If you are anything like me, you left the theater after Sex and the City 2 and thought, there ought to be a law against a looks-based culture in which the only way for 40-year-old actresses to be compensated like 40-year-old actors is to have them look and dress like the teenage daughters of 40-year-old actors.

Meet Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor who proposes a legal regime in which discrimination on the basis of looks is as serious as discrimination based on gender or race. In a provocative new book, The Beauty Bias, Rhode lays out the case for an America in which appearance discrimination is no longer allowed. That means Hooters can’t fire its servers for being too heavy, as allegedly happened last month to a waitress in Michigan who says she received nothing but excellent reviews but weighed 132 pounds.

Rhode is at her most persuasive when arguing that in America, discrimination against unattractive women and short men is as pernicious and widespread as bias based on race, sex, age, ethnicity, religion, and disability. Rhode cites research to prove her point: 11 percent of surveyed couples say they would abort a fetus predisposed toward obesity. College students tell surveyors they’d rather have a spouse who is an embezzler, drug user, or a shoplifter than one who is obese. The less attractive you are in America, the more likely you are to receive a longer prison sentence, a lower damage award, a lower salary, and poorer performance reviews. You are less likely to be married and more likely to be poor.

And all of this is compounded by a virtually unregulated beauty and diet industry and soaring rates of elective cosmetic surgery. Rhode reminds us how Hillary Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor were savaged by the media for their looks, and says it’s no surprise that Sarah Palin paid her makeup artist more than any member of her staff in her run for the vice presidency.

The problem with making appearance discrimination illegal is that Americans just really, really like hot girls. And so long as being a hot girl is deemed a bona fide occupational qualification, there will be cocktail waitresses fired for gaining three pounds. It’s not just American men who like things this way. In the most troubling chapter in her book, Rhode explores the feminist movement’s complicated relationship to eternal youth. The truth is that women feel good about competing in beauty pageants. They love six inch heels. They feel beautiful after cosmetic surgery. You can’t succeed in public life if you look old in America.

To put it another way, appearance bias is a massive societal problem with tangible economic costs that most of us—perhaps especially women—perpetuate each time we buy a diet pill or sneer at fat women. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work toward eradicating discrimination based on appearance. But it may mean recognizing that the law won’t stop us from discriminating against the overweight, the aging, and the imperfect, so long as it’s the quality we all hate most in ourselves.

“Few articles change owners more frequently than clothes. They travel downwards from grade to grade in the social scale with remarkable regularity,” wrote the journalist Adolphe Smith in 1877 as he traced a garment’s journey: cleaned, repaired and resold repeatedly; eventually cut down into a smaller item; finally, when it was beyond all wearability, the fibres recycled into new fabric for the wealthier classes.

That model is almost incomprehensible in the era of fast fashion. The average British customer buys four items a month, often at pocket-money prices; though the low cost is a godsend for the hard-up, many purchases are discarded after a few outings, or never worn at all.

Yet a gradual revival of the secondhand trade has gathered pace in the last year. At fashion website Asos, vintage sales have risen 92%. It was once worn out of necessity, then it became the quirky choice of Jarvis Cocker-style misfits and the label of “vintage” gave it cachet. Now it is simply a way of life. Strikingly, it has become big enough business that mainstream retailers want a slice of the action. For some buyers and sellers, the switch to secondhand is born of pandemic-induced financial need. Others have become queasy at working conditions in factories, or the impact of their shopping habit on the planet.

One concern is that mainstream brands may “greenwash”—using relatively small volumes of secondhand goods to improve their image, rather than engaging more seriously with sustainability. Another worry is that good causes are losing out as people trade rather than donate unwanted clothes. The biggest concern may be that people keep buying because they know they can resell goods, still chasing the buzz of the next purchase but with an eased conscience and healthier bank balance. Cheap items are unlikely to last long or be repaired easily: shoes are glued rather than stitched; seams are skimpier; fabrics quickly sag or bobble.

“A new Netflix series, Worn Stories, documents the emotional resonance that clothes can have, each item a memoir in miniature”, writes Emily Spivack. A handbag from a grandmother; a scarf passed on by a father; garments that made people feel confident in their first job—almost everyone has at least one item they cherish. Perhaps we could cultivate such attachments. A love of style is not a bad or trivial thing. But a committed relationship is better than a quick fling. Can we learn to appreciate our own old clothes as well as other people’s?

Manufacturers operating self-driving vehicles in the U.K. will be liable for a vehicle’s actions when in autonomous mode, according to the country’s new roadmap to achieve a widespread roll out of self-driving vehicles by 2025.

The roadmap stated that new legislation will build on existing laws and state that manufacturers are responsible for the actions of self-driving vehicles, “meaning a human driver would not be liable for incidents related to driving while the vehicle is in control of driving.”

This distinction could set a precedent globally, where liability in the case of autonomous vehicle accidents can still be somewhat of a gray area. When an autonomous Uber test vehicle killed a pedestrian in 2017, the human safety operator in the vehicle was charged with negligent homicide with a dangerous instrument. Uber faced no charges. And after a deadly crash in 2019 involving a Tesla vehicle operating in autopilot, the driver, not Tesla, was charged with two felony counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence.

As the country prepares to write new laws, Britain has opened a consultation period on a “safety ambition” for self-driving vehicles to be as safe as a human driver. The results from the consultation would help form the standards for operating autonomous vehicles on public roads, as well as potential sanctions if those standards are not met.

“It is still quite a big leap from assisted driving, where the driver is still in control, to self-driving, where the car takes control. It is important that the government does study how these vehicles would interact with other road users on different roads and changing weather conditions,” AAA president, Edmund King, said in a statement. “However the ultimate prize, in terms of saving thousands of lives and improving the mobility of the elderly and the less mobile, is well worth pursuing.”

The government said vehicles that can drive themselves on motorways could be available to buy within the next year for drivers with valid driver’s licenses. While Teslas are some of the best-selling vehicles in the U.K., current legislation does not allow for British drivers to try out Tesla’s full self-driving beta, its advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that comes with a variety of automated driving functions. New legislation could open the door not only for ride-hail, delivery and public transportation, but also for cars equipped with higher levels of ADAS.

In an old factory building in lower Manhattan a fintech startup is seeking answers to a question that has tormented teachers and students for decades: What is the value of a given course, teacher or institution? Climb Credit, with just two dozen employees, provides student loans. The programs it finances bring returns far higher than can be expected from even highly rated universities.

Climb does not claim to nurture billionaires, nor to care much about any of the intangible benefits of education. Rather, it focuses on sharp, quantifiable increases in earnings. The average size of its loans is $10,000 and it normally finances programs of less than a year. Some students have scant formal education; others advanced degrees. The rate of return they get is calculated as the uplift in earnings after the course of study, minus its cost.

Climb’s results so far are hardly conclusive. It has released only the number of loan applications: just 10,000 since its founding in 2014. Many institutions it works with do not offer the four-year and two-year courses eligible for federal funding, which account for 19m students. Instead, its market for now is among the 5m studying in more focused programs.

Climb tracks every loan it makes, along with data such as subject area, teacher, institution, job offers and salaries. Its interest rates average 9% a year, roughly double the government rate, and can be as high as 15%. It shuns some fields, such as acting or modelling, altogether, if there is no evidence that a course delivers a return. So far, the firm’s approach has worked: Its default rates are in the low single digits.

Climb’s credit offering covers 70 institutions; another 150 are being vetted. As many as 3,000 may eventually qualify. Climb’s attraction is obvious: an expanded student base. But many willbalk atthe tough provisions Climb imposes. Students must be given a drop-out period, when they can leave without any loan obligation. A review of data on conventional student loans suggested that those most likely to default had begun classes, taken on debt and then quit the course before they had acquired any new skills. If a student does default, the school is usually responsible for more than 20% of the unpaid debt. That gives it an incentive to pick students carefully and train them well.

In conventional student loans, interest and principal accumulate silently. On graduation, the monthly repayment bill comes as a shock. Climb students start making tiny payments as soon as they take out a loan (refunded if they drop out fast). Climb hopes to make its success-rate data public, to help both students and lenders. It already makes good use of its network of education providers: it has hired three former students from institutions within it.

Dream is a story that a person “watches” or even takes part in during sleep. Dream events are imaginary, but they are related to real experiences and needs in the dreamer’s life. They seem real while they are taking place. Some dreams are pleasant, others are annoying, and still others are frightening.

Everyone dreams, but some persons never recall dreaming. Others remember only a little about a dream they had just before awakening and nothing about earlier dreams. No one recalls all his dreams.

Dreams involve little logical thought. In most dreams, the dreamer cannot control what happens to him. The story may be confusing, and things happen that would not happen in real life. People see in most dreams, but they may also hear, smell, touch, and taste in their dreams. Most dreams occur in color, but persons who have been blind since birth do not see at all in dreams.

Dreams are a product of the sleeper’s mind. They include events and feelings that he has experienced. Most dreams are related to events of the day before the dream and strong wishes of the dreamer. Many minor incidents of the hours before sleep appear in dreams. Few events more than two days old turn up. Deep wishes or fears—especially those held since childhood—often appear in dreams, and many dreams fulfill such wishes. Events in the sleeper’s surrounding—a loud noise, for example, may become part of a dream, but they do not cause dreams.

Some dreams involve deep feelings that a person may not realize he has. Psychiatrists (精神病医生) often use material from a patient’s dreams to help the person understand himself better.

Dreaming may help maintain good learning ability, memory, and emotional adjustment. People who get plenty of sleep—but are awakened each time they begin to dream—become anxious and restless.