Lukianoff and Haidt have greatly expanded their popular Sept 2015 Atlantic article into a more detailed and nuanced book of the same title. Haidt is a social psychologist and Lukianoff is a First Amendment Lawyer - a perfect pairing for this project. Haidt is also author of the highly relevant and absolutely brilliant 2012 book, "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion." A major reference and parallel running throughout the book is Nassim Taleb's seminal book, "Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder." Key Coddling conclusion: Parents and educators are unwittingly, and paradoxically, harming today's students by trying so hard to protect them. This is from perceived physical dangers as well as from ideas that might prove uncomfortable. The net is that "helicopter" parenting and increasingly ideologically uniform college campuses aren't allowing children to develop natural resilience (identical in concept to children being susceptible to diseases if not properly immunized). Kids are not receiving the proper stress-testing to the issues they will undoubtedly encounter in the real world and "the growing tendency to cultivate vulnerabilities in students carries unacknowledged costs" (Erika Christakis). An important and highly unsettling second derivative of the cited trends are the "consequences for the future of liberal democracies." The book references "the coarsening of social interaction," and desire to "invoke coercion by other parties to solve problems" as one of the "vulnerabilities of democracies." A wonderful speech excerpt from Chief Justice John Roberts highlights his grasp of the importance of antifragility and ability to "see the message in your misfortunes." Parents need to let children fall, fail and skin their knees more, while colleges need to make sure students are exposed to diverse ideologies and ideas that make them uncomfortable. In the end, "safe spaces" are anything but. There is a great chapter on "The Bureaucracy of Safetyism" that opens with a prescient Alexis de Tocqueville quote from Democracy in America: "The Sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute and uniform rules...it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." Safety, conformity and resume wars breed "Excellent Sheep." Lastly, Haidt and Lukianoff's chapter "The Quest for Justice" demonstrates their ability to parse polarizing issues, like "social justice," and disaggregate them into the component parts. In this instance, the important distinction between "distributive justice" (the perception that people are getting what is deserved) and "procedural justice" (the perception that the process by which things are distributed and rules are enforced is fair and trustworthy). Do your brain a favor - buy The Righteous Mind, Antifragile and Coddling and then steal away for a weekend to read them all.