Cartoons from XKCD creator will appear in high school science textbooks

(credit: Randall Munroe)

Randall Munroe, creator of popular webcomic XKCD, recently published a new book called Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, in which he uses only the thousand most common words in the English language to explain how a variety of things work, from locks to nuclear bombs. Monroe’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, also publishes textbooks, and when editors in the textbook division saw proofs of Monroe’s Thing Explainer, they realized that his simple explanations could be used to augment high school textbooks.

You know, the old strategy employed ineffectively by dad joke-tellers everywhere: get the #teens on your side with humor.

(credit: Randall Munroe)

Luckily, Munroe's Thing Explainer comics are absurd enough in their hyper-simplicity that they have a shot at breaking down the walls of sarcasm and ennui encircling the most eye-rolling of high school students.

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