When in Rome

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, "I would've either blacked out or thrown up."

That's Larry Summers, one of Clinton's Secretaries of the Treasury and now president of Harvard. Quite the charmer, Summers made remarks at a conference Friday suggesting that biological differences between the sexes may be one explanation for why fewer women succeed in mathematic and science careers.

Summers is probably just trying to get hip to what he sees as the conservative times. Conservatives are attempting to portray Social Security as "dependency-inducing" and one of the sources of an immoral culture, a sign of the times. (Clinton did pave the way by "ending welfare-as-we-know-it.") But then there's gay marriage. Fiscally, the country has become more conservative (see Stephen S. Cohen & J. Bradford DeLong's piece in the January/February 2005 issue of the Atlantic Monthly). Socially, though, the Sixties revolution prevailed, for the most part.