Author: Lance Garrison
“It appears that not all orgasms are created equally,” says Tobias S. Köhler, MD, MPH, an associate professor at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield.Study after study shows that intercourse has all sorts of benefits for men — for your blood pressure, heart and prostate health, pain, and more. You’d think that masturbation would, too. But it doesn’t.Why would it make a difference whether you ejaculate during sex or on your own? No one’s sure. But your body seems to respond differently. Even the makeup of semen is different if you masturbate instead of having sex.Still, does it…
As a society, we’ve clearly benefited from promising A.I.-based technologies; this year I was thrilled to read about the ones that might detect breast cancer that doctors miss or let humans decipher whale communications. Focusing on those benefits, however, while blaming ourselves for the many ways that A.I. technologies fail us, absolves the companies behind those technologies — and, more specifically, the people behind those companies.Events of the past several weeks highlight how entrenched those people’s power is. OpenAI, the entity behind ChatGPT, was created as a nonprofit to allow it to maximize the public interest rather than just maximize…
Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’It’s become something of a tradition on “The Ezra Klein Show” to end the year with an “Ask Me Anything” episode. So as 2023 comes to a close, I sat down with our new senior editor, Claire Gordon, to answer listeners’ questions about everything from the Israel-Hamas war to my thoughts on parenting.We discuss whether the war in Gaza has affected my relationships with family members and friends; what I think about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; whether the Democrats should have voted to keep Kevin McCarthy as House speaker; how worried I am…
Far from the hustle of modern Atlanta and its rapidly growing suburbs is an older Georgia, a rural land of cotton fields and vacant storefronts, of low-wage jobs and shuttered swimming pools, of underfunded Black colleges and American promises ever deferred.In 2020, strong turnout among Black voters in these isolated regions of the state was key to the coalition that turned Georgia blue and ousted Donald Trump from office. Though Atlanta and its suburbs have drawn much of the national attention, Black Democrats in rural Georgia were just as critical: Voting in large numbers in 2020, they reduced the margin…
By Diana Buttu, Peter Beinart and Bernard AvishaiProduced by Derek ArthurSince Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s violent response in Gaza, nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 80 percent of Gazans have been forced to leave their homes. What is the future for Gaza?In this collection of audio essays, the Opinion guest writers Diana Buttu, Peter Beinart and Bernard Avishai share their visions for how to achieve lasting peace in the region.Read their complete essays and the perspectives of other writers here.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)The…
The Supreme Court is considering whether to take up the question of presidential immunity — that is, the idea that a president, by virtue of the unique nature of the office, is entitled to exceedingly broad protections from legal consequences for statements made and actions taken while in office. If the court takes up that question in a case regarding Donald Trump, it will have profound consequences for both the 2024 election and the bigger question of presidential power.To advance the Jan. 6 case against Mr. Trump, the special counsel Jack Smith wants to skip a step at the appellate…
From an economic point of view, 2023 will go down in the record books as one of the best years ever — a year in which inflation came down amazingly fast at no visible cost, defying the predictions of many economists that disinflation would require years of high unemployment.So far, at least, the public seems unwilling to believe the good news, or to give the Biden administration any credit. But this column isn’t about the apparent gap between voter perceptions and reality. It is instead about the unwillingness of some influential economists and officials to accept the fact that they…
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I spoke to a friend in Istanbul about my boundless horror, and while I can’t remember the exact words she said in response, they amounted to “Welcome to my world.” I told her about all the protests breaking out, and she gently warned me not to get my hopes up. She’d also demonstrated against Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, she said, but eventually those protests had died out, and ours would too.Over the next four years, I was often relieved that her prediction hadn’t come true. The Resistance, as the broad…
Perhaps that disparity reflects a lack of knowledge about the extent of Mr. Trump’s plans. Or it may indicate widespread dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs. In October, staff members from Customs and Border Protection interacted with more than 240,000 people who attempted to enter the United States along the southern border, and between October 2022 and September of this year, 169 people whose names matched those on the terrorist watch list were arrested while trying to cross.Indeed, it is easy to overstate how radical Mr. Trump’s record is on immigration. Mr. Biden kept in place Title 42, a…
Dec. 18, 2023 – The autopsy report of 54-year-old Friends actor Matthew Perry issued Friday by the Los Angeles County medical examiner has drawn attention to the possible risks of ketamine use, a drug traditionally used as an operating room anesthetic but more recently touted as a possible treatment for depression and other mental health conditions. Ketamine IVs can be given in clinics; products are also widely available via telehealth platforms for home oral use, with experts disagreeing on the safety of home use. After the results of the actor’s autopsy, ketamine experts are urging caution on when the drug is…