Alissa Quart  Alissa Quart (born 1972) is an American nonfiction writer, critic, journalist, editor, and poet. Her nonfiction books are "Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels" (2013), "Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child" (2007), "Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers" (2003), and "Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America" (2018), and her poetry, "Monetized" (2015). She was an editor at large for The Atavist, an award-winning nonfiction iPad and enhanced ebook publisher; her multimedia story with Maisie Crow, "The Last Clinic" was nominated for a National Magazine Award and a Documentary Emmy in 2014. She is editor-in-chief of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by Barbara Ehrenreich. Her articles and reviews have appeared in "The Guardian","The Atlantic", "The New York Times Sunday Book Review", "The Nation", "Newsweek", "Mother Jones", and "Marie Claire", and she has appeared on "Nightline", "20/20", the "Today Show", CNN, CBC, and C-Span. She coined the term "hyperlink cinema" in 2005 and popularized the term "hipster sexism". She teaches as an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and is a 2010 Nieman Fellowship recipient. Born to two college professors, she grew up in lower Manhattan, attending Stuyvesant High School. She received a BA in English Literature with Honors in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1994 then did graduate work in English Literature for a year at CUNY Graduate Center before completing a Master of Science at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1997. In 2003 she published "Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers" which illustrates and criticizes the way that corporations chase teenagers and pre-teens. From the annual Advertising & Promotion to Kids Conference to affiliate programs by catalog retailers such as Delia's that have teenagers advise their friends on what is desirable to Disney and McDonald's holding focus groups in high schools, Quart shows how companies have become increasingly sophisticated in hooking youngsters into a world of extreme consumerism that is ultimately harmful to them socially and developmentally. She points out that companies trap these impressionable individuals "into a cycle of labor and shopping" with brands "aim[ing] to register so strongly in kids' minds that the appeal will remain for life".