Author: Lance Garrison

Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, should resign.I don’t love thinking so and hoped we would not reach this tipping point in the controversy over whether she should be retained in her position. But a tipping point it is.Harvard has a clear policy on plagiarism that threatens undergraduates with punishment up to the university’s equivalent of expulsion for just a single instance of it. That policy may not apply to the university’s president, but the recent, growing revelations about past instances of plagiarism by Dr. Gay make it untenable for her to remain in office.As a matter of scholarly ethics, academic honor…

It’s been a strange few days on the Donald Trump front: He said something about himself that I actually believe and something about the economy that’s mostly true.On the personal side, Trump has been sounding a lot like Adolf Hitler lately — I don’t mean his general tone, I mean his specific statement last week at a New Hampshire rally that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing what Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf” almost word for word. (And if you think it was just a one-off, he said the same thing in a September interview.) But Trump…

This claim is a Christianized cousin of the secular idea that defending the free-speech rights of those with whom you vehemently disagree is, in essence, providing aid and comfort to racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia. In this view, your role as a citizen is first to determine whether any given speech meets with your moral approval, and then — and only then — to rally to its defense.But this is dangerous nonsense. I’m the farthest thing from a relativist. Indeed, my evangelical Christian religious convictions place me in a cohort that includes a mere 6 percent of adult Americans who…

But young people, according to polls, felt uncertain about American involvement in Ukraine. The binary of democracy versus authoritarianism didn’t ring true for a generation that had begun questioning the meaning of democracy at home and abroad. They lived with a sense of doom around climate change and many had embraced Black Lives Matter protests, both of which taught them about American hypocrisy and the preciousness of human life. “We have trouble with the idea that our nation has a right to lecture any other,” the young editors of the magazine The Drift wrote in June 2022. (I have taught…

For some people, social media is inconsequential — a cat photo here, a banana slip TikTok there. For others, it’s all-consuming — a helpless catapult into a slurry of anxiety, self-harm and depression.To each his own internet.Still, we can make some generalizations about the impact. We know social media use can harm mental health. We know that this disproportionately affects young people. Both the surgeon general and the American Psychological Association put out related health advisories this year. And we know that girls, who use social media more than boys, are disproportionately affected.But social media use also differs by race…

Dry January: It means you don’t drink alcohol for the month of January. Experts say it gives your body a chance to reset and allows you to re-evaluate your relationship with alcohol – and it’s getting more popular. What began when U.K. resident Emily Robinson paused her drinking to train for a half-marathon in 2011 turned into an official Alcohol Change UK campaign that has taken off. Today, millions both in the U.K. and across the pond in the U.S. have vowed to “stay dry” for January 2024. Kim Evans was a pioneer of sorts. She began going dry in January about…

To the Editor: Re “Projects for Offshore Wind Stall as Supply and Funding Sputter” (front page, Dec. 12):Offshore wind projects need to be reconsidered in both scale and financing.The Times accurately identifies the causes for delays and cancellations of ambitious offshore wind projects in the Northeast Atlantic. But the success of the recent launch of the South Fork Wind project may underscore another reason so many of the huge projects have been stymied.The South Fork Wind project, 35 miles off the coast of Montauk, N.Y., when fully operational, will produce electricity to fuel 70,000 homes on eastern Long Island and…

Dec. 21, 2023 — In 2013, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes to make a bold announcement: In 5 years, Amazon customers would be getting deliveries by drones. People could receive just about any item they wanted in only 30 minutes. A decade later, drones haven’t exactly become ubiquitous. As one headline teased, the company’s drone delivery service, Prime Air, in its first few weeks “delivered to fewer houses than there are words in this headline.” As 2023 progressed, the outlook didn’t seem to improve. Last month, The New York Times called the venture “underwhelming.” But there’s considerably more enthusiasm for drones when…

A.I. or no A.I., it pays to write — and to write well.

The Opinion video above gives voice to the lonely. We are publishing it at the end of a year in which loneliness started getting the kind of attention it has long deserved — an effort led, in large part, by the surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy. In a guest essay last spring, he revealed that he, too, had struggled with loneliness and said the nation was facing “an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” Several days later, he issued a surgeon general advisory about the problem, calling it a “public health crisis” and outlining a strategy to…