In the summer of 2006 near my home in northwest Illinois, two teenagers crashed the all-terrain-vehicle they were riding. The boys, aged fifteen and thirteen, had been helping a neighbor put up hay. Whether they had actually been in his employ was uncertain, but the boys' parents brought a wrongful death suit against the farmer, seeking $50,000 in damages. The suit asserted that the boys had been driving the vehicle with the consent of their possible employer, who should have known that ATVs were “notoriously dangerous vehicles.” In addition to questions about the legality of employment, the case turned on long-standing conceptions about young people in industrial society. Everyone knew, the family's attorney declared, “not to trust minors with dangerous instruments.” Indeed, all-terrain-vehicles had come to represent an early twenty-first century analogue of the railroad turntable, an attractive but powerful tool of both work and play. “Riding ATVs can be fun, provide a means of physical fitness, give parents and youth an opportunity for quality family time, and provide a means of accomplishing work,” a Pennsylvania State University report noted in 2005. The problem, the report dryly continued, was that “ATVs can be dangerous.”