Author: Lance Garrison

It has been a bumpy few weeks for carmakers who sell electric vehicles, which are moving more slowly off the lot than they were earlier this year. What’s going on? It seems that American drivers may be more hesitant about E.V.s than automakers expected.I am familiar with trepidation about electric vehicles; I hear it when I give talks around the country about how each of us can take small steps to slow and stop climate change, when I chat with my neighbors and when I go on a road trip in my own E.V. Some people worry about running out…

All politicians lie. So many people consider that idea self-evident that I’ve heard it deployed as both a defense of lying and a reason to disengage from our democratic system entirely.There’s a class of lying so extreme, however, that it exceeds either analytical framework. These aren’t lies about what a politician will do for voters; they’re lies about what the politician had for breakfast, what book he’s reading, whether he played on his college volleyball team. And I’m not talking just about George Santos.But I am absolutely, definitely talking about George Santos. Last week, a report by the House Ethics…

I’ll wager that the event of 2023 that will change our lives the most in coming years is not the sighting of a Chinese spy balloon, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, the fall of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership or any of the other eruptions that transfixed us this year.More likely, the event that’s judged most transformative will be some scientific or technological advance that only a handful of people know about right now — because that’s how things almost always go. The first time the word “transistor” appeared in print was in an article in The New York Times in…

After years of heady spending, the budget cuts announced by Mayor Eric Adams last week hit New York City like a punch to the gut: Most libraries would be closed on Sundays. The expansion of the city’s signature prekindergarten program would be delayed. So would efforts to improve New York’s notoriously dirty streets and keep rats at bay. The city’s police force would be pared down in coming years.Fiscal reality has caught up with a stunned city. The brutal cuts come as Mr. Adams scrambles to fill a $7 billion budget deficit in the next year. The Citizens Budget Commission,…

To the Editor:Re “The Question of Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism,” by Charles M. Blow (column, Nov. 16):The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, adopted by dozens of countries around the world, indeed does define anti-Zionism as antisemitism. It cites as an example of antisemitism: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”That the Jewish people deserve the right of self-determination, after the Holocaust and the persecution throughout Arab lands for centuries, was resolved in 1948. To debate Zionism is precisely the problem facing the…

To the Editor:Re “Progressives Aren’t Liberal,” by Pamela Paul (column, Nov. 17):Ms. Paul bemoans the failure of labels to accurately describe what a person’s beliefs are, in this case liberals. Instead, she should be championing the demise of labels for the very reason that whether progressive or liberal, conservative or libertarian, labels are a lazy way of organizing people into groups primed by the echo chamber we live in and devoid of any nuance.Labels allow a labeler to define us without the heavy lifting of critical thinking that truly informs who and what we are. The use of labels gives…

Peter Coy: So, Binya, Americans seem very grumpy about the economy lately, despite what looks like some pretty good news. I bet a lot of people will be talking over Thanksgiving dinner about why that is. I think I have some ideas to chew on.Let me throw out one thing to start. One problem is that economists and the general public talk past each other. Inflation is a good example. To an economist, inflation is the change in prices. So if prices go up sharply but then level off for a few months, the monthly inflation rate at that point…

Ah, Thanksgiving. That magical time when friends and family gather round the table to share the love, reminisce — and bicker endlessly about politics and the state of the nation. If your clan is anything like mine, the conversation bends toward the grim and angsty: President Biden’s advanced age, Donald Trump’s legal dramas, Ron DeSantis’s creepy robot smile, the price of Tom Turkey, the chaos in Congress, the government’s alien cover-up …. It can be a lot.But there is, in fact, so much to be grateful for, especially in the political realm. Don’t laugh! And please stick with me while…

Native tribes — whose lives had been physically and spiritually intertwined with the buffalo for more than 10,000 years, before their sacred connection was so abruptly severed more than a century ago — are doing the most significant restoration work. The InterTribal Buffalo Council, whose membership now includes 83 tribes in 23 states, has already returned approximately 20,000 buffalo to their ancestral homelands.If anyone doubts that the trajectory is now pointing in the right direction, consider this. One hundred and fifty years ago, during the hide hunters’ final frenzy of annihilation, Columbus Delano, who was then the secretary of the…

The podcaster and M.I.T. scientist Lex Fridman, who has emerged as the father confessor of the tech world, expressed the rapid-fire range of emotions I encountered again and again: “You sit back, both proud, like a parent, but almost like proud and scared that this thing will be much smarter than me. Like both pride and sadness, almost like a melancholy feeling, but ultimately joy.”When I visited the OpenAI headquarters in May, I found the culture quite impressive. Many of the people I interviewed had arrived when OpenAI was a nonprofit research lab, before the ChatGPT hullabaloo — when most…