I cannot recommend this piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom highly enough. It’s about why people who don’t have a lot of money spend money on luxury items. Spoiler alert: it’s because they are people, too, even though plenty of Americans struggle to remember that.

I do not know how much my mother spent on her camel colored cape or knee-high boots but I know that whatever she paid it returned in hard-to-measure dividends. How do you put a price on the double-take of a clerk at the welfare office who decides you might not be like those other trifling women in the waiting room and provides an extra bit of information about completing a ...