“But here’s what happens: your story has too straight a line. You have robbed your tale of tension. You have undercut the conflict. You have urinated in the mouth of urgency. And what results is this kind of gutless, gormless narrative. It’s a pair of underwear with the elastic blown out. It’s just laying there on the highway shoulder. Slack and sad. It’s covered in ants. Nobody wants to pick it up because nobody feels compelled to pick it up.”

danah boyd: “Wary of this frame, I started studying the culture of fear, watching as parents exhibited fear of their children doing the same things that they once did, convinced that everything today is so much worse than it was when they were young or that the consequences would be so much greater. I followed the research on fear and the statistics on teen risks and knew that it wasn’t about rationality. There was something about how our society socialized parents into parenting that produced the culture of fear.”

A value-added approach to assessing two- and four-year schools by Brookings Institution