Author: Lance Garrison
The problem for Haley, then and now, is that the Constitution does not say that. And if there is a right to secede, as a previous generation of South Carolinians learned the hard way, you won’t find it in our founding documents.Secession, like its cousin nullification, rests on a mistaken conception of the American union. You see it in the opening lines of Governor Abbott’s news release rejecting the Supreme Court’s ruling that he could not keep federal agents from removing razor wire placed at the border with Mexico. “The federal government has broken the compact between the United States…
Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicAround the world, the youngest cohort of voters are dividing themselves politically along gendered lines. What’s behind this “great gender divergence”?This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts debate the causes and consequences of a gender-divided world. Plus, Ross has some timing advice should you choose to improve the national birthrate.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Mentioned in this episode:Thoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) and Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT).“Matter of Opinion” is…
This article also appears in the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.Being a child or teenager today — and being a parent trying to raise a happy, healthy individual — sometimes feels like the hardest thing imaginable. There is so much information and advice, and so much counter-information and counter-advice, that can be applied to our personal choices at any given time.Those of us raising tweens find that kids can have more questions and demand more answers than many of us did growing up. The old “Father Knows Best”…
In this audio essay, the columnist Thomas L. Friedman proposes a three-pronged strategy for the president to address the widening crisis in the Middle East, which he calls the “Biden Doctrine.” The approach would focus on retaliating against Iran’s proxies in the region and supporting a Palestinian state. If successful, Friedman believes this plan could lead to the creation of a “credible, legitimate, effective, demilitarized Palestinian state that can live in peace and security with Israel.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to…
Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable…
Even as he witnessed intolerance and violent score-settling inside the F.L.N., he remained a good soldier, echoing the official line. But in “The Wretched of the Earth,” he expressed his concerns that the impending liberation of Algeria and the African continent would not lead to true freedom for the oppressed, since an avaricious and corrupt “national bourgeoisie” stood in the way of a more sweeping social revolution. Both in his writing, and in his work as a psychiatrist, Fanon advanced a rebellious vision of what he called “disalienation” — a commitment to collective and individual freedom that was in some…
“Let’s be honest, this is a good economy.”So declared Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, in his news conference on Wednesday after the Fed’s latest policy meeting. He’s right, even if the public isn’t fully convinced (although the gap between economic perceptions and reality seems to be narrowing). In fact, Powell is clearly wrestling with a dilemma many countries wish they had: What’s the right monetary policy when the news is good on just about all fronts?Contrary to what you may have heard, this is not a “Goldilocks economy” — get your children’s stories right, folks! Goldilocks found…
There’s high drama unfolding on the southern border. Even as undocumented immigrants are flooding across at an extraordinary pace, the governor of Texas is pretending to defy the Supreme Court, and other Republican governors are threatening to call National Guard units to help bring the border under control. But as dramatic as all that is, for the moment it’s a sideshow. The main event is in Washington, D.C., and the players belong to the only body that can truly fix our immigration system: the United States Congress.Concerns over immigration gave us a President Donald Trump once, and those same concerns…
Americans often think of vaccine hesitancy as primarily ideological, but demographic, socioeconomic and educational drivers may be even more powerful, and as best we can measure them, the ideological drivers are also moving relatively slowly, too. The percentage of Americans saying that vaccination should be required for all children in school fell from 82 percent in 2019 to 71 percent in 2022, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, but the number of children claiming an exemption to existing mandates has risen much more slowly, to just 2.6 percent that same year.In 2016, according to Pew, 88 percent of Americans said…
To the Editor:Re “Squaring a Life, a Brutal Crime and a Man,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, Jan. 21):Oh come on, Mr. Kristof. Your friend Bill Beard was a drug dealer. His mom abandoned him at a year and a half. His law-and-order father let him live in chaos and grow up uneducated. Bill committed a violent crime that damaged a woman for life. And you want to blame American capitalism?Even in feudal times, he would have been excoriated for that crime. When you do something as bad as what Bill did, the only way to atone is to dedicate yourself…