The list of costly services that supplement some children's public education is growing longer and now includes consultants, tutors, and test prep. That's in addition to the homework help some stay-at-home parents can afford to provide.

On the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites' emphasis on words such as 'connection,' 'community,' and 'choice.' Yet despite this democratic vocabulary, money makes a big difference.

The Southern California arena rock, hair metal, laidback hippie garden culture - for many growing up in the '70s and '80s, none of it made us who we were like Lou Reed did.

An IPO-mad technology boom made 'selling out' itself into an honorific.

When I was 13, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground made more sense to me than anything else.

Like other elements of childhood for the precociously gifted - private or home schooling, overstructured activity, and proto-professional training - edutainment products are part of a system that divides children into haves and have-lesses.

Parents who press their children to succeed do so in hopes of preparing them for an adulthood of high achievement.

Economically anxious, many parents see their children's accomplishments as a sort of insurance against the financial challenges of old age; high-achieving kids, this logic goes, will become high-earning adults and therefore be better able to help Mom and Dad pay for the assisted-living facility in a few decades.

Kids don't come cheap.

I love the show 'Billions.' But the main character is basically a hedge fund scumbag, and he's the hero.

When I was growing up, my parents thought there could be nothing better than being a writer. And at that time, society afforded that impracticality.

There's no better example of how to lead a difficult employee than to have a child. You have another kind of knowledge from your children that's actually applicable outside of childbearing.

When I was a young child, professional aspiration was synonymous to me with the clatter of my mother's high-heeled boots as she went off to teach each 1970s weekday morning, carrying her graded blue books under her arm.

'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new brown Stride Rite Mary Janes with little purple and silver flowers when the old shoes were pinching the toes.

The middle class is a group defined by more than just money: it also leans on credentials, education, aspirations, assets, and, of course, household income.

To be 'squeezed' is to be bound by a very American psychological and socio-economic predicament. Being squeezed involves one's finances, one's social status, and one's self-image.

Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up in its place, what I have called America's dystopian social net. That is, we now require private solutions to what are public problems.

Crowdfunding companies like GoFundMe are in themselves not evil. But the fact that we have to rely on them to pay for our basics is.

Social networks matter greatly, and our class calibrations are often around what college one attended, leading to gruesome institutional divisions between those who attend, say, community colleges and those who attend top-tier universities.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

I grew up in New York City and in London.

No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the fact that Americans still believe they will one day be joining their number.

Actors and writers and adjuncts are always looking for their next job: they find common cause with the female Uber drivers on contracts who have also been unprotected victims of sexual harassment.