Author: Lance Garrison
Gail Collins: Bret, I have a feeling this is the last time I’m going to ask you about the Republican presidential primaries. Things seem to be winding up fast. Ron DeSantis is out — don’t think we’re gonna miss him.Bret Stephens: Nope.Gail: If DeSantis weren’t such an awful candidate, this toppling of his campaign might be a little sad. But as it is, it’s — sorta dull, actually. DeSantis’s endorsement of Donald Trump as “superior to the current incumbent” wasn’t exactly moving.Bret: The Trump endorsement was dishonorable but probably inevitable, politically speaking. If Trump wins the presidency, DeSantis will have…
Maybe he suspected people were looking down on him; he strikes me as a man with a chip on his shoulder about … something. Or maybe he was looking down on them. Those who have worked with Mr. DeSantis have said he considers himself the smartest guy in any given room. This is not uncommon among politicians — especially the men. But he had the added problem of being unable to hide his arrogance and discomfort. Superciliousness is not a great way to win support, especially in a political party defined by its hostility toward pointy-headed know-it-alls.Mr. DeSantis might have…
Middle Tennessee has one metaphorical foot in the Midwest and one in the Deep South. We expect a certain amount of weather whiplash here, even without factoring in the extremities of climate change, but January has been a carnival ride. Thunderstorms and tornadoes followed by brutal cold and then by snow the likes of which we haven’t seen in years. Eight inches at our house, up to 10 in other Nashville neighborhoods.Last week, temperatures dropped into the single digits at night and didn’t rise much higher during the day. On Thursday afternoon it finally got warm enough to soften the…
As he oversees the succession search and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Mr. Khamenei appears to be content, for now, to let the Arab militias across the Middle East do what Tehran has been paying and training them to do. Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance,” which includes Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, is at the core of the Islamic Republic’s grand strategy against Israel, the United States and Sunni Arab leaders, allowing the regime to strike out at its adversaries without using its own forces or endangering its territory. The various militias and terrorist groups that Tehran nurtures have allowed it to…
Erik Larson’s firm, Cloverpop, helps companies make and learn from decisions. When Mr. Larson and his research team compared the decision quality of individuals versus teams, they found that all-male teams outperformed individuals nearly 60 percent of the time, but gender diverse teams outperformed individuals almost 75 percent of the time. Teams that were gender and geographically diverse, and had at least one age gap of 20 years or more, made better decisions than individuals 87 percent of the time. If you’ve ever called a grandparent for advice or tested an idea with a skeptical teenager, you get what this…
“The act of depositing human remains and other materials, which could be perceived as discards in any other location, on the moon is tantamount to desecration of this sacred space,” Mr. Nygren wrote.The Navajo president’s protest offers an example of how use of the moon, even for the most well-intentioned purposes, requires a collaborative and deliberate approach. The moon belongs to everyone, which means it belongs to no one; use of the moon by anyone demands consideration of everyone. Lunar landings scheduled for 2024 and 2025 under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program include a water-hunting robot, a navigation system…
I’m gutted to see Condé Nast folding the online music magazine Pitchfork into GQ. I won’t try to improve on the eulogies written for the site already (Casey Newton and Eric Harvey have good ones). But even today, if you look at the first screen of my iPhone, below The New York Times app and to the left of the Notes app, I keep a tile that’s just a direct link to Pitchfork’s page of music reviews. It’s one of the few corners of the internet I still love, no matter how often I find myself in disagreement. Disagreeing is…
The answer was settled on the battlefield, but it was ratified through the 14th Amendment, which defined who is a citizen of the United States and established that the “privileges or immunities” of same supersede any state laws that might abridge them. From now on, there would be no ambiguity: Under the Constitution, the people of the United States are sovereign, and this sovereignty supersedes the sovereignty of the people of the individual states whenever the privileges and immunities of the former are in conflict with the will of the latter.Section 3 of that amendment was similarly enacted in order…
Last week, a group of federal employees organized a protest of the Biden administration’s support of Israel in its war with Hamas. Although a snowstorm in Washington complicated their plans, some federal employees from a range of agencies declined to work for a day. Meanwhile at the Capitol, Republican members of the House of Representatives were once again threatening to throw their institution into chaos to prevent their leader from negotiating a spending package with Democrats.These seemingly unconnected dramas, on opposite sides of the partisan divide, offered examples of a characteristic disorder of this moment in our politics — the…
To the Editor:Re “Preservation Has Become the Enemy of Evolution,” by Binyamin Appelbaum (Opinion, Jan. 7):We must destroy New York in order to save it? And discard our history and heritage for expediency’s sake?New York City needs more, not less, historical memory. What we do not need is a return to the housing policies of Robert Moses.Mr. Appelbaum writes that much of Brooklyn Heights has been fossilized. Would he say that Paris has been “fossilized” because its city leaders preserve its buildings? There’s no other place like Brooklyn Heights in the United States. But there are countless other cities around…