From the right: Debate Won’t Halt Hillary’s Slide

Donald Trump may have come off “like an excitable dog running around the house” at Monday night’s debate, yet that was still “good enough to fight Hillary Clinton to a draw,” writes Eric Fehrnstrom in The Boston Globe. But Clinton “needed a big, defining moment,” and “didn’t get it.” For one thing, he says, she spent her time demonizing Trump, and “there is nothing you can tell the American people about Trump that they don’t already know.” Those who scored it for Clinton “miss the big picture”: Trump remains “the outsider in a year when two-thirds of the American people think the nation is on the wrong track.”

Iran watcher: Next Top Leader Will Be Even Worse

Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations says Iran’s most likely next Supreme Leader, Ibrahim Raisi, is “the only person in the Islamic Republic who could cause people to miss” the current top dog, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Raisi is being groomed by the Revolutionary Guards, he writes in The Washington Post, and by Khameini himself. Which is why no one should believe conventional wisdom that “once the elderly Khamenei passes from the scene . . . his successors will embrace prevailing international norms.” Khameini has turned Iran into a police state, and career prosecutor Raisi is viewed as “a vanguard of the regime and an enforcer of its will.”

Culture watch: Princeton Students Fight Back on Speech

The Princeton Campus has seen some surprising pushback against a university directive banning the use of “man” and “woman” in all official communications, reports Diana Furchtgott-Roth on The Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch blog. The student paper The Daily Princetonian published an editorial denouncing the gender-neutral order, calling it “a sinister first step towards Orwellian restriction of language and speech.” In fact, she notes, the new policy “verged on the absurd,” to the point of banning the word “freshman” for first-year students. Notes Furchtgott-Roth: “One purpose of school is to prepare students for real life. Cocooning them from reality isn’t doing them any favors.” The good news is that many students realize such stuff “is hokum — and are willing to say so in print.”

Culture watch, cont.: Seeking Emotional Safety on Campus

On other campuses around the country, Social Justice Warriors are demanding — and getting — McDonald’s-style ball pits as “safe spaces.” According to Jillian Kay Melchior on Heat Street, “the impulse to coddle and be coddled” apparently has “students fully regressing” to the “PlayPlace dreams of their childhoods.” Some campuses are even using ball pits as “a perfect ‘safe space’ to talk about feelings and other really important and serious stuff.” SUNY-Broome offered one to give students “the chance to interact with Pagans, Christians, Muslims, athletes, lesbians, nerds, African-Americans and many more groups.” With tuition at some of these schools running up to $40,000, she says, “suddenly day care looks like a bargain.”

Fiscal wonk: Kill the 9-5 Workday

Nearly half of all US workers — 42 percent — don’t hold hourly wage jobs, writes Rebecca Greenfield at Bloomberg, but still find themselves “stuck on the clock.” Yet “sitting in a chair for eight hours straight doesn’t produce results.” Moreover, “almost a third of parents who say they have difficulty balancing work and family life also find parenting stressful all or most of that time.” Alternatives like a four-day week or a six-hour day are “more humane and makes employees happier and more productive”— but such flexibility “seems to scare some employers.” In the end, she says, bosses might at least “give workers a little wiggle room at the end of their days. All we really want is a little control — and to make that 6 o/clock yoga class once in a while.”

Compiled by Eric Fettmann