Author: Lance Garrison
Iowa is in a deep freeze. Subzero temperatures — and a blizzard — have thrown many of the weekend’s highly choreographed events into question, leaving observers wondering if the weather could alter the election results. In this audio report from the frozen Hawkeye state, Opinion writer Katherine Miller describes what it’s like to cover the historic caucus and considers how the inclement weather might affect voting.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 48 hours on the Times website.)The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you…
To the Editor:Re “Caregivers Helped Us Be a Family. We Were Fortunate,” by Rachael Scarborough King (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 8):Ms. King, the wife of Ady Barkan, who died in November, shares the stark reality of what it means to be a caregiver for someone with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Their caregiving journey underscores the political and policy choices that have led to inequalities and challenges in accessing quality care.Receiving dignified care should be a fundamental right for all. Legislators need to pass a federal paid family and medical leave policy, like the FAMILY Act. Caregiving causes disruption in work, career…
Politics is a tough business, so you’d think most politicians would be tough people. In fact, in my experience they’re often not. A lot of people go into politics because they want to be universally liked, and from Abraham Lincoln on down, many of them have detested personal confrontation. Several years ago it occurred to me that in every administration I had covered to that point — from Reagan through Obama — the White House staff seemed to fear the first lady more than they feared the commander in chief.This has obviously changed in recent times. Donald Trump was tough,…
How you train your dog was once a fairly innocuous decision — to leash or not, to reward with treats or not. The internet changed that. Now, training styles and methods can be as much about identity as efficacy: Are you imposing colonial concepts on your dog? Are you harming their mental health? Is your style of training “woke?”In this audio essay, Alicia Wittmeyer shares her journey into the online rabbit hole of dog training and explains why dogs have become the next recruits in America’s culture wars.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the…
I’ve been very critical of Israel’s counterattack on Gaza, which appears to have killed a woman or child about once every eight minutes for the past three months. Many of my readers and friends disagree with these columns and are pained by what they see as my unfairness toward Israel.Too often, opinionated people bypass the most compelling arguments on the other side. Let me instead try to confront head-on the kinds of criticism I’ve received:Israel was attacked. Children were butchered. Women were raped. So why are you criticizing Israel rather than the Hamas terrorists who started this war?That’s a fair…
A close friend’s daughter was getting married in the pandemic summer of 2021. “We can’t invite friends to the wedding,” in order to keep it small and safe, my pal told me. But she did invite friends, I learned from a Facebook post. Just not me. Feeling humiliated, I initially kept quiet. But being together grew awkward and I sensed a growing distance. And when I tried to discuss the widening rift, she called a “pause” in our relations by text and stopped reaching out for a year.My first thought was to consider the friendship ended. Something in her tone…
In the summer of 2005, Qasim Amin Nathari was giving the sermon for Jumuah (Friday prayers in the Muslim religion) to about 200 members of a New Jersey congregation. He wasn’t nervous. He had no reason to be. He knew these people and they knew him. They were part of the same religious community. He was an experienced public speaker who’d worked for decades in communications. And he’d done this type of sermon many times before — not just at this mosque, but also at others.Yet, as Nathari started his traditional introduction — one that repeated religious scriptures he knew…
By striking Houthi rebel targets in Yemen with Britain on Thursday, Washington sent a searing message to both the Houthis and its Iranian backers that the United States has ended its longstanding defense-only posture in the Red Sea and is determined to stop the group’s attacks against commercial ships in regional waters.It’s unclear whether that strategy will work, given the intransigence of the Houthis and the fact that they stand to benefit from a fight with the United States. Such a clash boosts their credentials with U.S. foes in the region and distracts from their atrocious governance of northwestern Yemen…
It’s the latest hot TV genre: a woman in a frigid outpost, bundled in puffy outerwear, trying to uncover truths buried in ice.In the new season of HBO’s “True Detective,” Jodie Foster is a cop trudging through snow trying to solve a murder in a remote Alaska town, described as “the end of the world.” On FX’s “A Murder at the End of the World,” Emma Corrin is an amateur sleuth trudging through snow trying to solve a murder in an isolated retreat in Iceland.And now I find myself in puffy outerwear, trudging through snow in glacial Iowa, trying to…
If Ron DeSantis surprises in Iowa and beyond, if he recovers from his long polling swoon and wins the Republican nomination, it will represent the triumph of a simple, intuitive, but possibly mistaken idea: That voters should be taken at their word about what they actually want from their leaders.It was always clear, going into 2024, that a large minority of the Republican primary electorate would vote for Donald Trump no matter what — including, in the event of his untimely passing, for the former president’s reanimated corpse or his A.I. simulation. A smaller bloc strongly preferred a pre-Trump and…