Having read the New Yorker’s recent “family issue,” Naomi Schaefer Riley concludes that the magazine, and some of its readers, “seem bent on destroying” the institution:

Take the extensive interview with Laura Wasser, “divorce lawyer to the stars.” The founder of the website “It’s Over Easy,” which was recently bought by Divorce.com, Wasser enjoys philosophizing about how people weren’t meant to be monogamous. Echoing her favorite pop sociologists, one assumes, she notes that marriage was really for a time when people only lived a few decades.

The idea that “family” means what is convenient and enjoyable for adults is clear also in a piece on Feeld, a “hookup app for the emotionally mature,” which author Emily Witt found when “her fantasy of family dissolved.”

Between the articles about why prenups are so popular and “what should a queer children’s book do,” the one article that seems most relevant to a “conventional” definition of family is about children who lost parents to COVID-19.

It’s a hard piece to read, with emotional interviews with children and teens on what it was like to lose the most important person in their lives. . . . The spouses left behind are also bereft, trying whatever they can do to comfort their children even as they process their own grief. . . . The kids have friends, but it’s not the same. They want the person they have grown to depend on. They want family.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.