Author: Lance Garrison

In August 1944, in a city near Paris, Robert Capa took a photograph of a woman cradling a baby in the middle of a jeering crowd, her head shaved and her forehead marked with a swastika.The woman, Simone Touseau, would become infamous — first as a symbol of the brutality of post-occupation France and later, through painstaking scholarship, as an example of the Nazi sympathies among some of the French during World War II.A novel released in France this summer has reinvented her once again, this time as a woman scorned. It’s a reinvention that is a disservice to the…

Then there are the books — the new biographies and deconstructions and collected interviews. He permeates our cultural oxygen like a latter-day Shakespeare. As with Shakespeare, his words are often applied in ways that their creator most likely never intended. To borrow from W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “The words of a dead man/Are modified in the guts of the living.”Mr. Sondheim, who specialized in portraits of yearning outsiders, would probably regard his canonization on Broadway with the deeply mixed feelings in which he specialized. (Surely, he would have cocked an eyebrow at his apotheosis as the warm…

Queen Victoria wore black for the remaining four decades of her life after her beloved husband, Prince Albert, died in 1861. This mourning practice was still commonplace during the first decades of the 20th century but almost nonexistent by its end. My great-grandmother, who died in 1999, was the only person I knew who wore mourning black until her own death.Over the past century, traditional mourning practices have fallen out of favor in the West. Black is now usually worn only to a funeral, and not always then. Fewer and fewer people return to visit the deceased at their place…

It is said that wars end when both sides conclude they have nothing more to gain by fighting. By that logic, Israel and the Palestinians should have long ago agreed to the only solution that makes sense: separate states side by side. They’ve tried, again and again, but in this cauldron of religious passion and competing grievances, peace has always lost out. Is there any chance that things will be different when the guns fall silent this time?On the face of it, it does not seem promising. The brutal attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 and the massive Israeli retaliatory…

In researching and reporting for my most recent book, “Master of Change,” which explores how to navigate periods of disorder and endure life’s inevitable chaos and flux, I came across countless individuals who underwent harrowing life disruptions from grave injury to illness to profound loss. The vast majority said that when they were in the thick of these experiences what they were going through often felt meaningless and as if it were going to last forever. But they got to the other side and could look back on their struggles without a sense of their being all consuming, though sometimes…

They are coming at this from dramatically different places. Iowa is make or break for Mr. DeSantis, who has gone all in on the state. This makes it especially unsettling for his team that Ms. Haley has caught up with him there in recent polling. Mr. DeSantis has long benefited from the belief by many in the G.O.P. establishment that he is the party’s most electable option: Trump but competent, as the sales pitch goes. If he places behind both Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley, then limps to a second defeat in New Hampshire — where recent polling shows him…

As a teenager she had dreams of becoming a doctor, but soon after the war,she began to see the perils of doing so. In the 1950s, a propaganda campaign accused Jewish doctors of conspiring against Soviet leaders. Antisemitism prevented many Jewish people from being able to advance in their studies or careers.Dr. Amastis was undeterred. She dived into her studies at medical school. Passionate about surgery, she filled her days and nights with clinical training. She could have been sent to work in a remote part of the Soviet Union where she had no family, but instead she married a…

He thinks the big story here is that so many younger nones categorize themselves as nothing in particular rather than as atheists or agnostics. If you’re an atheist or an agnostic, you have a defined worldview. Whereas with many young Americans, Burge said, “they look at all the religion options and say, ‘I really don’t want to pick a side.’ And that’s what nothing in particular is. It’s not religious, obviously, but it’s also not secular, either. It’s kind of, ‘No, thank you. I’ll pass on the question of religion.’”And while some of their disaffiliation is driven by the same…

The lament is as old as education itself: The students aren’t paying attention. But today, the problem of flighty or fragmented attention has reached truly catastrophic proportions. High school and college teachers overwhelmingly report that students’ capacity for sustained, or deep attention has sharply decreased, significantly impeding the forms of study — reading, looking at art, round-table discussions — once deemed central to the liberal arts.By some measures you are lucky these days to get 47 seconds of focused attention on a discrete task. “Middlemarch” is tough sledding on that timeline. So are most forms of human interaction out of…

As the holiday season approaches, many parents find themselves facing a tricky problem: how to talk about Santa Claus with their young children, especially as those children begin to develop doubts about Santa’s existence. When does a fun, fanciful tradition risk becoming harmful deception? How can parents — who typically play a large and active role in fostering a belief in Santa Claus — ease the transition to disbelief?As developmental psychologists, we’ve long been interested in such questions, in part because they raise larger issues about the role of imaginative play in the life of a child and how parents…