But who needs romance when you have friendship with just as much texture and affection? - Anne Helen Petersen

The crafting of the face is a billion-dollar industry because there’s actually only one truly acceptable face to create: that of “the girl.” The girl’s face is always dewy, unblemished, and unwrinkled, her eyes bright, her forehead uncreased. “Womanly” hips and ass might be theoretically fetishized, but they’re desirable only when the rest of the body remains that of the girl.

The story of middle-class ascendancy is all about individual hard work. And no one wants to lose any of the hard-won benefits of that work, which helps explain the popularity of the Personal Responsibility Crusade amongst boomers and their parents. Members of the middle class were so freaked out by seeping economic instability that they started pulling the ladder up behind them.

This example from the retail world should be instructive: if you have only enough employees to barely get the work done as is, you’ve engineered a scenario in which employees may have theoretical permission to take time off, but understand that they’ll shoulder the burden of that time off in some way. Either they try to keep doing part of their work while on leave, a colleague takes on an even larger work burden, or a portion of essential work goes undone, slowing everyone on a team.