Author: Lance Garrison

In the late 1950s, my parents tried to buy land in northern New Jersey on which to build a home. But no one would sell to them. A real estate agent said it was because they were Chinese.It was a time when, throughout the United States, residential segregation was common, supported by mortgage lending practices and often written into real estate deeds with racial covenants that forbade the sale of a home to Black people, Jews and Asians. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Western states passed alien land laws, which prohibited Asian immigrants from buying or leasing…

Then, fearing inflationary pressures on the economy, Congress let the American Rescue Plan’s most powerful investments, and therefore the most substantial government support for social reproduction in a generation, end. But social reproduction — the caretaking of people, relationships and systems that make our society work — still had to be done. Reallocating your spending from child care to student loan payments, for example, might be feasible, but it is not particularly enjoyable. That assumes one can find accessible child care or an in-network doctor or apartment. When stimulus funding ended, a lot of services people rely on became harder…

Gail Collins: Hey Bret, would you hate it if I asked for a couple of predictions for 2024?Bret Stephens: Gail, it would be better if you asked me for my prediction for the year 2112. That way, hardly anybody will remember how wrong I was and I won’t be around for them to remind me. But here’s my 2024 prediction anyway: Trump is elected president again, and we become neighbors in Toronto.Now your turn.Gail: OK, Donald Trump is going to be campaigning for president while on trial for an astonishing range of crimes. Meanwhile, we’ll shiver with fear every time…

As I watched the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania struggle last week to respond to harsh congressional questioning about the prevalence of antisemitism on their campuses, I had a singular thought: Censorship helped put these presidents in their predicament and censorship will not help them escape.To understand what I mean, we have to understand what, exactly, was wrong — and right — with their responses in the now-viral exchange with Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York. The key moment occurred when Stefanik asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate school policies. The…

Rachel Goldberg’s 23-year-old son, Hersh, was abducted by Hamas at a music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7. In this interview with the Opinion editor Sarah Wildman, Ms. Goldberg reflects on the past two months of the crisis, the recent pause in fighting and the brief moments of “delicious, thankful respite” she felt as hostages returned home — even as her son remains captive. And she argues the hostage plight should be treated as a humanitarian crisis, not a political one.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)The Times is committed to…

To the Editor:Re “Penn’s President Felled by Furor Over Testimony” (front page, Dec. 10):I too was not happy with M. Elizabeth Magill’s and the other university presidents’ responses at the congressional hearing about antisemitism on campus, but I do not support resignation or firing. Everyone in a difficult job has made mistakes and has learned from those mistakes. Should any of us be fired or forced to resign for every mistake we make?All of these accomplished women were grilled at the hearing trying to balance their duties to protect the safety of their students and their right to free speech.…

I am ordained, but I do not pastor a church. Still, I am often invited to be a guest speaker or lecturer in congregations and universities. Lately, when people ask me questions afterward, they want to know my opinion about the war between Israel and Hamas. I am happy to answer them. Members of the clergy aren’t shut off from the world, and I don’t think our words should be either — we can be a force for good.The United States is a better nation because of the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil…

The near-implosion of OpenAI, a world leader in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, surfaced a conflict within the organization and the broader community about the speed with which the technology should continue, and also if slowing it down would aid in making it more safe.As a professor of both A.I. and A.I. ethics, I think this framing of the problem omits the critical question of the kind of A.I. that we accelerate or decelerate.In my 40 years of A.I. research in natural language processing and computational creativity, I pioneered a series of machine learning advances that let me build…

Last week, the wealthiest Americans had their day in court. The case before the Supreme Court, Moore v. United States, is a challenge to an obscure and narrow provision of the tax code, in former President Donald Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, that taxes certain assets held abroad.An activist lower court judge, most likely inspired by right-wing constitutional scholars and think tanks, cleverly framed Moore as a grand occasion to rule against some future wealth tax, and the high court took it up.Supporters of the Moore litigation probably hope to persuade conservatives on the court to issue a broad…

For more than 20 years, he lived and worked in Mozambique, but the move would not be Mr. Songolo’s last. Several years ago, he says, the government of Mozambique falsely accused a group of people, including him, of stealing medicine and equipment from a hospital. Despite a court ruling in the group’s favor, the officials unsuccessfully tried to deport them back to Congo. Mr. Songolo says that the United Nations refugee agency heard about the case and got involved, helping him relocate to Arizona this year, along with his wife and five children.As before, Mr. Songolo had few resources to…