Author: Lance Garrison

I can’t tell you where I put my car keys or what I had for breakfast three days ago, but I can tell you Oprah Winfrey’s goal weight.My current Apple password and most of my elementary school teachers’ names have been lost to the mists of time. But I can tell you how much Ms. Winfrey weighed at her heaviest and how many pounds of fat were in the wagon she schlepped across the stage, post-Optifast, in 1988. I can also tell you how my own weight compared with hers at any given moment of my adult life.By now, you’ve…

To the Editor:Re “Assisted-Living Fees Pile Up, as Do the Profits” (front page, Nov. 23):The recent series of articles examining the impact of our nation’s rapidly aging population sheds much needed light on a significant and unavoidable societal issue.Many Americans do have sufficient savings and home equity to pay for long-term care at home or in assisted living. But many have underestimated the consequences of longer life spans and have either been unable to adequately save or have not prepared for the costs associated with the myriad physical and cognitive care needs that are common at advanced ages.Our society does…

A decade or more ago, it wasn’t uncommon to pay several hundred dollars for a cashmere sweater. Now, as the holiday season approaches, advertisements offer cashmere sweaters at less than half that price. An ad campaign on Instagram from the retailer Quince boasts, “This $50 cashmere sweater is worth the hype!”A cozy cashmere sweater at a bargain price may seem like a win for consumers. But it comes at a steep cost to one of our most fragile environmental systems — the grasslands of the Mongolian Plateau in Central Asia.Every cashmere sweater begins with a goat. The fibers are woven…

The Irish expect the worst to happen at any moment. And they have what my colleague Dan Barry calls “a wry acceptance of mortality.”Still, Ireland was shaken to its core in 2012 by the death of Savita Halappanavar, a beautiful, sparkling 31-year-old Indian immigrant, a dentist married to an Indian engineer. Savita was expecting her first child. She wore a new dress for the baby shower and prayed for the future. But that night she got sick. She went to a Galway hospital, where she was crushed to learn that her fetal membranes were bulging and her 17-week-old fetus would…

A recent book, “The Two-Parent Privilege,” by the economist Melissa Kearney, has received a great deal of media coverage, urging women and men to marry for the sake of their kids. But the journalist Anna Louie Sussman, who reports on gender, marriage and fertility, argues that “it’s not that easy to get married.”In this audio essay, Sussman explains why marriage is out of reach for so many, and says that simply advising people to marry comes across as smug and out of touch.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)The Times is committed…

Over time, such stories have helped us understand that the actions of the royals affect not just their world but also our own, which may explain both our perpetual curiosity about the family and the intensity of our emotions as we litigate their choices. Many prestige cable shows have insightfully examined the dynamics of a marriage — take Tony and Carmela Soprano, — but when “The Crown” dissects Charles and Diana’s doomed marriage, it is re-enacting a pivotal moment in history that informed how many modern couples think about marital obligation and what we owe our partners and ourselves.The final…

I started training to be a doctor in the aftermath of the gulf war. It was a dark time to commit to a career of healing. U.S. sanctions and relentless bombings had decimated our medical infrastructure and endangered our access to medical supplies. Surrounded by devastation, we fought to heal, to operate, to comfort — often with the barest of resources. Every day was a battle in itself, trying to save lives as our facilities crumbled around us.The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 pushed a teetering health care system to the brink. Bombings and counterinsurgency operations relentlessly flooded hospitals…

Last week on the Senate floor two senators rose to express disappointment with the House of Representatives. This was by itself routine enough, but the senators, Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, and the New York Democrat and majority leader, Chuck Schumer weren’t complaining about Ukraine funding or border policy. They were complaining that the House was impeding transparency on U.F.O.s.The back story, for those who don’t follow every twist of what we’re now supposed to call the unidentified anomalous phenomenon (U.A.P.) debate, is that the National Defense Authorization Act, on Schumer’s instigation, included provisions to establish a presidential commission…

That came with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius,” published in 2018, which gave rise to the climate strikers and the protest group Extinction Rebellion and breathed oxygen into the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal. Even those concerned on the sidelines had a clearer sense of just how short the timeline really was: that to avoid really dangerous warming required cutting global emissions almost in half by 2030. We are now halfway through that period, and emissions are higher than they were when the report was published.The report also…

But the answer to all this confusion can’t simply be to update campus bylaws. Rather, we need to come up with better forms of speech education, keyed to the very purpose of the university, that give students the tools to work through the hard cases themselves.The treacherousness of the current moment has been building for some time. For much of the 20th century, free speech was a rallying cry for the left, a way of sticking up for Communists, anarchists, pacifists and student activists. In recent years, though, this hasn’t been the dominant story line. In the United States, it…