During my senior year of high school the entire class was required to take a class called American Problems. Which sounds like it would be about international relations, but was actually a class in Adulting. Mr. DeLaPaz, a no-nonesense WWII vet told us how it was going to be out there. How much you could expect to make if you went to work in the shops. How car loans and mortgages worked. That a pawn shop and a bank are essentially in the same business, just different storefronts. He spoke to us like adults, I remember as he was instructing us how to fill out an IRS 1040 form, he asked, "Sure, you could pay H &R Block five or ten bucks to do this. What's five or ten bucks? I'll tell you what it is, it's a case of beer or a carton of cigarettes."

Talk like that would probably get a teacher fired these days. Regardless, I appreciated Mr. DeLaPaz's candor then and his wisdom in the years since. I wondered if kids these days are getting that sort of education in critical thinking. Probably not, I reasoned, not if they're teaching that science can't be questioned. So I set about writing and designing a series of  tabloid one pagers that could educate and entertain at a 12th grade level, in the style of John DeLaPaz.