I've been reading a lot of Anne Carson over the past 24 hours to gather my thoughts about the recent Nobel Prize news. Here goes. I originally called her a serious scholar and later retracted my statement after digging deeper into her work, but listen—she's still a better writer than the vast majority of writers out there because the bar for contemporary literary writing is so abysmally low. Sure, there's Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie, but who else is really a literary mastermind today? You struggle to name anyone because most good writing just doesn't get published today. The literary establishment has largely declared a boycott on deep, introspective writing with a human soul. Yes, Carson's win was likely ideologically motivated, but everything getting published today is ideologically motivated as well. The pool for Nobel Prize winners was so weak to begin with that it's no wonder that Carson emerged as a top contender. If we want good writing back on our shelves, we must call out minimalist slop and topical trash. Great literature has always explored the human condition, and that's what we seem to have forgotten today.