Author: Lance Garrison

To the Editor:Re “An Act of Defiance Can Improve Things for Working Moms,” by Toby Kiers (Opinion guest essay, May 4):I am a woman nearing the completion of my B.A. in philosophy, and I have the absurd hopes of going on to get my Ph.D. and work in academia and also have a family.Dr. Kiers’s essay both shed light on the frustrating reality of the discrimination that mothers face in the world of academic research, and provided a shining beacon of hope to counteract it.The false binary that women are presented and that so many people (including Dr. Kiers’s own…

Of course, its history has had a dark side, too.In the 18th century, New York was a slave center second only to Charleston, S.C. Wall Street financed the slave economy in the U. S. after New York State abolished human bondage in 1827. The Draft Riot of 1863 remains the worst civil disturbance in all of American history. Slum housing, in the mid-1800s, was as bad as anything, anywhere. The world depression of the 1930s began on Wall Street. And, unbeknown to most residents, New York played a central role in the American Revolution. It was the site of the…

In 2004 Heather Hancock and Craig Blackburn were set up on a blind date while attending a Down syndrome advocacy conference. “I knew right away Craig was who I wanted to marry,” Ms. Hancock told me.But Mr. Blackburn lived in Metairie, La., and Ms. Hancock in Oklahoma City. They visited each other when they could and talked on the phone constantly. The relationship grew over the next three years, and eventually Mr. Blackburn proposed. Their parents supported their relationship, but they knew that legal marriage would be complicated.Ms. Hancock, 40, and Mr. Blackburn, 44, both receive Supplemental Security Income, a…

“Dad, I don’t think I’m old enough to handle this.”Those words were hard to hear. They were my daughter’s words of despair when she received the worst news of her life: The baby she was carrying suffered from grave defects. That sweet baby, named Lila, was diagnosed with gastroschisis, a dangerous condition in which her intestines were developing outside her body. She also had only one healthy kidney, and her very small size indicated that she might have a fatal genetic anomaly.And Camille was indeed young: 21 years old. She married her high school sweetheart while she was in college,…

A loving mother wants, above all else, good health for her child. Imagine, then, the emotional impact of discovering that your baby has eczema, of wishing more than anything to take away the itching and irritation. And imagine the worry when a woman with eczema becomes pregnant. The what-ifs are huge.Fortunately, there is excellent information — and inspiration — to help a woman in either situation. Here, two moms reveal the great lengths they went to in their determination to give their children relief and good health. Meghan Elliot Meghan Elliott, who lives in Kankakee, Illinois, is a busy mother…

I have never played on an athletic team. As a child, I was not fast or coordinated or interested in anything that involved chasing, catching or otherwise playing ball. My mother, who grew up in postwar Germany, associated youth sports with the Hitler Youth and the Nazi obsession with fostering the “prey instinct” through competition and strength. These concerns dovetailed conveniently with my anti-gym-class feelings.But in the long, cold and gloomy spring of 2020, I found myself the mother of an 8-year-old son who wanted nothing more than to play ball. This was the heart of early Covid; there were…

Despite this math, scared candidates are, in my experience, easily sold the idea that the Democratic base or Republican base is going to stay home in November unless they are constantly fed what they want to hear. One call from the head of a religious group, a civil rights group, a labor group and others (often called “the groups”) and fear runs through a campaign. A New York Times article this winter about Black pastors warning the Biden White House that his Gaza war policy could imperil re-election is a good example. Maybe if Mr. Biden were running against a…

To the Editor:Re “What Students Read Before They Protest,” by Ross Douthat (column, April 28):Historians in the future are unlikely to attribute worldwide protests against Israel’s war in Gaza to the syllabus for Columbia’s required “Contemporary Civilization” course. Yet Mr. Douthat somehow suggests that a handful of anticolonial texts read in the yearlong course are fueling widespread antisemitism.Mr. Douthat fails to explain how students go from Gandhi’s passive resistance or Bhimrao Ambedkar’s civic liberalism to condoning Hamas’s terrorism. Nor does Mr. Douthat account for the diversity of the authors’ views (Frantz Fanon’s book “The Wretched of the Earth,” which has…

The party had a golden opportunity to change in 1989, when the Tiananmen Square protests revealed that the economic reforms that had begun a decade earlier had given rise to a growing private sector and a desire for new freedoms. But to liberalize government institutions in response would have undermined the party’s power. Instead, China’s leaders chose to shoot the protesters, further tighten party control and get hooked on government investment to fuel the economy.For a long time, no one minded. When economic or social threats reared their heads, like global financial crises in 1997 and 2007, Chinese authorities poured…

Stormy was working blue, and the judge was seeing red.Justice Juan Merchan chided Donald Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles, saying he didn’t understand why she hadn’t objected to seamy details about the President and the Porn Star spilling out.“Why on earth she wouldn’t object to the mention of a condom I don’t understand,” Merchan complained about Necheles.But I wanted to hear about the condom — or lack thereof. The New York trial involves an abstruse legal strategy and illusory crime. It’s the weakest of the cases against Trump. It’s certainly not putting him on trial for the attempted coup d’état he…