Author: Lance Garrison

“Frankly, I felt exposed,” Loury told me. We were sitting by the fireplace of his living room on a chilly April afternoon in Providence, R.I., where he is a professor at Brown University. “I felt that my integrity could potentially be called into question.” He needed to “come clean.”“I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true,” Loury wrote in a mea culpa for his Substack, calling his error egregious. That weekend, he had Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, who oversaw the prosecution of Chauvin in the…

When I asked new college graduates last month to tell me about their job searches, I got back a ton of heartache. Unanswered applications. Lowered expectations. For some, a sense that college was a waste of time and money.John York wrote that he was about to earn a master’s degree in mathematics from New York University. “I have submitted close to 400 applications. I have heard back from less than 40, all rejections,” he wrote. “I essentially cannot get any job, because there are no entry-level positions anywhere at all.” He has a patent, he passed the first-level exam for…

Not long after Donald Trump was criminally charged in four state and federal cases last year, many people who want to see the former president held to account expressed an understandable fear: A MAGA mole would sneak onto the jury and then refuse to vote guilty, no matter how damning the evidence.The resulting hung jury would be just the vindication that Mr. Trump needs. But following Stormy Daniels’s dramatic testimony on Tuesday in Mr. Trump’s New York hush-money case, which delved into graphic detail about what she said was a brief, unpleasant sexual encounter with Mr. Trump in 2006, I…

May 8, 2024 — Want to sleep better and longer? Ditch the meat. At least that’s what some experts are saying. Vegans and vegetarians sleep around 30 more minutes per night than average, and up to 90% of them report good or excellent sleep quality, according to a recent survey published by the Sleep Foundation. “Poor sleep leads to poor food choices,” according to Abhinav Singh, MD, medical director of the Indiana Sleep Center and medical advisor for the Sleep Foundation. “That is why they are called comfort foods — because nobody who’s tired and sleep-deprived is going to reach for a salad.”Speaking of salad,…

The first is the militarization of American police forces and the rise of what Radley Balko has called the “warrior cop,” especially after Sept. 11 — a period in which, it is important to remember, the United States has gotten vastly safer, but during which law enforcement has nevertheless gotten far more martial, in their weaponry and gear, their tactics and training, and indeed their outward-facing “thin blue line” rhetoric, as well. The second is the recent turn against all forms of protest, by law enforcement and the public, in the aftermath of the mass climate change marches of 2019…

When we talk about the rise of economic inequality, or the fact that America, which long prided itself on being a land where a person could come and rise up the economic ladder and build a better life for themselves and their children, well, in the United States now, it’s actually more difficult to do that than it is in much of Europe. We’ve become a land of economic stagnation where people’s destinies are in large part determined by who their parents are. These problems have at their root the lack of housing.Single-family zoning grew up in the early 20th…

Let’s just come right out and say what pretty much everyone keeping an eye on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to blackmail House Speaker Mike Johnson is now thinking: Way to keep screwing this up, congresswoman!After huddling for several hours in two days of meetings with Greene this week to discuss her elongated crusade to oust him, the speaker emerged unscathed Tuesday afternoon, apparently without having committed to any ridiculous concessions. And really, why would he?There was no way Johnson was going to get booted by Greene and her wee band of bomb throwers over the Ukraine funding bill. A majority…

Dr. Paul Appelbaum, the director of the division of law, ethics and psychiatry at Columbia, told me that in these situations, family members are often “aware that if they turn the child out of the house, not only is that sort of turning the risk loose on society, but they’re also increasing the risk to their child.” He said mentally ill individuals are at greater risk of being victims of violent crimes than members of the general population are.This week, my newsroom colleague Glenn Thrush reported on the tragic death of Markus Johnson, “who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia,”…

Second, there’s a view that Francis’ capricious governing style has alienated even many churchmen who are not especially conservative and created little appetite for a sequel or “Francis II” successor. This is the theme of a sweeping assessment by Damian Thompson, an English Catholic journalist, in the online magazine UnHerd, which argues that while Francis’ maladministration and continuing scandals (including the protection of favored clerics accused of sexual abuse) have often been ignored by the secular press, they have made a strongly negative impression on the cardinals who will elect his successor.Finally there’s the belief that there has been no…

First, they are virtually all about stopping Israel’s shameful behavior in killing so many Palestinian civilians in its pursuit of Hamas fighters, while giving a free pass to Hamas’s shameful breaking of the cease-fire that existed on Oct. 7. On that morning, Hamas launched an invasion in which it murdered Israeli parents in front of their children, children in front of their parents — documenting it on GoPro cameras — raped Israeli women and kidnapped or killed everyone they could get their hands on, from little kids to sick grandparents.Again, you can be — and should be — appalled at…