Author: Lance Garrison

There’s a whip-smart 10-year-old girl in Gaza who speaks good English, displays a radiant smile and seemed to have a bright future. The daughter of an X-ray technician, she had been accepted to an international exchange program and was supposed to be leaving soon.Instead, she’s lying in a hospital bed with a badly infected wound in her thigh from a bomb blast. A photo shows a football-size open wound, with a chunk of her femur missing.“She was supposed to be in Japan,” said Dr. Samer Attar, an orthopedic surgeon who cared for the girl and told me about her. “Now…

A new study shows taxes on sugary beverages like soda reduce demand and are likely to improve public health.Soda is the No. 1 source of added sugar in the American diet. Aside from the tooth decay your mother warned you about, soda and sugar-sweetened tea, fruit, and sports drinks and their added calories increase insulin resistance, obesity, and the risks of diabetes, heart disease, liver cancer, and other chronic disease, research shows. That’s in part because sugary beverages have little nutritional value, and sugar in its liquid form can be especially unhealthy because it is so rapidly absorbed into the blood. In…

President Biden’s assertion that he’s ready to sign a border deal — one that would make it much harder for migrants to enter the United States — is a necessary and long overdue step to restore the public’s confidence in the federal government’s ability to maintain control over immigration.The crush of asylum seekers crossing the southern border has overwhelmed the government’s capacity to deal justly with their claims. The needs of the migrants have strained the resources of cities and towns across the country; in the absence of federal help, these communities are finding it difficult to maintain humane conditions…

Feb. 2, 2024 – If you’re in the minority of Americans who received the most recent COVID-19 vaccination, chances are you’re in the majority not experiencing any COVID symptoms now or in the near future. The CDC announced the first numbers on the XBB.1.5 monovalent vaccines protection against developing symptoms, including from the JN.1 variant. Among those vaccinated recently, immunization provided 54% more protection against symptoms compared to unvaccinated Americans. “It’s really exciting data,” said Luis Ostrosky, MD, chief of infectious diseases and epidemiology with UTHealth Houston and Memorial Hermann in Texas. “It’s really interesting to see this kind of a real-world study, not…

John Chambers grew up in West Virginia and went on to run what was once the world’s most valuable company, the computer networking firm Cisco Systems Inc. Now he is trying to help economically lagging West Virginia by making it a “start-up state” akin to Israel, which has been called the start-up nation. I interviewed Chambers recently about his hopes and the magnitude of the challenge.Short version: It’s going to be very tough.Chambers was born in 1949 while his parents were in medical school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He grew up mostly in Charleston, W.Va., and earned…

The air pollution in Emma Lockridge’s community in Detroit was often so bad, she had to wear a surgical mask inside her house. The smokestacks of nearby refineries and factories filled the sky outside her windows with black particles. “I couldn’t sleep because of those fumes,” she told me last year.In 2021 she fled Detroit for Memphis (which she soon found had pollution issues of its own), joining the million-plus Black Americans who have migrated to the South in the past three decades.This phenomenon has been called reverse migration because many Black people are returning to a region their forebears…

It can still be a meaningful force, to be clear, and to some extent the specter of climate change has given Ehrlichism new life. But the no-kids-because-of-global-warming narrative seems importantly different, less about overpopulation per se and reflecting instead a pessimism about one’s children’s prospects in a warming world. And before giving pride of place to that kind of pessimism in our explanations, it’s worth looking at a different ideological force: Not the anti-natalism of despair, but the anti-natalism of bourgeois propriety.This kind of anti-natalism isn’t anti-human, it doesn’t panic about teeming masses and polluted cities, it’s fine with people…

In Michigan, the Democratic Party now holds both Senate seats, all statewide executive offices and both chambers of the State Legislature. Part of that, Lavora Barnes, Michigan’s Democratic Party state chairwoman, told me, is that the Republican Party became so extreme that it scared off many of its traditional voters. But part of it is that the Democratic Party molded itself into a shape that fit an anxious electorate.“We have become almost the pragmatic party,” she said. “The party that recognizes the importance of building a government that supports its people and supporting that government in the process. If you…

Feb. 2, 2024 – Andisheh Nouraee was having trouble sleeping. “I was waking up a lot at night, so I tried to optimize things in my life to improve sleep,” said Nouraee, who first tried to track his sleep with a wearable band but was skeptical about its accuracy.If he woke up at night to use the bathroom or because of a noise, it was not always reflected in the next day’s sleep report. He now wears a smart watch to bed, which he said is more precise. Nouraee, who lives in a suburb of Atlanta, made some changes that typically lead…

To the Editor:Re “A Chestnut Stuck in Time: Nostalgia Stymies Fusion,” by Ethan Iverson (Arts & Leisure, Jan. 28), about “Rhapsody in Blue” at 100:Mr. Iverson’s article saddles Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with the task of not only changing music history (which it did) but also singularly overhauling Western music pedagogy. No artist in any medium could accomplish this, so I’m not sure why Mr. Iverson is holding poor Gershwin to this unrealistic standard.What the article did do was make me listen to “Rhapsody in Blue,” twice, for the first time in about 20 years. Mr. Iverson finds the work…