Author: Lance Garrison

By Yuri Cárdenas, as told to Evan StarkmanI’ve been living with chronic migraine for about 9 years, and it’s taken me lot of trial and error to learn how to get relief during a migraine attack.The exact steps that work for me might not help someone else. Everybody with migraine disease is unique. The symptoms vary from person to person and even from one attack to another. It really takes experimentation, learning as much as you can about the disease, and, ideally, partnering with a certified headache specialist to find out what treatments and self-care techniques will help you.My migraine attack…

In 1993, Polly Klaas was kidnapped and murdered at the age of 12. Following her death, Polly’s tragic story became a plotline in true crime podcasts, TV shows and books. In this audio essay, Polly’s sister Annie Nichol argues that the popularization of true crime not only re-traumatized victims’ families but also helped create demand for “tough on crime” legislation. “Our legal system actually became more reactionary and more fixated on punishment and fundamentally less just,” she says.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of…

Three people who’ve lived with chronic migraine discuss what their journey has taught them, from the benefits of exercise to the importance of speaking up for yourself.Exercise Your Body and MindLindsay Weitzel, PhD, is an author and a podcast/webcast host for the National Headache Foundation. My earliest memory was a migraine around age 4. I had head pain every day after that, until age 30. It was so serious that it caused me to have something called complex regional pain syndrome, which feels like fire burning down to your bone marrow.I was a competitive swimmer. I used exercise to keep…

There’s an idea that’s been floating around for a few years that when it comes to marriage, wealthy elites hold luxury beliefs.What does that mean? Rob Henderson — who popularized “luxury beliefs” in 2019 and has a book coming out next month that recounts his childhood in the foster care system — defines the term as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” In a recent interview with Yascha Mounk, Henderson shared a story that illustrates what that means to him when it comes to marriage:I had a conversation with…

Covid numbers recently climbed again. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention once again reported monthly death tolls in the thousands. Mask mandates are back in New York City’s public medical facilities and nursing homes. The presidential race has kicked into gear and, just as in 2020, the stakes seem existential. It all makes me feel like I’m revisiting a past I never actually left.I’m not the only one wrestling with that feeling. In other ways, 2020 seems like another lifetime. The pandemic ended; we went on with our lives. Yet by considerable margins, people still say they feel…

There was a brief period in the later part of the Covid-19 pandemic, between the moment when Glenn Youngkin swept into the Virginia governorship and the full political return of Donald Trump, when I became convinced that American liberalism was headed for a truly epochal defeat in 2024.It seemed then that — under the influence of progressive radicalism, institutional groupthink and coronavirus fears — the liberal establishment was untethering itself from American normalcy to a politically suicidal degree. Blue cities and regions were rerunning aspects of the left’s 1970s social program on fast-forward and generating spikes in crime and disorder.…

The prize in this struggle is the 2024 presidency and all the power that goes with it.I asked political strategists and American and European scholars to evaluate the viability of Biden’s immigration initiative and received a wide range of responses.Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has often argued that Democrats have moved too far to the cultural left, questioned the viability of Biden’s immigration strategy in an email:It’s a steep political hill Biden has to climb on this issue. His approval rating on ‘handling the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border’ is now 18 percent.…

Since the beginning of the pandemic, this feeling has built up in Germany. And it is true that Germans have had to deal with a lot: the war in Ukraine, an energy crisis, inflation and, most recently, the painful fallout from war in Gaza. Even though immigration is rising, we still lack skilled labor — teachers, plumbers, I.T. specialists — and public infrastructure is crumbling. Add in an ambitious government green transition agenda hamstrung by brutal infighting and you get a grim picture. Everything, it seems, is changing — and not for the better.In recent months, this dissatisfied feeling has…

United Nations agencies and officials are no strangers to scandal and infamy.U.N. peacekeepers caused a cholera epidemic in Haiti and committed horrific sexual abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The U.N.’s oil-for-food program for Iraq became a multibillion-dollar kickback scheme through which Saddam Hussein all but bribed his way out of international sanctions. In the 1980s, Kurt Waldheim, a former U.N. secretary general, was unmasked as a former Nazi. He was the same secretary general who denounced Israel’s 1976 rescue of Jewish hostages in Entebbe as “a serious violation” of Uganda’s national sovereignty.Now comes the latest scandal of…

In my last newsletter, I argued that it is unsuitably awkward for the word “plagiarism” to be applied both to the stealing of others’ ideas and the copying, perhaps accidentally, of boilerplate text without citing its source. To the extent that most would consider the former an egregious transgression and the latter more of a lazy misstep, English would benefit from using a different term for it.It also bears mentioning that the way we use and process the word “plagiarism” teaches a couple of lessons about language and society more broadly. For one, the word can be taken as a…