Articles like these are sensationalist and often overreaching in their conclusions, but the reason they have legs is that they speak to an essential conflict which is very real.

That conflict — between work and family — is one which middle-class women in postindustrial societies are only just discovering. (Everyone else, including middle-class men, already knew.)

For these women, it has come as a generational shock that one cannot be perfectly committed to one's career and also perfectly committed to one's family. One must make compromises. Compromise doesn't mean throwing up one's hands as some "born-again" mothers have advocated and reverting to housewifery, any more than it means the reverse. In fact parents of both genders and all walks of life have found the perspective that raising a family puts on one's career invaluable to one's work life, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, nobody likes to feel that they're making compromises when no one else is. What's interesting is how this feeling seems to cut both ways: childless working women feel that they've sacrificed something vital — motherhood — for their careers and resent their peers with families who appear to be having their cake and eating it too. At the same time, working mothers feel burdened by a lifestyle choice that limits their options in every aspect of their lives, not just at work, while their childless peers traipse about fancy-free.

Being middle-class women, these antagonists are strongly socialized to regard each other as selfish, irresponsible, unreliable, bad decision-makers, and so on — the litany of middle-class domestic sins. They'll burn a great deal more energy and column space saying so before this crisis passes (which may very well require nothing less than the entire generation dying off and being replaced by its more pragmatic younger sisters).

The great contribution of feminism to the discourse of social change is in its revelation that the personal is political. But from time to time even liberated women forget, perhaps inevitably, that sometimes the personal is just personal. Now learn to share (that long-deprecated middle class virtue) and leave each other be! No society ever suffered from a rash of well-cared-for children.

One of the major markers that distinguishes a religion from a cult is tolerance of heterodoxy. In that respect what makes Mormonism worth noting is that it has, almost uniquely, gone from being a rigidly controlled, autocratic church to one which tolerates open dissent on major theological principles and points of doctrine.

A generation ago if you called yourself a Mormon feminist and questioned patriarchal authority within the church, you were out, period. That's not the case anymore, and how the Mormon church underwent that transformation is a question I would have liked to see O'Hehir look into more in his article.

Why blame Kerry, for pity's sake? First of all we know the man has all the fight in him of a tub of molasses in January. He's not exactly going to go leaping into a struggle, fists swinging.

It's everyone else that gets me. There they are, sitting there watching with faint scowls of disapproval, enraptured by the spectacle of another student — one of their own, even if he is a drama queen — being beaten up.

Having defused a couple of standoffs between loudmouths and the cops who are ready to beat them, I can attest that it doesn't require any special training, credentials, or skill — just a sense of decency and the courage to act on it.

But maybe I shouldn't be surprised. These are Young Democrats, after all. Silent, frowning passivity is the only example they've ever had from most of their elders.

Logan suffered from poor administration and one of the worst track records for security in the nation long before the 2001 attacks. Even nonspecialists, outside the field and relying only on general news, knew this — and if they had any doubt, after forgetting a few times that they'd packed a utility knife in their carry-on luggage and having it slip through security anyway would certainly have persuaded them.

Why do you think Al Quaeda chose Logan?

So, time to come to terms with the real secret of post-World Trade Center America: there is no secret. Nothing of substance has changed — airport security that was good in August of 2001 is still good, and airport security that sucked then sucks now.

The reason why nothing has changed is that it's all pretty much the same bunch of people in charge, and fundamentally they have been under zero pressure to change their policies and institutional culture. The only things that has changed is that there's a lot more money floating around now — so the people who were doing dumb things before are now doing dumb things fast.

The bottom line is this: the entire apparatus of air security has failed to catch a single terrorist, foreign or domestic. It missed 19 guys with box cutters on September 11. It missed Richard Reid. And when undercover federal auditors recently tested American airport security by attempting to smuggle explosives through, they succeeded every time.

People of America, the terrorists just aren't there, and your leaders know this or they wouldn't still be doing the same dumb things day in and day out in order to look busy. A day will come when you will put your feet down and demand an end to this idiocy, in favor of a system that addresses the realities of terrorism and actually makes Americans safer. Until then, pray that nobody (else) gets shot.