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Let’s chalk up these kids’ snarky, furiously penned essays for campus newspapers and meanspirited social media posts to the internet’s mob mentality, a 20-year-old’s clumsiness with rhetorical flourishes, and their deep need to be part of a clique. Political radicalism at college is now more vocation than avocation, and anyone who displays a trace of racism, misogyny or sexual predation is suspect.

This heightened ethical sensitivity is being applied to sexual intercourse, an activity whose standards have long been mutable and often lax. My mother’s generation, coming of age in the 1970s, imagined that when a woman went to a man’s apartment, she’d signaled her intent to have intercourse. Twenty years later, I thought I could walk out of that apartment without even an obligatory kiss, but I would never have lain down on a mattress with someone with whom I didn’t plan to hook up. Today, inviting someone into your bed is “cuddling,” usually but not always sexual, and certainly does not have to lead to intercourse.

These types of vague encounters most likely spurred the demand for some rules. Whereas my Gen X friends called weird, awkward and even predatory sexual experiences “bad nights,” today’s students use the label “sexual assault.” If it feels violating, it is violating, and shouldn’t be part of anyone’s formative sexual experiences.

Most students — and not only the type of aggressive liberal activist once called a “Magic Marker terrorist” — like these standards, perceiving them as a way of making sex more pleasurable instead of less. “It’s attractive to me because he is showing me that he thinks I’m a person,”

As with all social etiquette, some people will take rules too far. These new sexual standards appeal to the ever-present undergraduate elimination of ambiguity. The need to communicate constantly — very millennial — may also be a naïve belief in explicitness. Nothing should be beyond words, no liminal realms of discomfort can be allowed to exist.

But we can’t lose sight of the fact that they’re also about compassion. They’re making sure that the desire of the other is present when gratifying oneself, an attunement to gratifying the other too.

The migration to urban centers threatens the prosperity outlying suburbs have long enjoyed, bringing a dose of pain felt by rural communities and exacerbating stark gaps in earnings and wealth that Donald Trump capitalized on in winning the presidency.

High homicide rates and concerns about the police department have eroded Emanuel’s popularity locally, but those issues seem confined to other parts of the city as young professionals crowd into the Loop, Chicago’s lively central business district.

Chicago has been ranked the No. 1 city in the United States for corporate investment for the past four years by Site Selection Magazine, a real estate trade publication.

If more jobs go, it will diminish the options for highly qualified managers and executives who have chosen to make their homes in Peoria — a far more affordable, less congested place than Chicago or Deerfield.