Michael Chabon:

Childhood is a branch of cartography.

James Akerman:

The “Gospel Temperance Railroad Map” is an example of an allegorical map.

Joseph Epstein:

Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in American and in perhaps any other national life. Such has been the weight of all this concern about children that it has exercised a subtle but pervasive tyranny of its own.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Michael Chabon:

The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

From the archive:

Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.

Michael Chabon:

Once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Jeff Goldblum, in Jurassic Park:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Matthew Crawford:

One of the hottest things at the shopping mall right now is a store called Build-a-Bear, where children are said to make their own teddy bears. I went into one of these stores, and it turns out that what the kid actually does is select the features and clothes for the bear on a computer screen, then the bear is made ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Wilderness of Childhood