Author: Lance Garrison

If there is a recession in the United States this year, it probably won’t be because consumers spontaneously run out of spending power. (If unemployment abruptly rises, that’s another matter.) I’ve put together five charts that show that consumers are in reasonably good shape, although life is getting harder for the most vulnerable groups.Households aren’t “the place to look for economic weakness,” Michael Pearce, the deputy chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics, a forecaster, told me last week.True, it’s easy to find worrisome statistics. The personal saving rate fell in December to 3.7 percent of disposable personal income, which except…

Many women get breast cancer. But the disease is deadliest for non-Hispanic Black women. And when it comes to metastatic breast cancer, women of color are less likely to get timely treatment that follows national guidelines. According to Grace Suh, MD, medical director at Northwestern Medicine Cancer Center Delnor, lack of access to health education and regular medical care is a big part of what’s fueling this disparity. And medical centers are actively trying to find and fix differences in breast cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment that fall along racial lines. “Regardless, despite all these efforts, there still remains a significant gap…

Photo Credit: Rapeepong Puttakumwong / Getty ImagesSOURCES:American College of Cardiology: “Latest Evidence on Racial Inequities and Biases in Advanced Heart Failure.”American Journal of Preventive Cardiology: “Improving the enrollment of women and racially/ethnically diverse populations in cardiovascular clinical trials: An ASPC practice statement.”CDC: “The Syphilis Study at Tuskegee Timeline.”Circulation: Heart Failure: “Factors Associated with Racial and Ethnic Diversity Among Heart Failure Trial Participants: A Systematic Bibliometric Review.”Clyde Yancy, MD, vice dean of Diversity & Inclusion; chief of the Division of Cardiology, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine.FDA: “FDA Takes Important Steps to Increase Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Clinical Trials.”JAMA Cardiology:…

To the Editor:Re “Academic Freedom Under Fire,” by Jennifer Schuessler (The Arts, Feb. 17):Reading this article one might think that the only people concerned about academic freedom are newly formed faculty groups that have “sprung up” at Harvard, Yale and Columbia. In fact, the American Association of University Professors, with about 43,000 members, has defined and defended academic freedom since 1915.The vast majority of higher education faculty members today are in contingent appointments. They are not eligible for tenure, and so most have no protection when they are disciplined as a result of violations of academic freedom. Faculty everywhere —…

Flaco the owl is gone, but his life had all the elements of a classic hero’s story, not soon forgotten.Born in captivity, he lived a dozen years in a comfortable cage in the Central Park Zoo where little happened and less was needed. His was a safe existence. But it was also a life without agency. Then, a little over a year ago, someone released him.On Friday, when he died of acute traumatic injury, perhaps from a collision with a Manhattan apartment building’s glass windows, his death offered us a chance to reckon with the question at the heart of…

What can Joe Biden do about it?

Conservative-leaning intellectuals want more people to get married. But how does that actually happen? Jane Coaston interviews Brad Wilcox.

On the average day, some 95 million pictures are posted on Instagram, along with 34 million videos on TikTok and hundreds of millions of tweets. Some go viral, most don’t. And some percentage — the numbers are unclear — are taken down for violating the content rules set by the platforms. Given the volume of posts and videos, it is no exaggeration to say that the rules for social media have become the most important speech regulations on the planet, policing what can and cannot be said online.This fact has not gone unnoticed. Texas a few years back wrote its…

There’s much we don’t know about why Nex Benedict, a nonbinary teenager in Owasso, Okla., died a day after a fight in a high school bathroom. But there are some things we do know, and all of them add up to tragedy.We know that 16-year-old Nex, who often went by they/them pronouns with peers, was bullied at school. According to Sue Benedict, their biological grandmother and guardian, the bullying started in earnest last year. We know that Nex didn’t report the recent encounters to teachers or school officials. “I didn’t really see the point in it,” they are seen telling…

If you attended law school at any time over the past half-century, your course in constitutional law likely followed a well-worn path.First you learned the basics: the Supreme Court’s power to say what the Constitution means. Then you read and discussed cases that set precedents for different parts of the Constitution — the commerce clause, presidential powers, due process, equal protection and so on. Finally you studied how the court balances individual liberties against the government’s need to act in the public interest.It was all based on an underlying premise that has long bound together everyone involved in the project…