[Cautionary verse] is a genre that has receded from view in recent years, but it’s hiding in the shadows, ready to pop out and horrify the stultified… - Tim DeRoche

So when a charter school is found to be cherry-picking its students, there are consequences. Local ACLU chapters, including Southern California and Arizona, have published reports detailing how charter schools have either broken the law or violated its spirit…But the rest of the public schools are held to a very low legal standard of access and face very little scrutiny of their enrollment practices.

My wife and I were out doing a kayak trip on the [Los Angeles River] ... It’s a wilder place than you would think from just driving over it on the freeway. I started to think about the idea of the River as this place where you could have an adventure. I started to imagine, ok, what would it be like if Huck Finn were alive today and he were traveling down the River.

I started thinking of Huck Finn as a protoypical American myth.