompson and Rose Horowitz discuss a study in which students were asked to interpret the opening of Bleak House — Dickens's foggy London scene with a megalosaurus — and largely failed. Rose reports only 5% had a detailed literal understanding; some thought there was an actual dinosaur in 19th-century London, and one student took the description of a man 'addressed by an advocate with large whiskers' to mean the advocate was a cat. This failure occurred even though students had full internet access during the exercise.

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