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In a State of the Union address 50 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty." Over the next year and a half, anti-poverty warriors developed new health insurance programs for the elderly and the poor, increased Social Security benefits and introduced food stamps and nutritional supplements for low-income pregnant women and infants.

The 9 smartest marriage tips ever Next to my desk there is a fallen pile of relationship-advice books. It looks like a miniature city of ruins, a very pink Parthenon. I can't even begin to fathom picking up all the rubble - mostly because I'm not sure if there's anything worth saving in there. It's a shame. The sheer volume tells you just how much demand there is for advice on sustaining relationships.

If we're ever going to fix our problems accommodating both work and family in our lives, we have to stop thinking that the dilemmas we face today stem from the collapse of the traditional male-breadwinner family. There is no such thing as the traditional male-breadwinner family. It was a late-arriving, short-lived aberration in the history of the world, and it's over. We need to move on.(MORE: Stay-at-Home Dads Will Never Become the Norm)

AT first glance, the prognosis for marriage looks grim. Between 1950 and 2011, according to calculations by the University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen, the marriage rate fell from 90 marriages a year per 1,000 unmarried women to just 31, a stunning 66 percent decline. If such a decline continued, there would be no women getting married by 2043!

MY column last month about the dangers of nostalgia inspired many readers to write to me about their family memories of the 1950s and '60s. Some shared poignant stories about the discrimination they encountered as blacks, women, gay men or lesbians. Others described how much easier it was for their working-class fathers to support a family back then.

HERE'S an old riddle: a boy and his father are in a car crash and the father is killed instantly. The boy is airlifted to the best hospital in the region and prepped for emergency surgery by one of the top surgeons in the country. The surgeon rushes in, sees the boy, and says "I can't operate on this patient. He's my son." Who is the surgeon? When I heard this riddle as a teenager back in 1962, I was totally stumped. Had the boy been adopted, and the surgeon was the birth father?