Author: Lance Garrison
As of Monday, March 4, 2024, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution is essentially a dead letter, at least as it applies to candidates for federal office. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision striking Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot, even insurrectionists who’ve violated their previous oath of office can hold federal office, unless and until Congress passes specific legislation to enforce Section 3.In the aftermath of the oral argument last month, legal observers knew with near-certainty that the Supreme Court was unlikely to apply Section 3 to Trump.…
We all have thoughts that invade our brains from time to time and mess with our moods. We all get down.Whether it’s your job, your social life, your family, or something completely different, sometimes the negativity can be too much. It does tend to snowball. And that’s the part where it can become problematic. Natalie Dattilo, PhD “We all have it. We all have it,” says Mark Reinecke, a professor emeritus of psychology and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.Natalie Dattilo, PhD, a clinical health psychologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, agrees.”Thoughts that we have…
You might be tempted to ignore symptoms like congestion, runny nose, and itchy eyes, thinking they’re due to seasonal allergies or a cold. And most often, they are. But if they last for a long time, these symptoms could mean you have nasal polyps.Nasal polyps are noncancerous growths in your nose and sinuses, often shaped like teardrops. The polyps tend to form in clusters, says Yasmin Bhasin MD, allergist and immunologist at Allergy Asthma Care in Middletown, NY. They often occur in both sides of your nose. The symptoms of nasal polyps include:CongestionTrouble breathingPostnasal dripRunny noseCoughPressure around the sinusesDecreased sense of…
I offer to pay you $200 in one year if you give me $190 today. Good deal or bad deal?It’s the kind of math problem you might encounter in real life, as opposed to, say, whether the cosecant of a 30-degree angle is 1 or 2. You can imagine students perking up and paying attention when they realize that they need to know algebra to avoid being cheated on a loan.Math and personal finance make a perfect fit. Students grasp concepts such as exponential growth and regression to the mean much better when they see how those subjects apply to…
To the Editor:Re “Most Biden Voters of 2020 Fear He’s Too Old to Lead” (front page, March 4):Donald Trump’s speech in Richmond, Va., on Saturday was chock-full of slurred words, confusion, strange non sequiturs and other red flags that anyone who has watched a family member’s mental decline would have no trouble recognizing. But The New York Times runs a front-page article about how unpopular President Biden is and voters’ worries about his age.Please drop the pretense that there is anything like “equivalency” in the choice between candidates! The real story this election cycle is the fact that the putative…
March 4, 2024 – Kathy N. has had food allergies since childhood. It started with eggs, an allergy that she shared with her mother, and gradually evolved to include walnuts, pecans, and garlic. With few options other than avoidance, Kathy, a 61-year-old consultant from Northern Virginia, has relied on over-the-counter allergy medications. “I’ve basically self-medicated my entire life,” she said. “If I’m going out to dinner, I take a bunch of drugs so I know that I’m going to live through the meal.”Kathy’s experience is getting more common; food allergies affect as many as 1 in 10 U.S. adults and…
The U.S. health care system has struggled for decades with the tension between providing incentives for pharmaceutical innovation and keeping breakthroughs affordable for those who would most benefit from them. Even as countries around the world have stepped in to require lower priced drugs for their citizens, the United States has been reticent to do so. As a result, U.S. consumers pay the highest prices in the world for drugs, by a wide margin.But the impetus for more fundamental reform may come from an unexpected place: America’s obesity epidemic. Many of us are aware that there is a new class…
It’s been more than a week since I read the news and I can still hardly believe it. Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo and spent a year on the lam in Manhattan, is dead. My disbelief is of a piece with the grief I feel at news of an unexpected human death. How can a vibrant, irreplaceable creature be safely here among us one instant and irretrievably gone the next? How is that even possible?The truth is that Flaco never had a chance. Few apex predators fare well in the built human environment, and Flaco…
The first article in the Opinion series At the Brink walks readers through the aftermath of a single nuclear detonation. That hypothetical scenario is based on extensive scientific research and effect modeling from the Cold War to the present, as well as conversations with experts, government officials and survivors of nuclear detonations. We have compiled a selection of those sources — detailing the humanitarian, environmental and economic effects — to help make this research more easily available to readers.Accounts of Living Through the BombThe scenario describing the effects of a nuclear detonation in the article draws on several interviews with…
You have an important dinner to attend tonight after work and the clothes you need are at the cleaners. The dry cleaner will be closed by the time you leave the office, so your partner has graciously agreed to pick the clothes up for you. But when you get home, your partner looks up, claps a hand over their mouth, and gasps, “Your dry cleaning!”You can’t believe it. Your pulse quickens, your face flushes, you want to scream. What do you do next? Do you take a beat? Do you unleash your wrath, or do you push all your hard…