Never marry again in slavery.

— Margaret Garner, 1858

Wherever the law is, crime can be found.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973

I.

“lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”

By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family. James Patterson’s Freedom Is Not Enough furnished much of the biographical information in this section. Patterson’s book is deeply sympathetic to Moynihan in ways that I don’t quite agree with, but I found it invaluable for understanding Moynihan as a human. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in New York City. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse. Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol. “My relations are obviously those of divided allegiance,” Moynihan wrote in a diary he kept during the 1950s. “Apparently I loved the old man very much yet had to take sides … choosing mom in spite of loving pop.” In the same journal, Moynihan, subjecting himself to the sort of analysis to which he would soon subject others, wrote, “Both my mother and father—They let me down badly … I find through the years this enormous emotional attachment to Father substitutes—of whom the least rejection was cause for untold agonies—the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings towards dad.”

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Last fall at Oberlin College, a talk held as part of Latino Heritage Month was scheduled on the same evening that intramural soccer games were held. As a result, soccer players communicated by email about their respective plans. “Hey, that talk looks pretty great,” a white student wrote to a Hispanic student, “but on the off chance you aren’t going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!”

Unbeknownst to the white student, the Hispanic student was offended by the email. And her response signals the rise of a new moral culture America.

When conflicts occur, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning observe in an insightful new scholarly paper, aggrieved parties can respond in any number of ways. In honor cultures like the Old West or the street gangs of West Side Story, they might engage in a duel or physical fight. In dignity cultures, like the ones that prevailed in Western countries during the 19th and 20th Centuries, “insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery,” they write. “When intolerable conflicts do arise, dignity cultures prescribe direct but non-violent actions.”

The rapping of knuckles on wood brought Kevin Brown to his front door on the morning of January 9, 2014. The uniformed detectives standing on his doorstep introduced themselves as Michael Lambert and Lori Adams of the San Diego Police Department. Lambert looked familiar to Brown, who had worked for the department as a crime-lab analyst from 1982 until his retirement, in 2002. The detectives said they wanted to discuss an old case with Brown, and he invited them in.

Stepping into the living room, the two detectives sat down in chairs and faced Brown, who perched himself in the middle of a burgundy leather couch. At 61, he was tall, with wire-rimmed glasses and a retreating halo of grayish curly hair. They were briefly joined by Brown’s wife, Rebecca, a teacher at a Catholic high school. The detectives’ visit constituted more excitement than the Browns typically saw of late: Many of the couple’s activities centered on church or Rebecca’s work. Rebecca, who was vivacious and talkative, directed school plays; the more reserved Kevin liked to fish and garden. The two took ballroom-dance classes, traveled abroad, and hiked together. “We were just a standard, boring couple living in the suburbs, tending to our stray cats, roses, and each other,” Rebecca told me.

Three years ago, my wife, Anne-Marie Slaughter, wrote in these pages about how difficult it remains for women to “have it all”—a family and a career. She’d recently left a high-powered job in Washington, D.C., to return to our home in Princeton, New Jersey, where I had been acting as lead parent to our children. Somewhat ironically, her article on work-life balance led her to increased prominence on the national stage, which reinforced my role as the lead parent of our two sons—a role I continue to fill today.

Here is the other half of our family’s story.

Anne-Marie and I went to college just as female graduates were beginning to outnumber their male counterparts, and, in many cases, to outperform them as well. Accordingly, my attitude toward my wife differed from my father’s stance toward my mother. I never doubted for a moment that her prospects were at least equal to my own. Neither did she.

Last week, I noted an effort by two sociologists to explain the rise of what they call “victimhood culture.” They focused their paper on “a new species of social control that is increasingly common at American colleges: the publicizing of microaggressions.” The scores of emails I’ve received in response to the article include people on both sides of the larger debate on whether “microaggressions” are a sound or unsound framework. Its defenders often fail to realize how many of its critics share their desired ends, if not their preferred means.

Consider an 18-year-old whose great grandparents immigrated from Japan to the United States. She enrolls at a large state university where she is constantly surrounded by strangers. A few times a week, someone asks her, “What country are you from?” Each interaction on its own is a tiny annoyance that she is inclined to ignore. But the cumulative effect of these interactions add up to a significant burden. No one likes having to answer the same question over and over and over again. And there seems to be something objectionable in the substance of this particular question––an implicit assertion that people with Asian features, or the descendants of Asian immigrants, are somehow less American than their white counterparts, even the ones whose ancestors immigrated here in the same generation. “I’m from here every bit as much as you are,” she might think to herself, “but people prejudge me as if that isn’t so because I don’t have white skin or features.”

Last Thursday, the world said hello to Homo naledi, a new species of ancient human discovered in South Africa’s Rising Star cave. As I reported at the time, scientists extracted 1,550 fossil fragments from the cave, which were then assembled into at least 15 individual skeletons—one of the richest hauls of hominid fossils ever uncovered.

But one significant problem clouded the excitement over the discovery: The team doesn’t know how old the fossils are. And without that age, it’s hard to know how Homo naledi fits into the story of human evolution, or how to interpret its apparent habit of deliberately burying its own kind. Everyone from professional paleontologists to interested members of the public raised the same question: Why hadn’t the team dated the fossils yet?

The U.S. is a composite of countless economies: The one experienced by the homeless population camped out under the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago will necessarily differ from the economy occupied by Millennials embarking on guerilla farming projects in Cleveland, who in turn might not recognize the system inhabited by the Bitcoin believers of libertarian New Hampshire. And a lone bicyclist who’s sold all his belongings to head west may live in a makeshift market of his own.

These are just a few of the people and subcultures documented in Moneytripping, a blog by 26-year-old financial journalist Bailey Reutzel. Reutzel, a former co-worker of mine, decided this summer to quit her job and drive across the country interviewing people about how they are making do (or not) in post-Financial-Crisis America.

As it has gone every year since 2007, when the first iPhone was announced, last week’s Apple event generated a lot of chatter. This year, though, some of that chatter took on a different tone. Some critics hissed at what they saw as paltry changes to their beloved device. Reactions to the iPhone 6S included: It’s boring. It looks pretty much the same as before. The changes are incremental at best. There’s no “killer new feature.” There’s a fancy new camera, but so what? (As my colleague Rob Meyer has noted, this is totally acceptable.)

While the headlines might be more indicative of Apple-media-hype-fatigue than of anything else, this morning Apple seemed to have news for all of those disappointed journalists: The company announced that its iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus were showing strong pre-order sales, and predicted that it will beat last year’s 10 million phones sold on release weekend. Apple’s spokesperson, Trudy Muller, said that preorders around the world have been going strong and that their customer response is“extremely positive.” Apple says that the online demand is currently beating the company’s own sales forecasts. (Some have suggested that Apple’s reluctance to give specific sales numbers is hiding something—last year, the company provided them after the launch of the iPhone 6.)