Author: Lance Garrison
Not to spend too much time writing about Donald Trump this week, but I was struck by this report in The Washington Post on the former president’s recent overtures to oil executives. After hearing one executive during an event last month at his Mar-a-Lago club complain about supposedly burdensome environmental regulations promulgated by the Biden administration, Trump made a proposition.You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from…
Foreign policy can make a mockery of moral certitude. You’re trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like genial neighborliness, where even a superpower’s ability to impose its will dissolves with distance, where any grand project requires alliances with tyranny and worse.This seems clear when you consider the dilemmas of the past. It’s why the “good war” of World War II involved a partnership with a monster in Moscow and the subjection of half of Europe to totalitarian oppression. It’s why the “bad war” of Vietnam was only escaped at…
Two police cars idled across the street from the protest rally I was attending in front of the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, their red and blue lights flashing but their sirens silent. The police seemed more bored than annoyed. It was the early 2000s, and I had recently moved from Turkey to study at the University of Texas.My fellow protesters were outraged. “This is what a police state looks like!” they started chanting.I turned around, bewildered. Turkey was still emerging from the long shadow of the 1980 coup. For years, protests were suppressed, sometimes with deadly force. Even a…
Protesting the world’s wrongs has been a rite of passage for generations of American youth, buoyed by our strong laws protecting free speech and free assembly. Yet the students and other demonstrators disrupting college campuses this spring are being taught the wrong lesson — for as admirable as it can be to stand up for your beliefs, there are no guarantees that doing so will be without consequence.The highest calling of a university is to craft a culture of open inquiry, one where both free speech and academic freedom are held as ideals. Protest is part of that culture, and…
Some Latina mothers teach their daughters how to spoon masa or plátano onto a corn husk or banana leaf when making tamales or pasteles.My Latina mother taught me to love musicals.Or, more precisely, how to worship the diva at the center of a musical, the woman pulling at the seams of its tidy romance plot, unraveling in her wake a trail of delight and mayhem. Some days it was Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice in her mink hat and muff insisting that no one rain on her parade. Or Diana Ross easing on down the road. But most times it…
The rap battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar is about more than whatever personal beefs these two men have with each other. As many have noted, it is a significant moment in hip-hop history, and not just because Mr. Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us,” released last week, has become the hip-hop song with the most plays on U.S. Spotify in a single day — surpassing the high set previously by Drake and Lil Baby.What sets this rap battle apart from previous high-profile hip-hop feuds is its magnitude and implications for popular music. Hip-hop, born as an underground movement, has…
Morning exercise offers many benefits, but for people with eczema, hitting the gym and then going to work presents a complex set of challenges. Getting hot and sweaty can lead to flare-ups. The breakfast you eat for post-workout energy may do more harm than good. And after a heavy workout that taxes your body, the stress of deadlines and other workplace pressures can be a trigger as well.Bottom line: If you like to jump-start your workday at the gym, you need a smart strategy that will keep eczema at bay. Matt Knight Enter Matt Knight, one of London’s most sought-after…
Such a speech would begin by making clear that if the U.S.-Israel alliance is under strain today, it’s because Israel has become a radically unstable partner under Netanyahu. He made a failed judicial coup his top priority for his first year in office — not dealing with Iran or the Palestinians. That divided Israeli society and distracted its military, probably tempting Hamas to think the time was right for an attack.This crazy lurch to the right in Israel, combined with a can’t-win strategy in Gaza combined with the fact that, as Harel wrote, “for almost a decade, Netanyahu purposefully wore…
May 10, 2024 – When we’re young, we take our macula for granted. At the center of our retina – the deepest layer of the eye that’s chock-full of photoreceptors and that confers color to our world – the macula is like a high-resolution camera. As light hits our eyes, the retina’s macula recasts our world in a bloom of color with astoundingly high visual sharpness.But as you age, your vision dulls. What once stood out sharply becomes foggy, like condensation on a windowpane. After some time, a coal-black smudge or cloudy circular area begins to affect your central vision. This…
During the 2016 Republican campaign, watching Donald Trump shoulder his way past his more pious rivals for the nomination, I remarked on the platform then known as Twitter: “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”This apothegm has often been quoted back to me, and this month Compact magazine’s editor, Matthew Schmitz, quoted it in order to offer a critique. My one-liner “captured a widely shared assumption” that Trump’s rise signaled “the birth of an irreligious right animated by white racial grievance,” he wrote. But that’s not how history has played out, Schmitz said:It is…