The difference between the two obviously had nothing to do with the size of the store or their impact on small businesses. It was just a matter of branding. Target had clearly become the big-box store of a certain class. Or people who aspired to be in a certain class.

We had actually lived in New York City during the beginnings of the big box revolution and were looking forward to finally paying less for household needs. But we had missed all of anti-big box attitudes. Or really, all of the anti-Walmart attitudes that had developed in the interim. And what was clear from this conversation was that Walmart was just tacky. Or low-class. Or something like that. It was strange hearing from these two educated, but by no means wealthy, individuals about how Walmart was just beneath them.

I say all this because Walmart has launched an ad campaign that seems to push back against this attitude. In an ad called “Meet Real Walmart Shoppers,” viewers are introduced to a teacher, an accountant, and a mechanical engineer. They explain that they are using the money they save at Walmart to invest in things like college education for their kids. I have no idea whether this appeal to a more middle to upper-middle class shopper will work. Presumably many in that demographic have bought into the media portrayal of Walmart as a corporate bad guy, out to exploit employees. But for those who simply associate Walmart with a lower class of shopper, perhaps this will help them.

A writer at Slate speculates that Walmart is actually doing worse as the economy gets better.

So perhaps this is image burnishing is more necessary now than before.

The other ads in the campaign, though, are less explicit appeals to a higher economic class of shopper and more of an explanation of how Walmart works and why you should feel good about supporting them. So instead of advertising low prices or quality goods, they explain how Walmart has developed the kind of logistics that provide goods more efficiently to customers. Another ad describes the trajectory of a Walmart employee who is enrolling in college and who plans to continue working for Walmart in the future, perhaps as a manager. Maybe all of these appeals will ease the consciences of shoppers in higher income brackets.

But if wealthy professionals really want to feel better about shopping at Walmart, they should find comfort in the fact that poorer people can afford much more thanks to Walmart’s lower prices. It may not have the cache of Target, but some things are more important.

Private institutions, I explained, are an unlikely starting point. Boards of trustees are often uninvolved and uninterested. But public institutions, whose policies are subject to review by state legislatures, have a much better chance. And institutions that are newer are also more likely to dismiss academic convention and opt instead for a more entrepreneurial culture. So it was not entirely surprising that Florida Polytechnic University, a new public research university scheduled to open in August 2014, has decided to offer multi-year renewable contracts to its faculty members instead of tenure.

Here’s the report from Inside Higher Ed:

“We want to be a leading university, and we wanted to attract faculty who think out of the box, and who are ambitious and creative,” said Ghazi Darkazalli, vice president of academic affairs. “We don’t want them to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”

The faculty contracts will last for one, three or five years, and will be renewed based on merit “rather than on a set rule within the boundaries of tenure,” Darkazalli said. He said that abandoning the tenure model means that faculty members will be less inclined to pursue the kind of “trivial publication and research” professors on the tenure track sometimes feel is required of them to succeed, and instead focus on teaching and research beneficial to their students.

Mr. Darkazalli seems to have a pretty good understanding of the detrimental effects that tenure has on academia. But the union representatives are unhappy.

“Academic freedom and independence is necessary for high-achieving faculty to function, which is why top scholars typically refuse to go to institutions that cannot make these guarantees,” Paul M. Terry, president of the University of South Florida System chapter of the United Faculty of Florida. “Since top institutions do make such guarantees, any institution lacking them will fail to attract faculty in what is now an international marketplace.”

The market is such that academics cannot be as picky as Mr. Terry assumes. But his threat that the school will not be prestigious enough without tenure is typical. In fact, Florida Polytechnic might look at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts. With no tenure, Olin has managed to get professors to leave schools like the University of Iowa or Vassar and get students to turn down schools like MIT and Berkeley. As the dean there told me, having tenure is like being placed in “golden handcuffs”: “There are more important things than permanent employment.”

Williamson and his wife, Barbara, were the founders of the Sandstone Foundation for Community Systems Research. (Now there’s a euphemism.) The 15 acres in the Topanga Canyon area became starting in 1969 a kind of swingers’ resort. Couples were welcome to come and swap spouses. Nude group activities were offered — the Times piece is accompanied by a great nude-trampolining photo.

According to the article:

At the peak of its popularity, Sandstone had a handful of couples who were full-time residents and about 500 paying members ($240 to join, then $15 per month), with a wide range of prominent names among them, including Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and the singer Bobby Darin.

Sandstone was made famous by Gay Talese, who wrote about it in his book Thy Neighbor’s Wife. It wasn’t so much the activities at Sandstone that puzzle the modern reader. (Who wouldn’t want to participate in group sex with the leaker of the Pentagon Papers?) It’s the justification offered:

“We believe in the sexual self as being at the core of organized social behavior,” Mr. Williamson told The Los Angeles Times in 1972, three years after Sandstone was formed. “When sexuality is distorted, it leads to a distortion of the basic self.”

You might suspect from such language that the Williamsons were failed academics — university researchers who decided to test out there silly sociological theories on real subjects. In fact, he was trained as an electrical engineer and she was an insurance salesman. One of the earliest visitors to Sandstone explained the kind of pseudo intellectual aura of the place: 

“It was like the Algonquin,” Mr. Zitter said of the upper floor. “Then people would go downstairs and have sex, and then they’d come back up and talk some more.”

Ahh yes, just like the Algonquin. 

Talese was also impressed with the approach. 

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Talese said one of Mr. Williamson’s central ambitions was for people to be honest about their personal and sexual lives and not be embarrassed about it.

“It wasn’t really about sex, because they got beyond the sex to the stage where they didn’t have to lie about anything,” he said. “If you didn’t have to lie about sex, you almost didn’t have to lie about anything.”        

Ehh. I suspect it really was about the sex. But eventually the Williamsons ultimately gave up on the whole thing. (There’s no report on how Sandstone’s guests — or their spouses — fared). By 1980, the couple had returned to mainstream society and even gave up on the idea of their own open marriage. In 1995, they moved to Nevada and devoted themselves to raising big cats. Mrs. Williamson explained, “They just really gave us a lot of satisfaction.”

Two museum members have recently filed a lawsuit claiming that the museum’s policy “defrauds” visitors. According to the suit, under the terms of the museum’s lease with the city (signed first in 1878), admission was never supposed to be charged. Or at least no admission was to be charged between Wednesday and Saturday from the time the museum opened until a half hour before sunset. According to an article in the New York Post, the museum began charging a dollar in 1970 as a kind of “experiment,” presumably because the museum (and the city) was hard up at the time.

But that is clearly not the case now. As the Post points out, the museum has $3 billion in assets and a annual revenue of $300 million.

Lawyer Michael Hiller, who is representing the plaintiffs in both suits, charges the Met is a public institution that “behaves like a private business that lavishes exorbitant salaries and perquisites among its executives. . . . The museum does not need to charge; it chooses to do so, and when it does, it does so on the backs of members of the public.”

The museum says that the city was well aware that it had been charging admission all these years and even approved periodic price hikes. But there is little documentation to support any of the museum’s assertions. Meanwhile, the museum has paid its employees very well and the Post notes that it even maintained an empty Fifth Avenue apartment for more than five years at a rent of $5,100 a month.

What’s interesting is how long this situation was allowed to continue before anyone objected. How many visitors have noticed the “recommended” sign? How many have inquired about what it means? It makes you wonder about other nonprofit organizations that are given land or other special privileges by the public. Are they being run like public institutions or private ones? Do some of them start acting a little bit more like private institutions and then slowly add more and more to their coffers hoping no one will notices? Without significant oversight it is hard to see how such situations will be avoided in the future.

Tenured but unable to support myself financially, I began to do freelance writing to supplement my income. I enjoyed it—so much that it became increasingly hard to juggle my professorial and freelance duties. The language of traditional scholarship was sounding increasingly foreign to me, and it became a tongue I no longer wanted to speak. I revised my writing courses to reflect the work I was doing in narrative nonfiction, cultural criticism, and book history. But then, when departmental and service duties ramped up, and especially when it was my turn to become chair, I found myself pulled in too many directions.

Trubek took an extended leave of absence from Oberlin and began to wonder whether she shouldn’t pursue the career that she enjoyed more. But then she asked herself, “Who does that? Who gives up tenure? I kept tripping myself up on the oddity of the move, the seeming illogic.” But then she started asking around. And she found a lot of smart, motivated, passionate, entrepreneurial academics who had done just that. As another author wrote for Times Higher Education “erosions of resources, autonomy, flexibility, vision, and respect for learning . . . [were] beginning to force a generation of scholars out of the field.”

Whether these scholars are going to start their own businesses or pursue a cause like “Open Access” or go work for some national organization, these folks were happy to give up the golden handcuffs of tenure. It allowed them to move around and pursue the things they were most passionate about. As one Pomona professor who left to work for the Modern Language Association explained, “It allowed me to do work at a much larger scale and a national level where it might have some impact beyond my specialized field. I could actually do the things I had been writing should be done. That seemed way more important than lifetime job security.” Another professor who left Cornell and now works on historic preservation noted the obvious: “Out in the world it’s normal to change jobs several times.”

In the end, Trubek is convinced that leaving is the right decision. And she makes some observations about the people who think this decision is odd. 

To frame the question as “Why leave? Who does that?” as I did—and as the articles I mentioned do—reveals a certain exceptionalism and a tinge of arrogance. It is a job, being a tenured professor. Just a job. Why not leave?

And so I will. I may still teach at my old college, but I will resign my position as a tenured professor. It would have been an unthinkable move for me when I received tenure; now it seems not only imaginable but obvious. My interests have evolved, and I am simply moving along with them. 

What these professors have in common is a sense that though they won’t have the same job for many years, they are confident enough in their own work ethic and talent that they will get another job. They seem okay with the idea of not knowing how they are going to spend the next 30 or 40 or 50 years of their lives. Of course, the sad part is that it’s probably the most talented professors who feel like it’s a good idea to get out. But what would happen if we got rid of tenure? Wouldn’t we encourage more of these entrepreneurial types, the risk-takers, to go into academia in the first place?

How did we arrive at the point where three 16-year-old boys thought to sexually assault an unconscious girl and then assumed that no one would have a problem with it? In a book called Premarital Sex in America, published a couple of years ago, sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker discussed the tremendous influence of pornography on actual sexual relationships. Not only do men (and boys) get ideas for sex from porn — the authors offer the example of women shaving or waxing in order to please men — but the authors argue that porn cheapens actual intercourse.

“Porn has given rise to requests for unusual sexual practices, plenty of which are one-sided. . . .” The idea that these boys would even find sex with a girl who is literally unconscious to be desirable is sickening, and I can’t help but wondering whether exposure to pornography might contribute to this.

His brow furrowed a little bit, and I assumed he was going to tell me he was disappointed with my decision to drop out and come out.

“Well,” he said, and then he thought some more. He took one step closer to me, and cleared his throat before continuing. “I got your email, Brandon.”

He paused again, as he searched my face for who knows what.

He spoke again, this time quieter than before. “I just wanted to let you know that you’re my friend and I love you.” And with that, he nodded his head and then gave me a bear hug, before walking me to the driveway and telling me to make it home safely.

I climbed into my car almost in slow-motion. I was shocked. I was expecting Dr. Borland to act differently towards me. I was expecting him to be . . . well, a homophobe. But as I put on my seatbelt, I realized that all that time, I was the one who was afraid. Not him. I’d been warned my whole life about homophobia, but no one ever said anything about homophobiaphobia.

It is not uncommon to hear that evangelical Christians preach “love the sinner,” but don’t practice it. And that they have “privileged” the sin of homosexuality over and above all others. That is, they reserve a special ire for gays and lesbians. The fact that these scenes of compassion take place at Liberty should be a sign to secular America that this view is not entirely accurate.

In a piece in today’s New York Times, though, author T. M. Luhrmann does more to cement that inaccurate view. Luhrmann, a secular academic who has written a somewhat sympathetic account of American evangelicalism, argues that secular and religious types often misunderstand each other and dig their heels in. Along the way, she explains her recent media experience.

I went on my first Christian radio show, a year ago, and the host set out to save me — live, on a nationally syndicated program, for 30 minutes. In the few seconds before I was connected, when I could hear him on the air but he could not hear me, he explained: “Listen, she’s not one of us. But I won’t fight with her.” It was a pledge he did not keep. Did I think God was present? My response, that I was speaking as a social scientist, interested him not at all.

I don’t know what show Luhrmann went on, but I have done my share of religious radio interviews and have never had this happen. For that matter, in all of the interviews I’ve done for columns and books over the past 15 years, only the dean at Bob Jones University tried proselytizing. And while he did shed a few tears, there was no hostility in the exchange. And he definitely did not, as Luhrmann describes her experience, “grill me about the state of my soul.”

All of which is to say that I found Lurhmann’s piece a little disingenuous. She describes how secular folks express shock and horror that she even talks to believing Christians. But having been in her position, I suspect that this form of hostility happens much more often than religious folks acting rudely toward her because she is a nonbeliever.

Parker and his fiancée are not the first — nor will they be the last — to turn a wedding into an absurd spectacle. But it is also a sign of the times. Most weddings these days are no more than elaborate and expensive costume parties (though most guests don’t have to don medieval robes). They do not symbolize commitment. They are just an excuse for putting on a show.

As the authors of the recently released report “Knot Yet” note, more and more women are having children before marriage — if they get married at all.

By age 25, 44 percent of women have had a baby, while only 38 percent have married; by the time they turn 30, about two-thirds of American women have had a baby, typically out of wedlock. Overall, 48 percent of first births are to unmarried women, most of them in their twenties.

Indeed, there is an entirely different understanding of the purpose of marriage. The authors write:

Culturally, young adults have increasingly come to see marriage as a “capstone” rather than a “cornerstone” — that is, something they do after they have all their other ducks in a row, rather than a foundation for launching into adulthood and parenthood.

It is sad and strange in these weeks of hearing about the new national consensus on the importance of gay marriage that we should learn just how diminished the institution of marriage has become.

But let’s say that Stern is right. Exposure to problems like poverty make rich people give more to alleviate such problems. He goes on to explain that the rich who live less isolated lives — in areas where there are different classes of people present — are more likely to give more. This seems quite reasonable. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the rich and poor are leading lives that are increasingly separate from each other.

As Charles Murray explained in his most recent book, Coming Apart, there is a growing divide between rich and poor when it comes to our values. And that is manifesting itself in a geographical divide. Here’s Murray writing in the Wall Street Journal last year:

In 1960, America already had the equivalent of SuperZIPs in the form of famously elite neighborhoods — places like the Upper East Side of New York, Philadelphia’s Main Line, the North Shore of Chicago and Beverly Hills. But despite their prestige, the people in them weren’t uniformly wealthy or even affluent. Across 14 of the most elite places to live in 1960, the median family income wasn’t close to affluence. It was just $84,000 (in today’s purchasing power). Only one in four adults in those elite communities had a college degree.

By 2000, that diversity had dwindled. Median family income had doubled, to $163,000 in the same elite ZIP Codes. The percentage of adults with B.A.s rose to 67% from 26%. And it’s not just that elite neighborhoods became more homogeneously affluent and highly educated — they also formed larger and larger clusters.

Who is to blame for this separation? Most of these upper and upper-middle class families did not up and decide one day that they needed to live more cloistered lives. They fled certain neighborhoods in cities and they fled cities altogether largely for two reasons — crime and poor public education. Families that could afford to moved to the suburbs not simply — as some would have it — because they were white, but because they wanted their kids to be safe and they wanted good schools.

But it seems logical that being away from the problems of urban life and the problems of the lower classes has allowed members of the upper class to turn a blind eye. Is there any way to change this short of showing the rich more videos of child poverty? Well, gentrification of certain neighborhoods would probably accomplish that. More charter schools that would allow middle-class parents to get the education they want for their kids. Oh and policing policies like the ones currently under attack in New York that make the streets safer. But I’m not sure Ken Stern would favor any of those.

He does note that the poor tend to give the bulk of their money to religious institutions and social service organizations while the rich tend to give to colleges and arts institutions. I wonder about this, though, since, as Murray and others have shown, it is the upper classes that tend to be more religious these days. But these numbers might be skewed by blacks — who are among the most religious Americans and also among the poorest.

“This demonstrates that charter schools are a viable reform,” said Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a nonprofit aimed at advancing the movement. “If it can happen in Massachusetts, it can happen anywhere.” 

Well, sort of. Despite its liberal reputation, Massachusetts has actually been a pioneer in education reform. Not only did it have some of the first charter schools in the country, Massachusetts was also on the forefront in terms of developing high-stakes test for graduation and ensuring that students actually knew something when they graduated. (I’m only a little biased because my mother served on the state board of education for a decade.) The effects have been clear. Massachusetts students are consistently among the top performers on nationwide tests. 

The state even took the unusual step of taking over at least one failing school district — Lawrence. Which brings us to the most interesting part of the Journal article. Despite the union objections, Massachusetts Democrats are supporting the end of the charter school cap. 

[State Senator Barry] Finegold, the bill’s sponsor and the son of public-school teachers, said his motivation sprung from conversations with parents in Lawrence, part of his district northwest of Boston, where the struggling school district was taken over by the state in 2011. The state has since brought in charter operators to run two low-performing schools, and parents told him, “we’d be out of here” had that not happened, Mr. Finegold said. “One thing I don’t think people realize — charter schools are keeping a lot of the middle class in cities,” he said.

Which makes sense. Everyone knows that the poor quality of urban public schools are one of the major reasons that people move to the suburbs. If you can’t afford private school tuition and you can’t get your kid into some kind of exam school, like Bronx Science or Stuyvesant, what choice do you have besides leaving? Well, increasingly the answer has been charter schools. Middle class urban parents have been responsible for starting up many of these new institutions. They have had an enormous benefit to the poor and working class kids who live in these neighborhoods. But there is also some amount of self-interest at work on the part of middle class parents.

I suspect that in the long run, the desire of 20- and 30-somethings to stay in cities even once they have kids will continue to drive the growth of and support for charter schools and other education reforms. Kudos to Mr. Finegold for listening to his constituents.