Affirmative action, long one of America’s most divisive social issues, is about to grab headlines again. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a challenge to a state university’s use of race in selecting students. In many ways, the legal issues in Fisher v. University of Texas are the same as those that came before the court in 1978 and 2003. But the broader affirmative action debate has changed since those cases were heard, and in ways that could point toward compromises that might win broad public support. Since the late 1960s, the racial preference discussion has been dominated by fairness questions. Proponents saw preferences as a necessary way of ensuring that racial minorities enjoy equal opportunity in the real world and not just paper promises of fair treatment. Opponents saw preferences as reverse discrimination, perpetuating racist habits under a new guise. But in recent years, scholars have started to do careful empirical research on whether preferences actually help their intended recipients. When the dispute shifts from... ...

“Housewives.” “Homemakers.” They don’t look like four-letter words, do they? But that’s what they became in the aftermath of the publication of Betty Friedan’s book about the “problem that has no name,” which gave a voice to the female yearning to be someone who was more than married to a house. It’s been 50 years since the late Ms. Friedan’s book, “The Feminine Mystique,” ignited a wave of bra-burning and contempt for men and domesticity. The women’s movement has ebbed and flowed over the decades, picking up steam from the civil rights movement and helping spawn the gay rights movement, only to be scorned by daughters who didn’t see the point of a feminist movement to help them gain rights they didn’t know they could lose. Women, and men, too, have had to relearn the lesson over the past decade that those rights are continually threatened and that guarding them requires vigilance. While there may be some who think the right to choose what you can do with your body is... ...

It was the day the ocean came ashore. As Hurricane Sandy lurched into the East Coast, we watched in horror as floodwaters crippled Manhattan and inundated more than 70 percent of Atlantic City. This Frankenstorm has given us a hair-raising look at the power of nature—and the harm and heartbreak it can inflict. But as a scientist, I think it’s critical to understand these disasters are becoming more unnatural. The terrifying truth is that we face a future full of Frankenstorms because of manmade climate change. We’ve always had hurricanes, of course. But powerful scientific evidence shows that superstorms are being fed by a climate change triple whammy. Global warming, it turns out, is cranking up three key factors that increase America’s risk of superstorms and the damage they cause. First, global warming loads storms with more energy and more rainfall. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Katrina-magnitude Atlantic hurricanes have been twice as likely in warm years compared with cold years.... ...