Author: Lance Garrison
To the Editor:Re “To Protect Kids, We Need More Foster Care, Not Less,” by Naomi Schaefer Riley (Opinion guest essay, May 13):Pieces like this express concern about the well-being of children while ignoring the daily harms caused by family separation. The trauma of being ripped away from their parents and placed in the foster system with strangers often results in children developing a host of challenges, including poor mental and physical health, low educational achievement, high rates of homelessness and early pregnancy, and involvement in criminal activities.The overreliance on family separation for children who aren’t in any immediate danger destroys…
Shariff Bukari, 25, gravitated toward math and science as a child. One of his dream careers was paleontology, which combined his love for dinosaurs with the hands-on work of combing through artifacts. His parents nurtured his curiosity, encouraging him to read books and newspapers. They yearned to give him more opportunities to explore his passions beyond their life in Queens.That wasn’t always easy when both parents worked late shifts. So when a neighbor told his parents about the Fresh Air Fund’s Career Awareness Program, in which children attend camp during the summer and participate in career training sessions during the…
Black voters will not only be a driving force in the 2024 elections; they will most likely be the driving force. Recent polls showed that roughly 20 percent of Black voters said they would probably vote for Donald Trump if the election were held today — the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the civil rights era. An additional 8 percent said they wouldn’t vote at all.Democratic campaign officials are rightly worried, but there’s still time for President Biden to make up the ground he has lost. One way he could do it is by…
After more than a decade sipping tree sap underground, as many as a trillion cicadas are now emerging en masse for a blockbuster bug bash, a meeting of two broods that have not surfaced at the same time in over 200 years. Some people are calling it the cicadapocalypse, but this once-in-a-lifetime event is cause for jubilation. It may even make us better people, at least for a while.The cicadas’ loud, rhythmic songs will reverberate from trees across 16 states, the latest rare, natural wonder to capture public interest. Like the recent solar eclipse and the Northern Lights in the…
Trail crews often serve as the only eyes and ears in the backcountry. Crews are often the first to report a wildfire or to begin the search for a missing person. The same crews fix safety hazards to prevent tragedies. Worker shortages place a heavier burden on crew leaders like Mr. Fickler, especially in parks like Yosemite, which has only about 25 permanent employees on its trail staff for over 750 miles. About four million annual visits are made to Yosemite.Well-kept trails protect the nation’s fragile natural resources by shepherding visitors to certain areas while keeping other areas untrammeled. But…
I was once told that the challenge of making successful feminist porn is that the thing women desire most is freedom.If that’s the case, one might consider my life over the past few years to be extremely pornographic — even without all the actual sex that occurred. It definitely has the makings of a fantasy, if we allowed for fantasies starring single, childless women on the brink of turning 50.It’s not just in enjoying my age that I’m defying expectations. It’s that I’ve exempted myself from the central things we’re told gives a woman’s life meaning — partnership and parenting.…
In a speech in Warsaw two years ago, President Biden declared that “the great battle for freedom” is one “between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”Now we’ll see whether he meant it.By a lopsided vote of 13 to 2, the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive” in Rafah and open border crossings for “unhindered provision” of humanitarian aid. But the court’s order, while binding, has no enforcement mechanism — which in practice means it is up to the United Nations Security Council and in particular Biden to enforce.This should be…
The great economist George Stigler wrote a paper called “The Cost of Subsistence” that calculated the minimum cost of food that would satisfy the nutritional requirements of “an active economist” who “lives in a large city.”He calculated the nutritional value of 77 foods, including yummy ones like chocolate, strawberry preserves, bananas and leg of lamb, but concluded that they were all too expensive. In his article for a 1945 issue of The Journal of Farm Economics, he settled on just five foods based on their August 1939 prices, in these quantities per year: 370 pounds of wheat flour, 57 cans…
As Tierney writes in his essay, the alienation from the institution also yields a practical difference in how this kind of Catholic culture works. Traditional Latin Mass adherents often cannot operate through the usual channels of Catholic life. They can’t just show up at a parish, participate in its programs, work with but also defer to the vision of its priest. Instead, the traditionalist laity often have to create a subculture that operates much more independently. Here’s Tierney’s description of a version of that process:A TLM community takes root within a diocese, and it wants to spread the news about…
The federal government made a disastrous choice a decade ago when it abandoned an accountability system (known as No Child Left Behind) that required schools to focus intently on helping the lowest-performing students catch up with their peers. Since then, the already alarming achievement gaps that separate poor and wealthy children have only widened.Math scores have plummeted, raising fears that the United States is destined to fall permanently behind its competitor nations when it comes to preparing young people for careers in science, technology and engineering.As Troy Closson of The Times wrote this week, some school systems have opted for…