Author: Lance Garrison
Fourteen years ago, at a human rights conference in Oslo, I met Julian Assange. From the moment I encountered the wraithlike WikiLeaks founder, I sensed that he might be a morally dubious character. My suspicions were confirmed upon witnessing his speech at the conference, in which he listed Israel alongside Iran and China as part of a “rogue’s gallery of states” and compared the Guantánamo Bay detention facility to a Nazi concentration camp.Nothing Mr. Assange has said or done in the intervening 14 years has altered my initial impression of him as a man unhealthily preoccupied with the shortcomings of…
In these most recent years of war, a lot has changed. In Mariupol, there was a community center called Halabuda — a place where Japanese and computer literacy were taught, where book launches and concerts were held, where people learned to be businessmen and proactive citizens, where they painted, sang and developed projects for an environmentally friendly city. After a brutal monthslong siege led to the Russian capture of the city in the spring of 2022, Halabuda had to relocate. Today in Cherkasy, a city in central Ukraine, it’s where people repair drones.There’s so much more left unrealized. More destinies…
“Write down a phrase you find abhorrent — something you yourself would never say.”My students looked startled but they cooperated. They knew I wouldn’t collect this exercise — what they wrote would be private unless they chose to share it. All that was required of them was participation.In silence they jotted a few words. So far, so good. We hadn’t yet reached the hard request: spend 10 minutes writing a monologue in the first person that’s spoken by a fictitious character who makes the upsetting statement. This portion typically elicits nervous glances. When that happens I remind students that their…
Desperate and frankly weird attempts were made to make the limb work. Wilhelm’s functioning arm was bound to his body when he was learning to walk, in an attempt to force him to use the other one: predictably he fell over a lot. Electric shocks were passed through it. The arm was placed inside the warm carcass of a freshly killed hare, the idea being that the heat of the dead animal would transmute itself into the child’s arm. At the age of 4, as his mother wept, he was regularly strapped into a machine to try to stretch the…
When I was in the fifth grade, my grandpa took me to my school’s dumpster. “You know the Coca-Colas and water bottles that people throw out?” he asked me in Mandarin. I nodded, spotting two empty Poland Spring bottles lying on top of a nearby garbage pile. He swiftly plucked them out and stowed them away in a plastic bag. “That’s 10 cents. Your turn,” he said, smiling as I ran to another trash can. Seconds later, I emerged victorious, holding a Pepsi can over my head as if it were a trophy.My grandpa was a canner, someone who collects…
Senator Roger Marshall’s voice was shaking with emotion as he made the case for speedy and focused research into long Covid. Marshall, the junior senator from Kansas, is a Republican and a medical doctor. But addressing the first-ever Senate hearing on long Covid last month, he wanted the audience to know that his interest wasn’t just professional and it definitely wasn’t just political. It was also personal.One of his loved ones, he explained, suffered from severe long Covid. “We’ve taken my loved one to dozens of doctors,” he said. “I’ve talked to 40, 50, 60, 80. I’ve read everything there…
Amid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?Late last month, I listened to a fascinating NPR interview with the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel…
Amid the graphic images, fierce polemics and endless media criticism that have dominated my social media feeds since the war in Gaza began late last year, I noticed a seemingly bizarre subplot emerge: skin cancer in Israel.“You are not Indigenous if your body cannot tolerate the area’s climate,” one such post read, highlighting outdated news coverage claiming that Israelis had unusually high rates of skin cancer. (They do not.) Skin cancer, these posts claimed, was proof that Israeli Jews were not native to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea but are in fact white Europeans with…
To the Editor:Re “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,” by David Brooks (column, Jan. 28):As a published author married to a writer/filmmaker, I deeply appreciated Mr. Brooks’s column.It pains me to witness the modern-day devaluation of the arts and humanities. When I was a child, my art history major mother dragged me to many of the world’s great museums: the National Gallery of Art, the Met, the Louvre. I may have protested after the first hour, but certain works left indelible impressions: the terrifying passion of Klimt’s “Kiss,” the seductive movement of the Calder mobile.Likewise, literature…
To the Editor:Re “Trump Must Pay $355 Million Fine in New York Case” (front page, Feb. 17):It is clear that Donald Trump is an inveterate scofflaw and will continue to be; he shows no evidence of remorse. As he has told us in many ways, he will continue this behavior regardless of whether he returns to political power.But too many people are on to his behavior; he will spend the rest of his life being brought to justice for his continuing peccadilloes. He would be wise to take his diminishing bag of marbles and retire to his Florida kingdomlet while…