In my 20s, I was a freelance writer with little money and living in a rabbit warren one-and-a-half-bedroom with a roommate.

The daily deluge of tales of lechery and trauma holds a hidden but crucial truism: sexual harassment routinely feeds on income inequality. After all, it's much harder to exploit an equal.

In 'Ozark,' the truism that we are not as likely to do as well as our parents did in the past is front and center.

If we don't at least try to make the future more equitable, most of us will left with simply scraps.

Instead of working to give robots personhood status, we should concentrate on protecting our human workers. If that means developing a more cooperative approach to ownership of autonomous trucks so millions of drivers are not left out in the literal cold, so be it.

The effect of robotization would be profoundly different if, say, truckers possessed their own autonomous vehicles rather than a corporation controlling them all.

Money and one of its embodiments, social class, are both riveting and mysterious to children. And if we don't challenge today's stigma around class status, it will warp a new generation's experience of an even more important class - the kind in which they learn. And that's one thing we simply can't afford.

If we could support school curricula about social class, we might discuss the full complexity of 'wealth' within the parameters of our children's educational lives. Out of these lesson plans, we might talk more about what society values - and whether it rewards the right things.

To be sure, many cultural elite pastimes are easily mocked and annoying.

The increasingly progressive messages in marketing campaigns are clearly a mercenary attempt to entice millennials: they are trying to be 'woke.'

Brand loyalty starts in the cradle and ends in the grave, as I wrote in my first book, 'Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers.'

Essentially, if you are surrounded by those who 'outrank' you, it is likely to affect your identity in insidious ways.

Going in and out of a proverbial 'poor door' - a separate entrance for income-restricted residents of mixed-income housing - of your city every day has its costs, even if the 'poor door' woman would be considered affluent in another location.

Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting their luxurious homes and top-quality private schools.

Like politics, all status is ultimately local - people compare themselves to those they live near.

Precariousness is not just a working-class thing.

Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this rule has never deceived me

...Madame, I have become a whore through good-will and libertine through virtue.

Only two things are required to accredit an alleged miracle: a mountebank and a crowd of spineless lookers-on.

It has pleased Nature so to make us that we attain happiness only by way of pain.

Those who are unhappy clutch at shadows, and to give themselves an enjoyment that truth refuses them, they artfully bring into being all sorts of illusions.

The greatest pleasures are born of conquered repugnancies.

Min� en ep�r�i koskaan valinnoissani ja koska olen aina varma, ett� l�yd�n nautinnon siit� mit� teen, en koskaan katumalla turmele sen vieh�tyst�.

This monster was outfitted with faculties so gigantic that even the broadest thoroughfares would still have appeared too narrow for him.