On the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites' emphasis on words such as 'connection,' 'community,' and 'choice.' Yet despite this democratic vocabulary, money makes a big difference. — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Social networks matter greatly, and our class calibrations are often around what college one attended, leading to gruesome institutional divisions between those who attend, say, community colleges and those who attend top-tier universities. — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Low-cost gear can make restless people like myself feel marginally happier. — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
I think our families or parents were trying to do best by us by telling us, 'Do what you love.' On an existential level,… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
When I was doing my research for 'Branded,' I'd meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
To be 'squeezed' is to be bound by a very American psychological and socio-economic predicament. Being squeezed involves one's finances, one's social status, and… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
A lot of the things that bore adults don't bore children, and people forget that. In some ways, boredom is a projection of adults… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Part of why daycare is so poorly paid is because the sense that they're prisoners of love, that daycare workers love their work so… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up… — Alissa Quart Copy Share Image
