Author: Lance Garrison
Illustration by Iris Johnson John Birmingham, a magazine editor, was startled to find his wife, Lola — dressed for work and for a birthday gathering afterward, in a jacket with a large fabric flower — perched on the edge of their bed, peering at her outfit in bewilderment.“Why am I dressed this way?” she kept asking.“You’re scheduled to go to a party after work,” he answered.“But … what do I do?”That’s when John got scared. His wife owned a small company that made one-of-a-kind hats with handcrafted materials; she was passionately dedicated to her work.“She kept asking me where I…
I was a senior in college in 1978 when I wrote my first opinion piece that touched on airline deregulation. It was an editorial in The Cornell Daily Sun (“Ithaca’s only morning newspaper”!) titled “Our Man in Washington,” and it was about Alfred Kahn, a colorful Cornell economist who presided over deregulation of airlines at the Civil Aeronautics Board from 1977 to 1978 before becoming President Jimmy Carter’s inflation czar.I wrote, “When Kahn began hacking away at airline protectionism the airlines screamed, but today fares are lower, passenger volume is way up and airlines are actually profiting. Everybody except the…
To the Editor:Re “‘Barbie’ Is Bad. There, I Said It,” by Pamela Paul (column, Jan. 26):Ms. Paul has no sense of humor. There, I said it.After reading her column, I am getting the vibe that any film that rides on satire, humor and a plethora of pink is not worthy of serious artistic consideration.It is a slight that Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie did not get Oscar nominations for best director and best actress. The movie was buoyant and amusing and poked fun at everyone: the women who need to be beautiful, the men who need to dominate women, the…
Jan. 26, 2024 – The cravings feel inevitable and unavoidable – you stand up, walk to the kitchen, open the fridge or pantry, and ponder. Although you remind yourself to consider a piece of fruit or some protein, your eyes linger on the potato chips and cookies.If fats and sugars sometimes seem irresistible, you’re not alone. A new study published in Cell Metabolism, based on work by researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, shows we have two separate but parallel fat and sugar craving pathways that send signals from the gut to the brain, which light up our…
In 1996, accepting the Republican nomination for president, an aged (by his era’s standards, not ours) Bob Dole issued a stirring defense of the past against the present. “Let me be the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth,” he told his audience. “Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquillity, faith and confidence in action. And to those who say it was never so, that America’s not been better, I say you’re wrong. And I know because I was there. And I have seen it. And I remember.”America declined Dole’s offer, choosing to stay…
There has been plenty of hand-wringing in the West about the prospect of China displacing — or at least rivaling — the United States as the world’s leading superpower. But the evolving security crisis in the Red Sea makes clear that this remains a distant prospect.China, with a trade-led economy dependent on the free flow of commerce through chokepoints like the Bab el-Mandeb strait off Yemen, relies on the United States to protect international sea lanes. The U.S.-led military response to the Houthi militia attacks on international shipping may not ultimately be the answer to the current crisis — the…
The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test birthed an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced bombing firsthand during World War I, mused, “If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation.” One year earlier, F.C.S. Schiller, a British philosopher and eugenicist, summarized the general intellectual atmosphere…
Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIt’s an old truism that Americans don’t care about foreign policy when it’s time to cast their ballots. But with the crisis in Gaza, a prolonged conflict in Ukraine and a trade war brewing with China, could 2024 be the year that American voters finally care about what’s going on beyond the water’s edge?The “Matter of Opinion” hosts take a look at the importance (or lack thereof) of foreign affairs in American elections. Plus, Lydia Polgreen recommends a film Oscar nominations were wrong to skip.(A full transcript of…
The record backs him up. He allowed Hamas to hold Gaza, and Qatar to finance the group, because its presence kept the Palestinian leadership divided. No one could demand that Netanyahu accept a Palestinian state so long as that state would be governed by Hamas. This was his strategy, and he and his advisers said so.In the West Bank, Netanyahu allowed settlers to run wild and rendered Hamas’s rival, Al Fatah, feckless. The Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority cooperated on security with Israel, day after day, but rather than raise Al Fatah up as a negotiating partner, he humiliated it. Netanyahu made…
This is why, coming out of New Hampshire, the conversation that stuck in my head was with Lee Dunn, who had come up from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., to volunteer for Team Haley. Waiting for a rally to begin on the eve of the primary, I asked Ms. Dunn why she had committed to Pick Nikki!, as the campaign swag implores. She didn’t hit the darker notes I had been hearing so often: The panicked, Trump is a disaster. Or the disgusted, I cannot bear a November rematch between two old geezers. Instead, she gushed about how amazing…