Alex Tabarrok thinks apprenticeships are brilliant and that America should adopt them because, hello, practical and affordable and resulting in jobs, all things colleges are not delivering on right now (ever again?).

Yair Lapid, Israel's finance minister, created an imaginary person who he thinks embodies the country's middle class.

Attractive people line up to pay $2.25 for a donut. Sometimes I do, too, usually whenever I walk by, because I always want doughnuts, every minute of every day.

Ross Douthat gave a little meritocracy 101 in the NYT this weekend: "Our elite’s entire claim to legitimacy rests on theories of equal opportunity and upward mobility, and the promise that 'merit' correlates with talents and deserts."

Basically: Help us have a decreasingly shitty time In This Economy.

My local Catholic church in Washington, D.C., however, has taken a more radical approach, using the story of Christ's betrayal and crucifixion as an allegory for the changes gentrification has wrought on our neighborhood. Usually, this is done at holy sites, but in this case, the church stops at food banks, AIDS clinics and other local establishments in our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood and talk about the need to preserve social services and provide more affordable housing.

In his column this week, Adam Davidson looks at one of the wealthiest towns in America, Greenwich, Conn., and the research examining how well poor kids do when they attend schools that wealthy kids do.

Middle and upper class black neighborhoods don't get the same national retailers and restaurants as middle and upper class white neighborhoods, and The Atlantic explores how one community outside Chicago—"a mixed-race community, where the average annual household income is $77,000, above the county average"—is trying to change that. And why it happens in the first place. Can you guess?

Jen and Katherine are married in the state of New York. Jen gave birth to their daughter Edie. But in order for Katherine to be recognized as Edie's parent in other states—and be able to make medical decisions—Jen and Katherine had to meet with a social worker, undergo background checks, and pay $3,000 so Katherine could legally adopt Edie.

Molly Crabapple writes about her abortion. It was the event that made her politics personal. It cost $400 at a Manhattan Planned Parenthood. The essay is brave and beautiful:

A visit to an abortion clinic is often a middle class girl’s only brush with the brusque, painful care that is the lot of America’s poor. The better funded go to private doctors. They get treatment that’s far more personal and less public. Proper pain killers, no protesters in sight, and your man holding your hand.

The ability to have an abortion is as important for women as the vote. It is the basis of fertile women living equal lives. As soon as I could, I raised a thousand dollars for Planned Parenthood. It felt like paying a debt.