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The three panels show a 1986 test of a Tomahawk cruise missile. The missile traveled 640 km (400 mile) low over the terrain to detonate above the target, a decommissioned fighter plane. It’s pretty clear the test was a success.

When the missile exploded, the expanding debris cloud from the vaporized weapon was probably moving faster than the speed of sound. Even so, in this second picture you can see none of it had touched the plane yet when the shot was snapped. Yet look at the plane: it’s on fire. How can that be? It’s because of something that moves much faster even than supersonic debris: light. When the warhead exploded, it sent out a huge pulse of heat in the form of infrared photons, light that travels about a million times faster than sound. As far as that flash of heat was concerned, the expanding debris was standing perfectly still! There was plenty of time for that heat to get to the plane and set it aflame before the explosion itself could reach that far.

Kindlon also observed that because we tend to have fewer kids than past generations of parents did, each becomes more precious.

Long work hours don’t help. “If you’ve got 20 minutes a day to spend with your kid,” Kindlon asked, “would you rather make your kid mad at you by arguing over cleaning up his room, or play a game of Boggle together? We don’t set limits, because we want our kids to like us at every moment, even though it’s better for them if sometimes they can’t stand us.”

In her book Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children, Ann Hulbert recounts how there’s always been a tension among the various recommended parenting styles—the bonders versus the disciplinarians, the child-centered versus the parent-centered—with the pendulum swinging back and forth between them over the decades.