Author: Lance Garrison

An hour of the day will be unceremoniously snatched away on Sunday as we “spring forward” to daylight saving time.Polling shows that more than half of Americans want to “ditch the switch” and prefer daylight saving over standard time by a margin of 10 to 20 points. But making that switch permanent would require an act of Congress, and while the Senate managed to pass a bill called the Sunshine Protection Act two years ago, the legislation never made it through the House. Worryingly, state legislators from Maine to the West Coast are now so fed up with waiting that…

Welcome to Opinion’s coverage of President Biden’s State of the Union address. In this special feature, Times Opinion writers rate Biden’s performance on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the night was a disaster; 10 a triumph. Here’s what our columnists and contributors thought of the event.Best MomentBinyamin Appelbaum In a speech with multiple fire-breathing moments, I was struck by Biden’s level tone as he declared that those who fought to overturn Roe v. Wade were going to learn about “the power of women.”Jamelle Bouie I thought Biden’s best line was his move to connect reproductive freedom to…

Any filmmaker trying to draw meaning from the Holocaust onscreen faces potential pitfalls. If you showcase individual human perseverance, as in Agnieszka Holland’s 1990 film “Europa Europa,” you risk trivialization; if you attempt to dramatize the inside of a concentration camp, as in Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film “Life Is Beautiful,” you risk exploitation; if you’re simply interested in preserving the testimony of survivors, you risk redundancy with what Claude Lanzmann accomplished in the 1985 film “Shoah.”Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List” is a masterpiece that consciously navigates these risks, but it, too, has faced criticism for sentimentality and for centering…

[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra kleinFrom New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”The Dobbs decision, 2022. The Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. It hands abortion, in theory, back to the states. What would you have thought then the consequence of that decision on abortion would be now? I read one prediction, then, that about 25 percent of women who need an abortion would be unable to get one. That seemed plausible to me.But the best estimates we have now suggest the number of abortions in the country, the rate of abortion, has gone slightly up, not down. That’s true,…

Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicCould Donald Trump’s promise to be a dictator on day one come true?On this episode of “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts debate which policies could be most consequential in a potential second Trump term and whether a proposal set out by conservative allies could provide the tools to execute his vision.And Michelle Cottle shares her passion for a trend that can only be achieved with lots of volume.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)Mentioned in…

I’ve been crisscrossing the country almost constantly over the last five months. When I ask people about politics, the feeling I hear most often is exhaustion. People are just tired out from the endless national crises, their dread of the 2024 presidential campaign, the ugliness of it all. Many people I talk with seem passive, discouraged, and are trying, mostly in vain, to shut out the political noise. It’s almost as if people have been so beaten down by the last decade, they’ve lost the self-confidence to wish for more.In these circumstances I turn to two leaders who knew something…

One of the amazing political achievements of Republicans in this election cycle has been their ability, at least so far, to send Donald Trump’s last year in office down the memory hole. Voters are supposed to remember the good economy of January 2020, with its combination of low unemployment and low inflation, while forgetting about the plague year that followed.Since Trump’s romp in the Super Tuesday primaries, however, the ex-president and his surrogates have begun trying to pull off an even more impressive act of revisionism: portraying his entire presidency — even 2020, that awful first pandemic year — as…

I don’t want to downplay the problem of left-wing antisemitism or its closely related cousin, a jejune anti-imperialism that treats Hamas as heroes. Both phenomena have shocked me in the months since Oct. 7, and shouldn’t be rationalized as understandable reactions to Israeli savagery in Gaza.In an Atlantic cover story, Franklin Foer recently reported on anti-Jewish bullying, vandalism and conspiracy-mongering in Northern California. “In the hatred that I witnessed in the Bay Area, and that has been evident on college campuses and in progressive activist circles nationwide, I’ve come to see left-wing antisemitism as characterized by many of the same…

March 7, 2024 – Let’s start with this: Your vagina “is naturally self-cleaning, meaning that it does not need to be washed or rinsed in order to be ‘fresh,’”That’s the bottom line from Karen Adams, MD, an OB-GYN and clinical professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Stanford University School of Medicine.Yet, there is a common misperception that vaginas need to smell and taste extravagant to indicate that its healthy, according to Heather Irobunda, MD, an OB-GYN with NYC Health + Hospitals. “People have this expectation that their vagina is supposed to smell like roses, or chocolates, or orange…

The answer is: Latin. Scholars of Lowth’s period were in thrall to the idea that Latin and Ancient Greek were the quintessence of language. England was taking its place as a world power starting in the 17th century, and English was being spoken by ever more people and used in a widening range of literary genres. This spawned a crop of grammarians dedicated to sprucing the language up for its new prominence, and the assumption was that a real and important language should be as much like Latin as possible. And in Latin, as it happens, one did not end…