Brace Yourself in Act II: Trigger Warnings Come to the Stage; The New York Times, November 18, 2018

Michael Paulson, The New York Times;Brace Yourself in Act II: Trigger Warnings Come to the Stage

"Trigger warnings have, of course, become part of the college experience, surviving mockery and concerns about censorship to win acceptance, if not broad approval. Now demand for those warnings is spreading among the wider public. “People who have grown up with warnings now expect them,” said Becky Witmer, the managing director of ACT Theater in Seattle."

The Bad Parent Caucus; New York Times, February 15, 2018

Timothy Egan, New York Times; The Bad Parent Caucus

"Let me try another take for you bad parents in office. Pretend you live in a pleasant, well-protected community of like-minded people, and you’re in charge. O.K., you don’t have to pretend. And let’s say there was a natural gas leak every three days in one of the homes in that community, a leak that killed entire families.

Your response would be to pray and do nothing. Or to pray and talk about everything except the gas leak. Or to pray and say you’re powerless to act because the gas company owns you. The response of those suffering would be to take control and kick you out. That’s what we have to do, and will, next November."

Trigger Warnings and Intellectual Freedom; The Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, Intellectual Freedom Blog, June 13, 2017

Patricia Peters, The Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, Intellectual Freedom Blog; 

Trigger Warnings and Intellectual Freedom

"Trigger warnings, initially designed to give advance notice of content potentially detrimental to those who have suffered trauma, have made their way into everyday situations and become code for “stuff that may be offensive or upsetting.” The controversy that continues to surround the use of trigger warnings in educational settings, whether K-12 or university, seems to boil down to whether one uses a narrow definition of the term or a broad definition."

The Coddling of the American Mind; Atlantic, September 2015

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, Atlantic; The Coddling of the American Mind:

"Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma."