Ross Douthat penned an interesting column in a recent issue of the Altantic saying that post-9/11 America has, culturally, returned to the paranoid style of the 1970s. Conservatives such as Noonan hoped that 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and ’50s, playing Pearl Harbor to a new era of patriotism and solidarity. [...]

In Sunday’s The New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen questions whether the Supreme Court’s ruling (PDF) against using race as a factor in placing students in public schools will actually have an effect. As he notes in the middle of the column, there are a number of ways for school districts to get around the affirmative [...]