Growing up poor, Clark Kent's hundred-acre Kansas farm might as well have been on another planet and Wayne Manor, with its caverns and butlers was always the most unbelievable part of the Batman mythology. I still don’t understand the kids that picked Batman or Superman.

The author points out that unlike the children’s world, the world of grown-ups is strikingly unjust: “Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy.” The transition to maturity is bitter. One gets betrayed. One gets broken. 

How did I feel in the fall of my freshman year of college? I was lonely and lost, but posting Richard Brautigan’s “Karma Repair Kit” (the memory of reading it in a dog-eared used paperback curled up on the floor of my college town bookstore coming back to me now) and an mp3 of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” (before I wore it down from playing it on loop that first Thanksgiving back home) articulate this better than my own words ever could, let me re-experience what exact type of lonely I was, and remind me how the loneliness was mixed with other things, like twinges of excitement at the sheer newness of the experience.

The alarming similarities between the two Effies make Skins–or at least its Effy episodes- appear something akin to Stephen Moffat’s Sherlock: a plot updated to befit a contemporary audience and punctuated with objects from the text, also suitably modernised.

In pictures of “Shipoopi” from my high school’s production of The Music Man the previous spring, the other Pickalittle ladies and I—the matrons and moral arbiters of River City, Iowa—stand off to the side while the boys and girls dance. We’re very upset; the children have interrupted rehearsal for our tableau interpretation of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”