The scenario is well known, and the story still haunts the modern mind. The great ocean liner that was built as unsinkable struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912 and sank early the next morning, taking 1,517 of 2,223 lives on board. The RMS Titanic became a parable of modernity — of the limits of technology and the hubris of humanity.

A visit to your local college or university campus is likely to reveal that a revolution has taken place. On many campuses, young women now outnumber young men, and a gender gap of momentous importance is staring us in the face.

You do not have to look far to find evidence of the fact that males are in trouble in these confused and confusing times. On the university campuses, women undergraduate students outnumber young men by a clear margin — 60% to 40%. A frightening percentage of young males are or have been behind bars, and the vast majority of young men are delaying their assumption of adult roles and responsibilities until well into their twenties or early thirties.

Whatever happened to being seen but not heard? Diana West asks that question in a recent essay, noting that there has been a massive shift in Western culture away from adult authority and toward the “wise child.” All around us are signs that authority and wisdom are now to be recognized in the young, rather than the old. This is nothing less than a reversal of what previous generations had believed and assumed.

Do children need fathers? Fascinating research on that question is reported by Shirley S. Wang of The Wall Street Journal. Anna Katherina Braun, a German biologist, has been working with colleagues to understand the biological impact of single parenting.  Her research has focused on the degu, a small rodent that is a distant relation to the guinea pig.

America’s long war over abortion has classically been defined as a struggle between competing rights — depicted as the right of a woman to have an abortion versus the right of an unborn child to the protection of life. This long-familiar framing of the issue suggests, at the very least, that the rights of women and their unborn children are, or at least can be, presented as an irresolvable conflict.