Several weeks ago, the journal Marie Claire took us “Inside the Growing Movement of Women Who Wish They’d Never Had Kids.” Did you know that was a “movement”? Apparently, women all over the world are daring to come forward and speak the unspeakable. “I realized that this was my life now—and it was unbearable.” “I know my life would have been much happier and more fulfilled without children.” “I wonder if my accomplishments would have been more spectacular [if I hadn’t had kids].”

Do you remember 1994? After two years of Bill Clinton’s overreach, Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Newt Gingrich was now speaker of the House: an idea man who had brilliantly nationalized the congressional races around 10 key propositions called the Contract with America. Conservatism was on the march, and boy, did those Democrats look sheepish. Six years later, Clinton left office more popular than when he went in, and it was Gingrich’s turn to look sheepish.

It all started the night Tom Wolfe was up late, bathing his eyeballs in the glow of a multimillion-pixel screen—web surfing, in other words—when he happened upon a long article in Frontiers of Psychology, dated May 7, 2014. As he read, he felt his mind boggling. “The Mystery of Language Evolution,” an essay signed by eight scientists, all prominent linguists, anthropologists, biologists, and computer scientists, was an announcement of failure!

Cutting-edge microbiology was an election issue in 2004, when presidential candidate John Kerry used Michael J. Fox and the late Christopher Reeve as object lessons for his proposal to lift federal “bans” (actually, restrictions on federal money) from embryonic stem cell research. Since then, experimentation on human embryos has not been much of a political football, perhaps because it has produced no significant results. It’s time to open the conversation again, in light of the new technology storming the frontier of genetic research all over the world.

Rod Dreher, a writer and editor at The American Conservative, is looking into the future and doesn’t like what he sees. “The Coming Christian Collapse” names three trends that will spell doom for the church in America unless—well, Dreher sees no “unless.” We’re doomed.

In 1959, Whittaker Chambers thought democracy was finished. After decades of heavy involvement with the Communist Party (card-carrying member, no less), he converted to Christianity and testified against high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss, another Communist. Chambers did not see the conviction and life-sentencing of Hiss as a victory, for Communism was stretching its tentacles into every continent and would most likely make good on its promise to conquer the world.

Screenwriter William Goldman begins his Hollywood memoir with these memorable words: “Nobody knows anything.” He meant the uncertainty of the movie business, and it’s as true now as it was in 1983 (just ask the makers of Batman v Superman). But the application stretches to other fields, even those dedicated to knowing everything there is to know.