Author: Lance Garrison

The thing that has surprised me most since I began my job leading foreign assistance for global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development is how much emergencies have defined my work. The bureau I oversee focuses on reducing the global burden of mortality and disease and on protecting the United States from health threats from abroad. Our work is supposed to primarily serve long-range goals — for instance, eradicating polio (after 35 years of effort, we’re down to just a handful of wild-type cases in the world) and ending the public health threat of H.I.V., malaria and tuberculosis…

Off Route 6 on Cape Cod, a few miles in from the bay near Yarmouth, Mass., there hides a giant ancient English weeping beech. The tree is so big that it has its own parking lot.But you don’t see it right away. Tucked among a clutch of shrubs and smaller trees, it’s not clear where, or what, the tree is. You follow signs to a thick green curtain, push through, and suddenly you’re on the other side, inside. A huge gray-brown trunk, chiseled with lovers’ initials, rises 60 or 70 feet in a smooth, elephantine twist. Branches begin close to…

I fell in love with “Fairytale of New York,” the indelible Christmas song by the Pogues, before I’d heard a note.I grew up in the boarded-up, bombed-out Northern Ireland of the Troubles. There wasn’t an abundance of galleries in Derry, where I lived, at the time, and my father would take me to a record store where the sleeves were one of my main early experiences of art. I’d spend hours escaping into the alien worlds of prog rock and heavy metal.The sleeve of “Fairytale” was different. It was black and white and spare. There was a photograph of a…

Here is a summary of a conversation I feel like I had countless times during my pregnancy: You think being pregnant is hard? Just wait until your baby is born and sleep exists only in your dreams! Except you’ll never have dreams again because you’ll never sleep again! Anyway, congratulations! Welcome to the Mom Club!These dire warnings and endless jokes about the unspeakable horrors of parenting have only increased as my daughter enters the “terrible twos.” While friends, family members and kindly strangers have also shared encouraging words with me, the anxiety-inducing comments seem to vastly exceed the positive ones.When…

For many years I’ve written about people suffering intractable pain, and how their agony and increased risk of suicide and death has been ignored in the rush to end the overdose crisis.I’ve told the story of a woman who hoped for a cancer diagnosis since it might mean that her chronic pain, which already felt like “pouring acid on” her skin, would get better treatment. I’ve written about a father who was paralyzed from the waist down, left in excruciating pain and using a wheelchair following a car accident, who died by suicide the day a doctor cut off his…

Growing up in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the Opinion editorial assistant Adrian J. Rivera was no stranger to processed food. As a child, he relished a good Big Mac, a box of chicken nuggets and a cold, refreshing Sprite. But after moving to the East Coast for college, Rivera’s socioeconomic circles began shifting, as well as his worldview around food. In this audio essay, he reflects on his relationship with processed food, class and what it’s like to go home with a new set of tastes.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)The…

If you have not kept up with the latest scandal in the world of young adult publishing, it is a doozy. It involves a debut author with a lot of buzz, lies, clumsy alibis, “review bombing,” a long and sordid confession — and, of course, Goodreads. Because whenever there is a meltdown in publishing, Goodreads, the Amazon-owned site that bills itself as “the largest site for readers and book recommendations,” is reliably at the center of it.You might wonder if Goodreads isn’t just an enabler of scandal, but the problem itself.But first, the scandal: Internet sleuths figured out that an…

As a teenager in the 1980s, I watched the construction of the intricately designed Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center in Gaza City, named after one of Gaza’s greatest public figures, and its theater, grand hall, public library, printing press and cultural salon.Students and researchers, scholars and artists from across the Gaza Strip came to visit it, and so did President Bill Clinton in 1998. The center was the gem of Gaza City. Watching it being built inspired me to become an engineer, which led to a career as a professor and, in the footsteps of al-Shawa, as mayor of Gaza City.Now…

To the Editor:Re “What Is Happening at the Columbia School of Social Work?,” by Pamela Paul (column, Dec. 18):I am outraged by Ms. Paul’s column. I don’t know what is happening at the Columbia School of Social Work, but if engagement around issues of social justice and racism were entering the curriculum only in recent years, it would be a very unusual social work school.The equally renowned Smith College School for Social Work, from which I received an M.S.W. 32 years ago, identified itself as an “anti-racist institution” shortly after my cohort graduated, and a critical understanding of race and…

I grew up in Japan, and as a kid, more than anything, I longed to be like everyone around me. Yet as the child of a Japanese mother and a British father, I was considered hafu, a term used to describe people who are ethnically half Japanese.I spent much of my young life proving how Japanese I was. I would grow angry when people praised my impeccable Japanese. Too often I felt I didn’t belong in my own society. It was all too much. Always standing out felt so suffocating that at 19 years old, I moved to New York.Japan…