Although federal law prohibits companies with 15 or more employees from discriminating against pregnant job seekers, it can be quite hard for an ordinary woman to land a job if she lets prospective bosses know she is pregnant.

For the rich and powerful, pregnancy might not be an obstacle - it might even help one's career. But for the rest of us, it remains a hindrance.

I go to see films at the multiplex because they are not good films, and so I don't have to think about things like death, social oppression, or yes, my fertility, while I watch them.

Approximating authenticity online is not such a tall order. In fact, it may be the very least we can do.

Parenting makes us better in so many regards.

Mothers suffer in the workplace. That fact is by now so painfully familiar it even has a name: the motherhood penalty.

'Mr. Robot,' in particular, signals the rise of a fresh post-Occupy portrayal of the wealth gap. No longer is the story of income inequity delivered via a well-meaning, crushingly earnest indie film by John Sayles or in a single laugh line on 'Roseanne.'

As consumers, we can pressure corporations both to monitor and improve workplace conditions overseas - when inspections reveal violations, these companies should address the gaps immediately.

Low-cost gear can make restless people like myself feel marginally happier.

Making a movie, under any circumstances, is a highly stressful occupation.

At the end of the day, the truth is that if - when - robots prevail, so many vocations will actually become close to impossible. Save for the profession of making robots, that is.

Like Hipster Racism, Hipster Sexism is a distancing gesture, a belief that, simply by applying quotations, uncool, questionable, and even offensive material about women can be alchemically transformed.

Hipster Sexism consists of the objectification of women but in a manner that uses mockery, quotation marks, and paradox: the stuff you learned about in literature class. As funny as Dunham's 'Girls' is, it can definitely border on Hipster Sexism.

When I got pregnant with my daughter, both my husband and I were freelancers, and we didn't have that much security. We had savings. We were better off than many people, but we didn't have, you know, pensions and all the things that people used to have.

I think there's a contempt for care work and caregiving in this country that seeps into how we think about mothers, professional workers who are mothers.

Self-reinvention is an encouraging conceit. It is simply not always a possible one.

There is a psychological and physical toll from the pressure to recreate ourselves in midlife. To survive as workers, we have to deny, on some level, the realities of our bodies - bodies that age and give birth.

While more people are working later in life because of happy things like longer life expectancy, they are also doing so because of very sad things, like a lack of Social Security benefits or retirement plans.

We in America believe in starting over - and over and over.

If everybody is a Facebook friend, what is an actual friend?

I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the '40s. There was probably cool before that, but that's when people started talking about cool - Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.

I think teens trust each other's opinions about products because of the quality of authenticity that they think their friend's recommendation has.

When I was doing my research for 'Branded,' I'd meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine spread in a women's magazine or teen girl magazine and say, 'I'd never buy this outfit. I know these girls are starving themselves.' But they probably would go out and buy the thing eventually.

There is a set of emotions around money and new technology and advertising and that sort of thing, and there is this kind of changing, transforming way we go through the world happening. The lyrical eye, the perspective of poetry, can get to something like this when other forms of writing can't.