Author: Lance Garrison
May 2, 2024 – When does old age begin? Evidently, it depends on who you ask. And when you were born. For millions of people born between 1952 and 1974, the line in the sand between middle and old age is a moving target, according to German researcher Markus Wettstein, PhD. “Every 4 or 5 years, our perceived onset of old age has shifted one year or higher,” said Wettstein, who, along with a team of researchers from the Humboldt University of Berlin, examined data collected from over 14,000 German adults born during the 20th century, starting in 1911. Their findings, published…
Sticking with The Times, which was the source of most of your nominations over the past week — Margaret Lyons perfectly described the main character of the messy but mesmerizing “Baby Reindeer,” a new Netflix series about an aspiring stand-up comedian and his stalker: “Donny recognizes and articulates the dangers of wanting fame, how it warps his judgment but also could solve his problems. (One person knowing your darkest secret is unbearable, but a million people knowing it is stardom.) Agony and attention are bound together here — Look at me! No, not like that! — twin snakes choking the…
May 2, 2024 – More than 1 million Americans live with Crohn’s, a chronic and sometimes crippling inflammatory bowel disease that affects the intestines and leads to digestive issues. While some people may have mild symptoms or even be symptom-free at times, others get severe belly pain, diarrhea, fatigue, weight loss, anemia, and other life-threatening complications.So far, the condition doesn’t have a cure, and treatments are often limited. Typical drugs to treat it, such as steroids and immunosuppressants, can provide relief and slow the disease’s progress, but many patients say the drugs don’t work as well over time or don’t…
The idea of the garden as a place of sinister seclusion has found its way to the world of high fashion. The theme of the 2024 Met Gala on Monday will be “The Garden of Time,” a reference to a short story by J.G. Ballard. In Ballard’s characteristically bleak tale, a desperate mob advances on an elegant garden, where Count Axel and his wife live out a civilized, secluded existence. The count plucks mysterious “time flowers” to stave off the inevitable incursion, knowing the horde spells ruin to their cultivated life. Perhaps Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue…
The imagery is politically salient. Insofar as it resonates with his supporters, it may be an indication not that they are indifferent to our political tradition but rather that they are drawn to one of its core mythologies — and it suggests that attempts to use the legal system to defeat him politically will backfire.From the beginning, Mr. Trump’s admirers have compared him to a paradigmatic outlaw hero, Robin Hood. In 2017, Sebastian Gorka, an official in the Trump administration, described Mr. Trump as “a Robin Hood taking over the empire” — an outsider who suddenly found himself on the…
Pretty much every presidential election includes a smattering of third-party and independent candidates — minor players who have slim to no chance of winning but who can seriously damage the electoral chances of the major-party nominees. This year, with so many Americans unhappy about a rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump, alternative contenders are enjoying a moment, with one candidate in particular earning a surprising amount of support: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.A scion of America’s most famous political family, Mr. Kennedy is polling in the low double digits. With his quirky political brand, it is hard to know who…
Sarah Wildman: I’m Sarah Wildman, a staff editor and writer for Times Opinion.Newsreel: (Protest chants)Campus protests and rallies have been percolating since Oct. 8, but in the past week, something shifted.Newsreel: New York City police used force last night to zip-tie the hands of dozens of student protests and hauled them away in buses.Newsreel: Protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza have rocked campuses from coast to coast over the past week.Newsreel: The ongoing demonstrations have stirred debate about the line between free speech for the protesters and open harassment of Jewish students.Sarah Wildman: It seems on and off campus, the…
The first day teaching as an adjunct professor at a new university can be daunting: finding your way around campus, struggling to get access to web servers, office space and copiers — to say nothing of the ghastly compensation you receive for your labor.But on a bright spring day in April 2022, when I walked onto the Staten Island satellite campus of St. John’s University to prepare to teach a philosophy course that fall, I could tell something would be different about my experience there. The warm, tight-knit community on the tiny campus — whose main, much larger campus is…
It caused a bit of a sensation in 2014 when the editorial board of The New York Times published a six-part series urging the federal government to stop banning marijuana. Readers responded with more than 15,000 comments, pro and con (mostly pro). TV networks interviewed board members, and the big newspapers and magazines wrote articles about the series. There were cringe-worthy headlines about the editorial page going to pot. Twitter users fantasized about Times opinion writers getting stoned.The overall tone of the response was: Wow, if the staid New York Times thinks cannabis should be legal, maybe the federal government…
Grey’s Anatomy neurosurgeons perform a “groundbreaking procedure” to cure Parkinson’s. It’s not unusual for TV to fast-track medical innovation. Take the current season of Grey’s Anatomy, which featured a major storyline about a “cure” for Parkinson’s disease. The drama series followed a team of researchers and doctors as they used a groundbreaking surgical procedure using skin-derived stem cells.In real life, despite decades of research and huge gains in technical knowledge around stem cell therapies for Parkinson’s disease, those treatments remain out of reach for most people with the disease. Parkinson’s is a brain disorder that worsens over time and causes…