Author: Lance Garrison
I started making this short documentary as a response to my mom developing dementia in her early 60s and forgetting how to read a knitting pattern. After years of having her knit for me, I taught myself how to knit by watching YouTube tutorials. As I learned more, and my mom’s health declined, I began to understand the solace that knitting brings.I started interviewing members of the Merrymakers, a small group of older knitters in rural Shropshire, England, over five years ago. All the members had their own stories illustrating the therapeutic power of textile arts and how knitting granted…
Recent general-election polling has generally shown Donald Trump maintaining a slight lead over President Biden. Yet many of those polls also reveal an Achilles’ heel for Mr. Trump that has the potential to change the shape of the race.It relates to Mr. Trump’s legal troubles: If he is criminally convicted by a jury of his peers, voters say they are likely to punish him for it.A trial on criminal charges is not guaranteed, and if there is a trial, neither is a conviction. But if Mr. Trump is tried and convicted, a mountain of public opinion data suggests voters would…
An editor of mine told me a story from his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in Iowa. The little boy, looking out over acres and acres of corn, asked his grandfather, “How are we going to shuck all that corn?” His grandfather said, “One row at a time.”This, too, is how to improve the world. And we can start small.Personally, I vow that I will frequently visit a children’s hospital and try to distract kids with stories, the funnier the better. I vow that I will phone every lonely person I know — and there are plenty — at least…
In a rare bit of political good news in the final days of 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has signed into law legislation aimed at increasing voter turnout.For so many people, the temptation to tune out in this moment of uninspiring politics is stronger than ever. But in Albany, as in Washington, one of the clearest ways to build a saner, more responsive political system is to vastly increase the number of voters who cast ballots.The bill enacted by Ms. Hochul and the State Legislature would do just that, by moving many county and local elections across New…
A wrecking ball. A bull in a China shop. A “chaos candidate.” During Donald Trump’s whirlwind rise to the presidency, his opponents and critics frequently noted his penchant for havoc. Surely, they believed, voters would not want to steer the country toward disorder and mayhem.The problem? In 2016, being a chaos candidate turned out to be a feature, not a bug, of American politics: Enough voters were tired of bland, establishment candidates and a system that didn’t improve their lives, and they put Mr. Trump over the top. The Trump team was so confident that these voters and the president…
Of all the ways the body can go wrong, A.L.S. is one of the most frightening. It begins subtly — a twitching muscle, a cough when you swallow or a clumsy hand. But then it progresses. Motor neurons degenerate and die. You lose the ability to talk, to eat and ultimately to breathe. There is no cure. Treatment will slow progression somewhat, but not enough.A diagnosis of A.L.S., or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, begins a race against the clock. What do you do to make yourself heard before you are rendered voiceless? How do you find a trial or a treatment…
We lose something when we force ourselves to be polite.
But such caviling flies in the face of history, common sense and even human biology. The detractors have lost sight of a basic fact: Everyone has to eat.At our deepest level, we are “biologically engineered for human interaction,” said Robin Dunbar, an emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University. And we seem to need to eat together, even when we don’t agree with one another. We don’t know why this is so, Dr. Dunbar said, but his theory is that communal eating stimulates endorphins, our bodies’ naturally occurring opioids that reinforce good behaviors. Even our closest primate relatives, like…
Peary — who once wrote home in a letter, “Mother, I must have fame” — was self-serving, paranoid and meanspirited. He fathered, and abandoned, children with Inuit women; he obfuscated and minimized the accomplishments of his Black assistant Matthew Henson; he stole treasured meteorites and brought Inuit people from Greenland in order to put them on display at the American Museum of Natural History. And when his polar excursion failed, he set about inventing, just as Cook had.By the time he claimed to have reached the pole in 1909, Cook had proved his worth as an explorer. He had begun…
To the Editor:Re “A Booming Industry of Cutting Babies’ Tongues” (front page, Dec. 21):This article describes a surgery performed on babies who are born with their tongues attached too tightly to the bottom of their mouths. One needs only to note that there is not a single substantive profile in the article of a family that had a positive experience with the procedure — a statistical majority — to understand that the reporters are fearmongering.Their article poisons the well against not only a procedure that can provide relief to breastfeeding parents and babies who are having difficulty feeding, but also…