Dolly Parton rose from poverty to stardom. She gave $500 to every student in her hometown who finished high school, she built hospitals and bald eagle preserves; her Imagination Library has gifted 300 million books to children. Roger Ebert once met her and came away thinking she was a literal angel. RIP.
Not only were kids reading 700 and 800-page Harry Potter books in a single day, they were writing, without AI, fan-fiction that frequently surpassed the length of those books. The fact that people can no longer believe this happened only shows how steep our decline has been.