Superladiva’s Reviews > Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America > Status Update

“When I reached back out to Lilliana Mason, the Johns Hopkins political scientist, her latest data showed a record 60 percent of Americans now approved of political violence if the other party initiates it, up from 40 percent four years before.”

“School leaders are resigned to the fact that too many teens “are waiting around either to become famous or to fall off the face of the earth,” writes the child development professor Robert Halpern. “A great quantity of youthful idealism, energy, imagination, questioning, pushing at boundaries has no place to go.””

“In the span of a decade, Reagan had systematically shifted our federal financial aid apparatus from being need based to greed based, and now Clinton was upping the game to prove his “new Democrat” bona fides. And no one, save a few writers, educators, and nonprofit organizations, said a word.”

“‘It occurred to me after seeing my old friends in Urbana who’ve done very well: If you had a big family business or a farm, you either stayed, or you went away for college and came back.’ If you didn’t have inherited land or wealth in the form of an established family business and you went away to college, you didn’t return.”