Author: Lance Garrison

I’ll be glued to the TV on Thursday for the debate between Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Fox News. (Not a plug.) It will pit a conservative Republican against a liberal Democrat, a one-time outfielder for Yale against a one-time pitcher for Santa Clara University, a fighter against another fighter. As Fox’s Sean Hannity told The Times, DeSantis and Newsom are “two very smart, well-educated, highly opinionated, philosophically different governors” who are “diametrically opposed.”Still not sure why these two are debating, but bring out the popcorn!My contribution to the predebate festivities is the…

One of the most fundamental problems with recycling is that we don’t really know how much of it actually happens because of an opaque global system that too often relies on counting the material that arrives at the front door of the facility rather than what comes out. What we do know is that with plastics, at least, the amount being recycled is much less than most of us assumed.You probably throw a milk container in the recycling, put the bins out on collection day and forget about it. But depending on where you are in the United States (or…

I asked her whether No Labels should be required to register as a political party.If No Labels fields candidates, it should register as a political party. It has the basic structure of a modern electoral organization, with leaders, data and campaign analysts, fund-raisers, and volunteers. If it is going to use this organization to support candidates running with its label, it is functionally a party — and needs to be subject to the same rules and regulations as the other parties.A No Labels candidate, Kuo continued,will likely serve as a spoiler in what is shaping up to be a very…

Fifty-three days ago, citizens of Israel suffered a horrendous attack orchestrated and executed by Hamas.The solidarity that Jewish Americans initially received from our fellow citizens in the aftermath of Oct. 7 has since waned, drowned out by other, more disturbing voices, even from some we considered allies, while hate crimes against Jews have skyrocketed.Today, too many Americans are exploiting arguments against Israel and leaping toward a virulent antisemitism. The normalization and intensifying of this rise in hate is the danger many Jewish people fear most.Since Oct. 7, Jewish-owned businesses that have nothing to do with Israel have been boycotted and…

State courts in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and elsewhere have so far declined to rule in favor of challenges asserting that Donald Trump should be disqualified from holding the presidency again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. (Cases in Michigan and Colorado have been appealed.)Challengers assert that Mr. Trump is barred because, as stated in Section 3, he was an officer of the United States who, after taking an oath to support the Constitution, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the country, or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on…

It’s actually three wars, and there’s one keystone that we have to get right.

Ten finance guys are drinking in a bar. Nine of them are Masters of the Universe — wheeler-dealers who make many millions of dollars every year. The tenth is what Gordon Gekko, in the movie “Wall Street,” called a “$400,000-a-year working Wall Street stiff.”Then the stiff leaves for a while, maybe to answer a call of nature. When he leaves, the average income of the guys still in the bar shoots up, because he’s no longer dragging that average down; when he comes back, the average drops again. But these fluctuations in the average don’t reflect changes in anyone’s income.Why…

Starting in the 1970s, the 1948ers were known as the “rejectionist front.” More recently, they have become the “axis of resistance.” Membership includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Assad regime in Syria and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — a Who’s Who of designated terrorist groups and their state sponsors.On Oct. 7, the axis of resistance became the face of the Palestinian movement. On Oct. 8, demonstrators around the world chose to embrace that axis. Sometimes they did so unwittingly, believing there was no contradiction between being pro-Palestinian and supporting Israel’s right to exist, or not understanding…

I have a proposal about our new usage of “they” to refer to individual people, as in, “Irene? Oh, they left an hour ago” or “Bernard cut themselves by accident.”Because it is so hard to change language by fiat, I know that my proposal here must qualify as modest. But propose it I must: Might it make the new “they” a little easier to handle if it were used with singular tense marking?I have often been asked by people over 35 or so, “Are we supposed to say ‘they want’ or ‘they wants’?” I always answer that the proper form…

Nov. 28, 2023 — The “sunscreen paradox” has confounded doctors of late: As more and more people use sunscreen, rates of melanoma and other skin cancers are going up. The statistics on all types of skin cancer are sobering:Invasive melanoma cases diagnosed annually increased 27% over the past 10 years. The rate of basal cell carcinoma (BCC) has risen in all age groups in the country at a rate of nearly 10% each year, according to the National Library of Medicine.Yale Medicine reports that squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) has risen to nearly 1 million diagnosed cases in the U.S. per year. Even cases of…