“The first thing I’d say [is that] online we’ve got to embrace nuance over outrage. We’ve got to get past an outrage culture of reading things simply and making really broad conclusions about them, and instead ask questions and try to listen to each other better. Generally, we just aren’t doing a great job of listening to each other online. I don’t think in the end it’s very helpful for the overall quality of discourse.” — YA superstar John Green (Paper Towns, The Fault In Our Stars) talking to Refinery 29’s Sabrina Rojas Weiss about YA headliner Andrew Smith getting beaten up on Twitter for stating that his novels aren’t that invested in female characters because he “was raised in a family with four boys, and I absolutely did not know anything about girls at all.”

I have suffered the slings and arrows of outrage culture firsthand and can personally attest that ranting Twitter bitches are amply represented among both genders. I have a private fantasia in which these little gremlins are forced to taste their own venom, which gives them pause and prompts them to say, “Oh, we didn’t mean to be so vicious and damning.” I have another in which they’re thrown off a cliff into a swamp crawling with crocodiles.