Author: Lance Garrison
Likewise, my mother’s biking adventures served as their own flashing screen. Every pedal uphill was a subliminal shout that she was strong. Every heart skip on a downhill told her she was brave and fun. Every new route she planned showed she was capable. She was being immersed in implicit feedback that upended what she (and others) had been told one could and could not do or be at this age.Most older women don’t join bike groups. Instead, we begin to pull back on physical activities, risk-taking or novel pursuits. Too dangerous for our failing body and mind, we are…
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.patrick healyI’m Patrick Healy, the deputy editor of “New York Times” Opinion, and part of my job is running our focus groups.[MUSIC PLAYING]margie omeroHi, everyone.speaker 1Hello.speaker 2Good evening.speaker 3Hello.patrick healyRecently, my co-moderator Margie and I sat down with 13 undecided independent voters.margie omeroHow would you describe Joe Biden as a person? Natalie.natalieIt’s like he’s a little bit senile, and I do think it’s time to…
This week in The Texas Monthly, I read a troubling profile of Tim Dunn, a 68-year-old billionaire Texas oilman and lavish financier for right-wing extremists in the state.“In the past two years,” Russell Gold writes, “Dunn has become the largest individual source of campaign money in the state by far.” He has spent, through his political action committee, millions of dollars targeting Republicans who don’t meet his ideological litmus tests of opposition to public schools, opposition to renewable energy and support for tax cuts and draconian anti-abortion laws.A pastor who once said that only Christians should hold leadership positions in…
Tiffany Reed grew up in a biracial Pentecostal family that moved frequently and fasted off and on, according to the direction of her father. “He would read about church history, watch documentaries, and then get excited and introduce a new family practice,” she told me. As an undergraduate at the King’s College, a Christian school in New York City, she watched some evangelical classmates become Anglicans or convert to Catholicism. She graduated in 2016; a few years later, she moved to Waco, Texas, to join Brazos Fellows, a program partnered with Baylor University that offers recent college graduates nine months…
Earlier this week, veiled comments started to emerge on Capitol Hill regarding an unnamed and “serious national security threat.” By Thursday, a White House spokesman, John Kirby, let the American public in on what members of Congress were talking about: a new Russian space-based antisatellite capability that violates the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, suspected of being a space-based nuclear weapon.Officials say the system is not active, and they have not detailed what it can do. But if it is what the White House suggests, we may now find ourselves facing this generation’s Sputnik moment. In 1957, when the former Soviet…
When I covered George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988, he was so eager to wrap himself in the American flag that he took us to a New Jersey flag factory. That way, he could claim that the G.O.P. was “on the American side” while caressing pieces of striped, red-and-white nylon.At the time, it seemed like a cynical move by Republicans, trying to bogart patriotism. But at least they respected our country enough to try to monopolize its symbol.That vanishing breed of Republican pledged allegiance to the American flag. Now Republicans pledge allegiance to Donald Trump’s ego. He has to…
The first year of the war in Ukraine seemed to vindicate Russia hawks. The belief that Vladimir Putin was a careful chess player whose ambitions could be constrained through negotiation, the belief that Ukraine couldn’t plausibly defend itself against Moscow and therefore didn’t merit support from an already overstretched America — these ideas seemed to dissolve in the first months of war, with Putin gambling and rambling while Ukrainian arms threw his forces back.The second year of war has been kinder to realists and doves. Russia, as in many wars before, seems stronger in a grinding conflict than it did…
For most of the 12 or so years in which Alexei Navalny crusaded against the rule of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president tried to avoid mentioning his gadfly by name, even as he and his minions tried every which way, assassination included, to silence him. Yet when the news of Mr. Navalny’s reported death in a remote northern labor camp appeared on official Russian news sites, it included the detail that Mr. Putin, on a visit to the city of Chelyabinsk, had been “informed.”Many official outlets also reported the reactions of officials in the West, and some on discussions in…
To the Editor:Re “Aleksei Navalny, Putin Critic, Dies in Prison, Russian Authorities Say” (nytimes.com, Feb. 16):Aleksei Navalny’s courage, fortitude, indomitable spirit and unshakable moral clarity will stand the test of time and serve as beacons of hope for victims of oppression and totalitarianism everywhere.While the world mourns amid reports of his passing, Mr. Navalny’s legacy and all that he stood for during his relatively short life will never diminish in their capacity to inspire the collective will to be free despite the seemingly overwhelming obstacles in realizing this basic human desire in many parts of the world, including Mr. Navalny’s…
In New York on Friday, a State Supreme Court judge, Arthur Engoron, ordered Donald Trump and his company to pay the staggering sum of $355 million for lying, over and over, with stunning audacity, about the value of his assets. The ruling comes just weeks after a jury, in a defamation case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll, ordered Mr. Trump to pay $83.3 million — also for lying. That’s on top of two previous jury findings: Mr. Trump’s company was found guilty of 17 felonies, including fraud, and an earlier Carroll civil jury ordered him to pay $5…