Child’s play: In 1920, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and similar puritanical organizations received a providential assist from the United States Congress in the form of a constitutional amendment barring the production and distribution of alcoholic beverages. All this did, as is often the case, was create a plethora of subversions. The Italian and Irish mobs got to work creating thousands of speakeasies, some disguised as bingo parlors or literary salons. Many built their own stills and the word moonshine became a Roaring Twenties staple. Shipping lines invented binge-drinking “Cruises to Nowhere” in which liners spent a day or two outside U.S. territorial waters. The rich traveled to Cuba while the poor drank wood alcohol and went blind. In a word, Prohibition failed, and Franklin Roosevelt repealed it in 1933, giving a literally depressed nation a chance to again drown its sorrows, this time legally. Unsurprisingly, Alcoholics Anonymous came into being two years later. All this comes to mind when I read of legislation, some already in place, to keep under-16s off addictive social media platforms. While the idea has merit, I see stills and moonshine in the offing in the form of subterranean assistance to children who feel suddenly deprived, with unscrupulous hackers and tech companies playing the role of the mob. Bottom line, the digital genie is out of the gin bottle and, much as I’d like to, I can’t imagine a single way of putting it back in.