After a speech we gave a few weeks ago, feminist scholar Gina Barreca and I were asked by an audience member if there was any subject too hot to handle in our columns about men and women. We considered this, and confidently declared there was not.

Proving conclusively that there is a God, and that He has a really wicked sense of humor, within a matter of days, something happened to test us. You may not have heard about it; most news organizations chose to ignore it by exercising a quality I like to call "sanity."