Author: Lance Garrison

Nikki Haley’s announcement on Wednesday that she’s going to vote for Donald Trump wasn’t that much of a surprise. Eight years ago, she basically did the same thing: She was critical of him before he got the nomination, then once he did, said she’d vote for him and sort of faded into the background, before her surprise arrival in the administration.She’ll probably end up in the vice-presidential conversation again, even though Trump already said she won’t be, partly because he seems to like the curveball consideration.I wrote a lot in the winter about what Haley would do after she lost,…

Ms. Keys is a fantastic talent; there’s a good reason she’s a megastar. But I can’t say I vibed to the songs, nor could I hum even a part of one the next day. My cousin, on the other hand — a musically knowledgeable theater professional who accompanied me to the show — loved it.Seeing her response helped me to understand mine. “I’m just not hearing it right,” I told her. I was listening for deftness of melody and harmonies that change every two seconds, tracing quirky pathways. At “Hell’s Kitchen,” that was like hollering for ketchup at a Japanese…

To the Editor:Re “Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It),” by Ezra Klein (column, nytimes.com, May 19):President Biden,Your campaign is failing, as spelled out plainly by Mr. Klein, and your chances of winning seem increasingly out of reach.For love of country, I ask that you look honestly at yourself, relinquish pride, dispel delusions regarding your electability, reassess your decision to run again and drop out of the race for the good of the country. Democracy is at stake!For a long time now polling has consistently shown low approval ratings, the preferences of most…

Following the death this month of Alice Munro, a Nobel-recognized master of the short story, The Times resurfaced an appraisal of her work by Ben Dolnick that was published in January. It included this astute observation about the genre in which she glittered: “There’s something reassuring about novels — you know where you stand with them. Even if all you’ve read is ‘Moby-Dick,’ you can say with a straight face that you’ve read Melville, just as a visitor to Paris can say she’s been to France. Short story writers, though, don’t have capital cities. You can wander and wander through…

The results of the latest New York Times/Siena College polls showing Donald Trump leading President Biden in five crucial battleground states were bad news to many Democrats. There’s still time for Mr. Biden to win back some swing voters, but a lot of his supporters are wondering the same thing: How?“People wanted things to get back to normal after the pandemic, and now they want perhaps a different kind of change,” writes Katherine Miller, a politics writer and editor in Opinion. “The ‘more’ people seem to want can sometimes be articulated clearly in economic or foreign policy decisions, and at…

As the world warms, permafrost is thawing across two-thirds of Russia, threatening cities and towns that were constructed to house miners sent to dig up a subterranean trove of oil, gas, gold and diamonds. Even the roads are buckling, cracking and collapsing, as if in a slow-motion earthquake. And outside a small town called Batagay, deep in the Siberian hinterland, a crater is rapidly opening up — known to locals as the gateway to the underworld.From space, it resembles a stingray impressed on the coniferous forest. Already more than half a mile deep and about 3,000 feet wide, the Batagaika…

The Jews who founded Hollywood — and make no mistake, the big studio heads were overwhelmingly Jewish — shared several things: ambition, creative vision and killer business instincts.But more than anything else, the men who were the driving forces behind Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shared a very 20th-century sense of being Jewish in America. They were assimilationists who considered themselves American above all else and who molded Hollywood to reflect and shape their American ideals.“Above all things, they wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews,” Neal Gabler wrote in his definitive 1988 history,…

In 1969, the National Basketball Association was a relatively young professional basketball league fighting to establish itself. It was generating buzz. But the league was facing economic problems, and it was unclear how successful it would be monetizing the game’s appeal to young people.At the time, Lew Alcindor, a three-time national champion at the University of California, Los Angeles, was entering the professional ranks as a rising star, having dominated the college game and captivated the public’s interest. Desperate for credibility (and fighting off a rival league also seeking to establish itself), the N.B.A. and the Milwaukee Bucks rose to…

I believe that nearly a decade since his first campaign, Mr. Trump retains the sort of shield that only celebrity can provide. It is too easy to forget that before Trump the politician came Trump the businessman, the entertainer, the tabloid fixture. After all, though he is now a former president and current front-runner to retake the White House, it was really not that long ago that Mr. Trump was seen as an American success story, a businessman with the track record and charisma to rise to become a celebrity, appearing in movies like “Home Alone 2,” the hit television…

The uncertainty ushered in by the death of Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash, just weeks after an unprecedented exchange of military attacks with Israel, has brought a chilling question to mind: Is 2024 the year that Iran finally decides it can no longer take chances with its security and races to build a nuclear bomb?Up to now, for reasons experts often debate, Iran has never made the decision to build a nuclear weapon, despite having at least most of the resources and capabilities it needs to do so, as far as we know. But Mr. Raisi’s death…