Tina Wells, Teen Whisperer

WELLS IS on Twitter and Tumblr, and she blogs, but she doesn’t spend all her time online. She hangs out with her family. She goes on dates — “I tell myself, ‘You just need to find someone who has a life, his own life.’” She serves on boards. But mostly, she studies her herd of Millennials around the world. She tends to them, defends them, speaks out for them on HLN and HuffPo, and in return, they provide her with a livelihood. It’s a reciprocal arrangement not all that different, when you think about it, from her father’s and grandfather’s pastoral flocks. Bill Wells may be a minister, but he doesn’t flinch when he watches his daughter stand up to the moral police on TV. “I know just about every rap artist out there,” he says in a phone call between classes at Rowan. (He and his wife have gone back for their degrees now that the kids are through school.) “I have to, if I’m going to minister to young people. I have to understand the music and use that to get inside their heads.”

Or as Tina would say, if Sony and “Skins” and Procter & Gamble are getting inside your kid’s head, you’d better be there, too.