Why the 'explain it to ten-year-olds' craze misreads Randall Munroe's Up Goer Five

Randall Munroe's 2012 diagram Up Goer Five, which described the Saturn V rocket using only the thousand most common English words, spawned a wave of imitators among science communicators trying to simplify their own fields the same way. Critics, including Carl Zimmer, pushed back, arguing the trend was condescending and a distraction rather than a genuine tool for public understanding of science.