Author: Lance Garrison
Then, as partisanship deepens, partisan subcultures can get increasingly weird. They become so convinced of the us-versus-them dynamic that they’ll eventually believe virtually anything, as long as it’s a claim against the other side. MAGA’s Taylor Swift conspiracies, in which her popularity is some sort of liberal psyop, and election denial conspiracies sprang from the same poisonous partisan well. If decades of partisanship have persuaded you that your opponents are evil, have no morals and want to destroy the country, then why wouldn’t they hack voting machines or recruit a pop star as a government asset?George Orwell famously wrote that…
Donald Trump isn’t exactly Don Quixote, but he does have a thing against windmills.Indeed, Trump’s animus toward wind power is one of the strangest obsessions of a man with many unusual preoccupations (toilets! hair spray!). Over the years, he has asserted, falsely, that wind turbines can cause cancer, that they can cause power outages and that wind energy “kills all the birds” (cats and windows do far more harm). Now he says that if he wins in November, on “Day 1” he’ll issue an executive order putting the brakes on offshore wind farm construction.Trump claims, without evidence, that such wind…
The central struggle in the world right now is between liberalism and authoritarianism. It’s between those of us who believe in democratic values and those who don’t — whether they are pseudo-authoritarian populists like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi or Recep Tayyip Erdogan or straight-up dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping or theocratic fascists like the men who run Iran and Hamas.In this contest, we liberals should be wiping the floor with those guys! But we’re not. Trump is leading in the swing states. Modi seems to be on the verge of re-election. Russia and Iran are showing…
May 16, 2024 – Multiple U.S. agencies are working to contain the recent bird flu outbreak among cattle to prevent further spread to humans (beyond one case reported in early April) and use what we learned before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic to keep farm workers and the general public safe. Fingers crossed, the bird flu will be contained and peter out. Or the outbreak could continue to spread among dairy cattle and other animals, threatening the health and livelihoods of farmers and others who work with livestock.Or the virus could change in a way that makes it easier to infect…
It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr. Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while appearing on Israel’s Channel 12.“These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,” complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr. Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A…
The North Yorkshire Council in England has been in the hot seat recently for its changes to street signs — not because of anything on them, but rather because of something left off. One street in the town of Harrogate was rendered as St. Marys Walk. No apostrophe. Outrage ensued.The problem, punctilious observers argued, was that the nearby church is and always will be St. Mary’s — with an apostrophe, thank you very much — and leaving that bit of punctuation out of the name of the road obscures that vital and historical connection. Plus it’s just plain ignorant.St. Marys…
To the Editor:Re “In Rare Remarks, Thomas Denounces Public Scrutiny Facing His Family” (news article, May 12):At a recent judicial conference, Justice Clarence Thomas complained bitterly about “the nastiness and the lies” about him and his wife, Ginni, in the last few years.And yet, these are the facts: He accepted lavish gifts from powerful friends and failed to report them. His wife was indisputably involved in an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the duly elected new one. But somehow to report these facts, and to criticize the Thomases for their behavior, is nasty…
In The Times, J Wortham studied Brittney Griner’s technique and admired “the way she lifts the ball over the rim and into the net as gently as if she were returning a lost child to a parent.” (Ann Davenport, Olmué, Chile, and Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.) In a subsequent profile of the actress Jean Smart, J distilled Smart’s character in the show “Hacks”: “Deborah is a workaholic on the verge of bitter, someone who grew tired of being cut and so became a knife.” (Karen Kasnetz, Bedminster, N.J., and Donald Jurney, Amesbury, Mass.)In The Arizona Republic, Ed Masley appraised a…
In 1918, an influenza virus jumped from birds to humans and killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people in a world with less than a quarter of today’s population. Dozens of mammals also became infected.Now we are seeing another onslaught of avian influenza. For years it has been devastating bird populations worldwide and more recently has begun infecting mammals, including cattle, a transmission never seen before. In another first, the virus almost certainly jumped recently from a cow to at least one human — fortunately, a mild case.While much would still have to happen for this virus to…
It’s a question that has eaten away at me these past months. Was it the shock of such a violent crime in peaceful Vermont? Was it that my friends and I went to well-known American colleges? Did the timing of our shooting during a holiday weekend play a role? I’m sure it did, but to me, the determining factor is the reframing of the crime: Instead of settlements, the Oslo Accords or the intifada, the conversation around our shooting involved terms such as “gun violence,” “hate crimes” and “right-wing extremism.” Instead of being maimed in Arab streets, we were shot…