Author: Lance Garrison

Jan. 23, 2024 — Loneliness has been known to be a serious health problem, and a new report makes the case that the suffering is worse for people who are obese.“To date, dietary and lifestyle factors are the major focus in preventing obesity related illness,” said Lu Qi, MD, lead author of the study published Monday in JAMA Network Open to CNN.“Our study highlights the importance of taking social and mental health into account in improving health for people with obesity,” said Qi, a professor at Tulane University.CNN reported that “all causes of death for people classified as obese was 36% lower in…

A funny thing happened on the way to the 2024 election. Well, actually, a lot of funny things happened. (Ron DeSantis!) But I’m talking about the economy. As I wrote in my latest column, there seems to have been a sudden upswing in consumer sentiment, which is finally starting to catch up with the reality that inflation has plunged while unemployment has remained low.And I do mean sudden. Here’s a chart from the Michigan survey, the most widely cited measure of consumer sentiment:OK, this is just one survey, and some of what we’re seeing may be statistical noise; other surveys…

Leave it to a linguist to say this, but we need another word. In this case, we need a word for the relatively minor, “duplicative language” version of plagiarism.To present someone else’s ideas as one’s own is unquestionably wrong, in academia and elsewhere. However, to cite boilerplate statements — the assumptions basic to a field, for instance — word for word, or close to it, without citing the person who typed the words originally is something different, and vastly less egregious. I would argue, in fact, that there may be nothing wrong with it at all, in particular when it…

Jan. 23, 2024 – Kasey Vaillancourt and her husband were trying to get pregnant when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 36. Her oncologist told her she may not be able to safely carry a pregnancy due to the risk of her cancer coming back. Vaillancourt and her husband used a fertility clinic to create and freeze embryos, and they started researching surrogacy, possibly with Vaillancourt’s sister carrying the pregnancy.Amid the abrupt turn in her family planning vision, Vaillancourt had a rare complication during egg retrieval where her belly and lungs became filled with fluid that later had…

Jan. 23, 2024 – You’ve got the symptoms, but your test for COVID-19 isn’t positive. You’re not alone. JN.1, the now-dominant variant that accounts for nearly 86% of all circulating SARS-CoV-2 strains, may take longer to show a positive result on home antigen tests.Some infectious disease doctors and patients have reported that tests taken days after symptoms appear turn up negative, then a couple of days later are positive. It’s triggered uneasiness about the value of the tests. “Are the at-home tests able to detect JN.1?” tweeted one user on X, formerly known as Twitter, echoing concerns of others on social media.Before blaming…

Why have Republicans and Democrats moved so far apart on immigration? That’s the question that drives the Opinion video above.We are publishing this as President Biden comes under extraordinary pressure to curb surging illegal immigration at the southwestern border. Republicans have held up further military aid to Ukraine, demanding more border security in exchange. And this month House Republicans opened impeachment hearings against Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, accusing him of intentionally failing to enforce immigration laws.A group of senators from both parties has been trying to negotiate a deal that would address the Republican demands for a border…

To the Editor:Re “Don’t Ditch Standardized Tests. Fix Them,” by Jessica Grose (Opinion, nytimes.com, Jan. 17):Ms. Grose is incorrect when she says, “Without standardized testing, we won’t know where to put the most resources.” I taught in half a dozen schools in two of our nation’s largest school districts, and in my current job training teachers, I’ve been in dozens more. It takes about five minutes in a school building to know if it needs more resources.And yet, regardless of the ever-changing policy on standardized tests, the same schools across our nation suffer from underfunding year after year. The problem…

In a year with so much political and legal tension, law enforcement is seeing a disturbing trend: targeting public officials with swatting, or false emergency calls intended to draw a heavily armed police response. This conduct isn’t a harmless prank; it’s a symptom of a deeper disorder in American politics. Recent incidents involving officials who have taken stands seen as hostile to Donald Trump and bomb threats in multiple state capitols are signs of a troubling escalation in political violence.These hoaxes pose real dangers. Sending armed police officers to someone’s home on the ruse that violence is occurring there risks…

In today’s creative economy, the tail increasingly wags the dog. Marketing is driving culture as promotional campaigns overshadow the offerings they seek to elevate — in fashion, music, art and film. With fashion weeks taking place around the world and awards season well underway, the hype machine is operating at full throttle. But few products, if any, can compete with such fanfare. On the runway, the red carpet and beyond, culture is at risk of being subsumed by the sound and the fury, the hype and the buzz, of its own promotion.Fashion houses seemingly no longer hire creative directors for…

What Boeing has missed, as it tried to dump costs and speed production, was the chance to ensure that safety was a cultural core and a competitive advantage. Corporations can choose to push back against the Wall Street-driven notion that safety equals cost, and thus lower profits. In the late 1980s and ’90s, the aluminum giant Alcoa, under its chief executive Paul O’Neill, made safety the top priority demonstrating that a culture built around safety can actually be efficient, because accidents and defects decrease when employees know the company cares about their well-being. While assembling an airframe isn’t as dangerous…