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CUBAN: People feel threatened and insecure in their own lives. If you have uncertainty about where you may be a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, then you're going to question what's going on around you. We've become a free-agent economy, and as you get older, you recognize that if you become a free agent for whatever reason--layoffs, downsizing--it becomes much more difficult to deal with the realities of life, and that is scary to anybody. And so if you face that uncertainty and you start looking around, you start saying, "What adds to my uncertainty? Where can I have some influence? Where can I say something?" Like Andrés mentioned, there's easy scapegoating, but I don't think that's ever going to change, as long as we are free agents.

MARTINEZ: And I think the intensity of the immigration debate is ratcheted up by the cultural issue. Not to say that people are necessarily racist, but I think people have the notion that the mainstream, majority American, Anglo-European culture--whatever you want to call it--is eroding, and I think that makes a lot of people very anxious.

•FAMILY LIFE

TIME: A number of news stories lately suggest that the feminist revolution that shaped the lives of men and women in the '60s and '70s, even the '80s, has sort of run its course. Do you think that has happened?

JOHNSON: The trend that I find really interesting in all this is the education gap growing between men and women. I don't know exactly what the numbers are, but more girls than boys are graduating from college. So you're going to hit this point where you have this major gap in terms of educational background and thus employability between women and men--women being significantly ahead after all these years of making sure that women get access to the [whole] educational system. There's going to be a very interesting moment when we have to decide as a society, Why is this big gap happening? Is it because there's some innate difference between men and women that makes women more likely to gravitate toward school or thrive in school environments and not drop out, particularly when they're 18 or 22 or something like that? Or is it that at some level, society is discriminating against men as far as education is concerned? And what about [this possible] trend toward having women actually spend a little more time at home than we thought they were going to? We've got a lot of interesting demographic trends sort of coming together that are going to take a lot of thinking.

MARTINEZ: I'm very skeptical of the recent reporting that suggests any kind of pullback or U-turn [of women in the workforce]. I think the progress will continue in terms of greater equality in professional fields. I think, anytime you have progress, there are periods of sort of assimilating and digesting the things that have occurred. I think, when people look at traditional employment data, it doesn't sufficiently take into account nontraditional forms of employment that occur with both genders. That's why there's been a lot of debate about some of the unemployment statistics in recent years.

TIME: The suburban mom with her eBay business on the side.