Author: Lance Garrison
In one of my earliest memories, I am sitting in my teta’s (grandmother’s) lap. The scent of ripe figs fills the air with the calm satisfaction of late summer. We’re in the shade of our cool limestone veranda surrounded by the family’s verdant mountain farmland in a village that is now in Israel but to me has always been Palestine.Our hands work together to pull apart grape leaves we had picked from the vines in her garden. My teta would use the leaves to cook my favorite dish: warak enab, or stuffed grape leaves. My grandparents were fellahin (farmers). They…
Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts take apart why Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis can’t seem to form competitive coalitions against Donald Trump, and whether Haley, DeSantis, the Supreme Court “or God himself” can keep the former president from becoming the Republican nominee.Plus, Michelle Cottle reveals her Plan B if her political reporting career doesn’t work out.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Mentioned in this episode:Thoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat…
The DeSantis presidential pitch often was about the governor as this singular force stopping societal decline. His vision encompassed schools, corporations, the markets and government bureaucracy. This, at times, uneasily subverted traditional conservative ideas about federalism and the individual — using government to create space for a specific conception of the individual and interfering with business and local government, if necessary, to do it. The pitch wasn’t especially about preserving the Everglades or raising teacher pay or getting bridges rebuilt after hurricanes, which he has worked to do and are actually the kind of problems people have now.Mr. DeSantis marries…
Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’“I have no idea how this ends. I’ve never seen it so broken,” Thomas L. Friedman, a New York Times Opinion columnist who has been covering the Middle East for decades, tells me.It’s been just over 100 days since Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the costs of the war are staggering. In polling from late fall, 64 percent of Gazans reported that a family member had been killed or injured. Nearly two million Gazans — almost the entire population — have been displaced from their homes, and analysis of satellite imagery reveals that about half…
We have been down this road before, and it did the country lasting damage.
In crude material terms, Donald Trump’s presidency benefited the media, with subscriptions, ratings and clicks all soaring. It’s therefore not surprising that lots of people believe his return to the center of our politics will once again generate obsessive interest. “When Trump Wins, So Does the Media,” the center-left writer Matthew Yglesias wrote in October. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump recently predicted that because of Trump’s presidential campaign, “cable news channels may soon see a resurgence.” Even warnings about the manifold ways a second Trump presidency could damage a free press tend to assume that four more years of MAGA…
Illustration by Iris Johnson By Paul RogersIn 2016, CIA officers in Havana, Cuba, started having unexplained health issues. They reported a persistent piercing sound followed by symptoms including headaches, nausea, vertigo, trouble concentrating, and memory loss. Was it a new condition? Or was it the latest incidence of the centuries-old phenomenon of mass psychogenic illness, formerly called mass hysteria?Since 2016, hundreds of incidents of what is now dubbed “Havana syndrome” have been recorded by U.S. intelligence and Foreign Service personnel in a growing list of global locations, including Russia and China. As most were working in hotbeds of espionage, surrounded…
The United States has just experienced one of the biggest collapses in consumer inflation in modern history. In June 2022 consumer prices had risen 9.1 percent over the previous year. By December 2023 the rate of increase had slowed to 3.4 percent. And yet, in survey after survey, voters still declare inflation to be at or near the top of their list of concerns.Why aren’t voters recognizing the decline in the inflation rate? Because voters are humans, and humans don’t think about inflation rationally. To understand why, let’s look at a Snickers bar.More than 12 Snickers bars are sold every…
To the Editor:Bret Stephens’s Jan. 14 column, “The Case for Trump, by Someone Who Wants Him to Lose,” is a brilliant summary of why we may be about to elect a buffoon with enough baggage to sink, one would think, anyone similarly freighted who aspired to high political office.Millions of Americans are unhappy, frightened and angry. Privileges long taken for granted, like good housing and the chance for decent employment and advancement, are fast fading away. People want change! And the demagogue’s madness speaks to that need.The same old, same old posture of the Democratic Party does not. What happened…
Sometimes in this job I have a kernel of a column idea that doesn’t pan out. But other times I begin looking into a topic and find a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else. This latter experience happened as I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering. Over a third…