What I've found is that there is an enormous shift taking place in our society. Suddenly there are all young women who are better educated and earning more money than men their age. When young couples today decide to marry, they have very different expectations of one another than their parents did. And there's even been change at the very top of the career ladder. People tend to underestimate that.

It's a fact that within the space of a few decades, women have achieved a massive shift in the role they play - in the way they act in public, and in the way they have conquered areas of the working world that were until recently considered a man's domain.

On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them.

Hollywood is in somewhat the same position as Las Vegas these days. It went from being the capital of sin to Disneyland, and now it's landed somewhere in between. It tries to keep the sins hidden away and outwardly present itself as a defender of American virtues: justice, individual freedom, and the power of one innocent soul to save the world.

That's not a convincing argument. Public sector jobs are cyclical. Teachers get fired when money is tight, then rehired when things get better. Manufacturing jobs, on the other hand, aren't coming back. They're relics of a past age.

The launch of a space shuttle can still make you weep with amazement and wonder, if you happen to be watching it.

Men aren't able to find jobs anymore, and they're withdrawing from society, essentially creating a matriarchy. For the upper social classes, marriage is still a successful model, but for poorer people it's not.