Author: Lance Garrison

Again, I was struck by how relevant Olsen’s writing continues to be. She gave a talk to the institute called “Death of the Creative Process,” and it was adapted into an article for Harper’s Magazine in 1965. This passage resonates:More than in any human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now (and remember, in our society, the family must often be the center for love and health the outside world is not). The very fact that these are needs of love, not duty, that one feels them as one’s self; that there is…

It’s a consequential choice. Students can do so at only one college, and they have to promise to attend if accepted, before knowing what the school’s financial aid offer will be. That means there is at least a chance an applicant will be on the hook for the full cost, which at Duke is $86,886 for the 2024-25 year. Students couldn’t be legally compelled to attend if they couldn’t afford it, but by the time they got the news, they would have already had to withdraw their other applications.If full tuition isn’t a deal killer, as it wouldn’t be for…

Of the four criminal cases that Donald Trump is facing, the one now unfolding in Manhattan is generally considered the weakest. Its legal foundation is complex. Its key witness is a felon. Its details are the sort of stuff that the tabloids splash across their front pages.Worst of all, it doesn’t speak to Mr. Trump’s actions as president, as the other cases do. But as the Supreme Court oral arguments on immunity last week made clear, it is likely to be the only one the country will see resolved before Election Day.As a historian who has written about the wrenching…

H5N1 is in a better position than ever to move between species and spill over aggressively into humans: This bird flu virus is now thought to have been spreading among dairy cows for many months, and federal regulators have found viral fragments circulating widely in the commercial milk supply chain across the United States (though live virus has not been found).The one person we know of so far who has tested positive for infection (a mild case) was a Texas dairy worker. Agricultural workers have always been an underprotected population for zoonotic diseases, including influenza viruses of animal origin. When…

In February, there was a flurry of discussion about whether Joe Biden’s advancing age and seeming weakness in a matchup with Donald Trump meant that he should step aside. I wrote a column on that theme, but the more notable (that is, nonconservative) voices arguing that Biden should consider withdrawing from the race included the polling maven Nate Silver and my colleague Ezra Klein. The report from the special counsel Robert Hur, which indicated memory problems for the president, was also part of the discussion — or, if you prefer the terms favored by the president’s allies, part of the…

Women replied quite differently: 68 percent said Trump does not respect women (24 percent “not much,” 44 percent “not at all”), while 31 percent of women said Trump does respect women (15 percent “a lot” and 16 percent “some”).Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of “Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents and What They Mean for America’s Future,” wrote by email that the question of why there is such a gender divide “is tough to answer,” but she made some suggestions: “It could be that…

Out of more than 7,300 state legislators in the country, 116 — or 1.6 percent of the total — currently or last worked in manual labor, the service industry, or in clerical or union jobs, according to a recent study conducted by Nicholas Carnes and Eric Hansen, who are political scientists at Duke University and Loyola University Chicago. By contrast, about 50 percent of all U.S. workers hold jobs in one of those fields.This problem afflicts both parties. In the last legislative session, the study found, 1 percent of Republican lawmakers and 2 percent of Democratic lawmakers had working-class backgrounds.…

Weeks before Helen’s death and what would have been her 91st birthday, we exchanged letters. I had sent her an essay I’d just written on the beauty of wonder, stemming from the wonder so many people felt upon viewing the total solar eclipse earlier this month.I often sent Helen things I wrote. Some she liked less than others, and she was never shy to say so. She liked the essay on wonder, though she said she was never a wonderer herself, but a “hopeless pragmatist,” not subject to miracles, except upon two occasions. One was the birth of her son,…

To watch “Screams Before Silence” is to be disabused of any lingering doubts about what Hamas did. The personal testimonies of victims, survivors and witnesses are clear and overpowering, as is the photographic evidence Sandberg was shown of mutilated corpses. And some of them have scarcely been heard about outside Israel.There is Tali Binner, a partygoer at the Nova music festival who hid in a small camper as other women were raped outside: “I heard a girl that started to yell for a long time. It was like, ‘Please don’t. No, no, stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. No. No. No’. It…

Twelve departing lawmakers tell us what Congress is really like.