The conversation is still all too vivid in my memory. It’s been more than 20 years, but it was a defining moment in my management career.

Friends were visiting WORLD magazine’s offices, and as part of our modest tour, I was showing them the warehouse where in those days we provided a mail order service for a number of good books, especially for children. The warehouse handled several hundred orders every day, and employed about 25 people.

In a Dec. 4 speech, President Obama declared income “inequality” to be “the defining challenge of our time.”

It is time for me to come clean; to own up to a dark secret I have been hiding most of my life. It is embarrassing to admit it, but I suffer from income inequality.

Yes, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who make more money than I do and it has affected my life in ways too numerous to recount.

WASHINGTON (AP)—Weekly applications for U.S. unemployment benefits jumped 46,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 388,000, the highest in four months. The increase represents a rebound from the previous week's sharp drop. Both swings were largely due to technical factors.

The four-week average of applications, a less volatile measure, rose slightly to 365,500, the Labor Department said Thursday. That is a level consistent with modest hiring.