Tom Hanks, the Academy Award-winning actor and filmmaker, delivered a thoughtful and impassioned address at Yale's Class Day ceremony in 2011. After a humorous opening and a sardonic tour through decades of history showing that progress and setbacks always seem to balance out, Hanks arrived at what he called the one variable that tips the scales: fear. In this searing passage, Hanks dissected fear as a commodity—something manufactured, packaged, and sold for profit. He illustrated this with a story about watching a local news promo that screamed, 'Are our schools poisoning our children?!' As a father of school-age kids, he tuned in terrified, only to learn the actual story was about a batch of hamburger with slightly elevated bacteria that had already been recalled. The schools were fine. But the fear had done its work. Hanks argued that fear has become the dominant currency of public discourse, more reliable than sex for capturing attention and generating profit.