Author: Lance Garrison
In the 1990s you would have been hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t know the name of my sister Polly Klaas. I was 6 years old when a stranger abducted 12-year-old Polly from our bedroom on the evening of Oct. 1, 1993. Her face quickly became a fixture on nightly news, her name featured prominently in headlines alongside fearmongering about crime rates. News crews broadcast from our living room and remained camped in front of our house during the two-month search before her body was found.Though the media frenzy should have ended there, it only intensified, fueling a political climate…
Gail Collins: Hey, Bret, it really is 2024 now. Happy new year. And the race is on! Next week, the Iowa caucuses. After Iowa …Bret Stephens: Le déluge.Gail: OK, I want to hear your thoughts. Any chance Donald Trump won’t be the Republican nominee? Do you have a Nikki Haley scenario?Bret: Gail, my feelings about the G.O.P. primary contest are like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. After the 2022 midterms, when Trump’s favored candidates were more or less trounced and he looked like a total loser, I was in complete denial that he could win. Then, as his standing…
Amnesty played a leading role in bringing down the curtain on South Africa’s apartheid regime. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 1995, famously traded truth for justice by granting amnesty from prosecution for those willing to testify fully. For the commission’s chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, amnesty was an essential component of the reconciliation process because of the promise it held for securing the truth and for healing the social divisions created by apartheid. Amnesty, in the form of prisoner releases, was also part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the three decades of violence in…
Conventional wisdom has generally held that Israel’s government lacks a strategy for the Gaza Strip beyond toppling Hamas.“Israel has no plan for Gaza after war ends, experts warn,” the BBC reported in October. In November The Washington Post observed that “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under criticism for not offering a clear plan for what happens in Gaza if Israel succeeds in its goal of deposing Hamas.” A headline in Foreign Affairs in December lamented “Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza.”But there are signs that some members of the Israeli government do indeed have a strategy, or at least…
It’s not enough to simply tell children what the output should be. You have to create a system of guidelines — an algorithm — that allows them to arrive at the correct outputs when faced with different inputs, too. The parentally programmed algorithm I remember best from my own childhood is “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” It teaches kids how, in a range of specific circumstances (query: I have some embarrassing information about the class bully; should I immediately disseminate it to all of my other classmates?), they can deduce the desirable outcome (output: no,…
Without unstifled access to our city’s tree-lined streets and architectural marvels, New York’s amblers are left trapped in tiny apartments and cluttered offices. When we go outside, the domination of cars, scooters and bicycles imprison us in public. They trigger omnipresent skirmishes, dodges and clenches of the jaw. Today it too often feels as if crossing the street at a “Walk” light is not a right so much as a pleading negotiation — as if my free movement is begrudgingly, charitably permitted by glittery-eyed, two-ton monsters that inch impatiently forward, resentful to have relinquished precious seconds.New York today feels a…
How do you see the 2025 election playing out?Mara: Twenty-eight percent. Wow, that’s abysmal. I still wonder how much this has to do with a general post-pandemic malaise. I tend to agree that it’s hard to see a strong challenge from the left, but I wouldn’t rule anything out this early. I’m not sure how much racial grievance Brad Lander would inspire, given his strong record on social justice issues, which dates back over a decade to his role alongside Jumaane Williams in pushing to end Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk program. That said, the only challenger who would obviously pose serious problems…
Early on the morning of Friday, Nov. 10, my phone rang with terrible news: My wife, Nancy, has a highly aggressive form of breast cancer.Even as I type these words, I know there are countless readers who know the exact sensation. Either they’ve received a similar diagnosis or they love someone who has. And each of those readers knows the surreal feeling of having your life change instantly. Nancy and I lived in one reality before the phone call and another reality afterward.It’s like the difference between peace and war. In peacetime, you can dream and plan. True joy may…
To the Editor:I was moved by “I Wrote Jokes About How Parenting Stinks. Then I Had a Kid,” by Karen Kicak (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 25).I have marveled at my child and couldn’t bring myself to complain about night waking or tantrums. I stayed quiet at birthday parties when parents lamented missing out on adult time and said they wanted to get away from their children. I felt so proud of my daughter and wanted to be around her all the time, yet I learned to push that part down.Ms. Kicak is right that when we downplay our parenting skills…
Contemplating this moment in which a heartfelt compliment was the spark of a complicated friendship, I thought of my friend, the writer Robert Bingham, who died of a heroin overdose in 1999. At a gallery show in New York in the early 1990s, Rob, then a stranger, came up to me and told me he’d read a short story of mine and liked it very much. The story was about a young man whose father died young. I would later discover that Rob was a guy whose father died young, as had mine, though this affinity was something we never…