Author: Lance Garrison

April 25, 2024 – Over 2 million people in the 1980s and 1990s had a procedure known as radial keratotomy, a vision-correcting eye surgery that preceded the laser surgery known as LASIK. As part of the procedure, eye surgeons would make tiny cuts in the patient’s cornea, the outermost layer of the eye, in a radial pattern from the center, to flatten the central cornea to correct nearsightedness.The surgery, known as RK, was considered a successful tool for correcting vision at the time, but in recent years, many of these patients who have gone on to have cataract surgery are…

We’ve seen movies aplenty in which a deeply flawed protagonist, someone we’d pretty much given up hope on, has a stirring of conscience or change of heart and puts his immediate interests at risk for the sake of something bigger. The music swells. The credits roll.I never expected the music to swell and the credits to roll with Mike Johnson’s face in the center of the frame.Johnson, the House speaker, reversed a position that he’d previously held, banded with Democrats and infuriated some of the loudest, meanest and most vengeful members of his party — that’s Marjorie Taylor Greene you…

In a time of climate crisis, can poetry help us save the planet? In this audio essay, the contributing Opinion writer Margaret Renkl speaks with Ada Limón, the U.S. poet laureate, to understand how the written word can help the natural world.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Kristina Samulewski. It was edited by Alison Bruzek, Kaari Pitkin and Annie-Rose Strasser. Engineering by Isaac Jones and Efim Shapiro. Mixing and original music by Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking…

If you had asked me at the start of this Supreme Court term what the blockbuster abortion case would be, I would have focused on the one that could limit access to mifepristone, a drug used in a majority of U.S. abortions. But oral arguments last month suggested strongly that the justices might not even think that case has standing — which is to say, that decision is likely not to make much of a difference.But a decision in the second case, on access to emergency abortions, may have much more profound consequences, both for November’s election and the ongoing…

Against this backdrop, reading Frank Bruni’s new book, “The Age of Grievance,” is one sad nod and head shake after another. Building on the concept of the oppression Olympics, “the idea that people occupying different rungs of privilege or victimization can’t possibly grasp life elsewhere on the ladder,” which he first described in a 2017 column, Bruni, now a contributing writer for Times Opinion, shows how that mind-set has been baked into everything from elementary school to government institutions. Tending to our respective fiefs, Bruni writes, is “to privilege the private over the public, to gaze inward rather than outward,…

For the next several weeks, the presumptive Republican nominee for president will be spending his days in a New York City courthouse. By any normal campaign standard, taking your candidate off the road for much of April and May of a presidential year would be devastating. But “normal” and Donald Trump live in different countries. The trial will afford Mr. Trump the opportunity to define the essence of his candidacy: I am a victim.The very competent operatives running the Trump campaign didn’t draw this up as their ideal campaign plan, but they will appreciate its potential. The Manhattan courtroom will…

Raelle Brown is a powerful voice for many – for women of color, for women with eczema, and for anyone needing a role model with strength and self-assurance. A video producer in the Philadelphia area, Raelle uses her communication skills and her deep compassion to help others through her popular Instagram account, @wokewithinskin, as well as her blog. How does she get ready to be at her best each morning, even when dealing with a difficult skin flare-up? Here, she shares her strategies, from both health/beauty and emotional perspectives.As Raelle sees it, planning for any contingency is key. “I have…

April 24, 2024 – Weights, aerobics, and … Wegovy? Some in the fitness industry are moving to dispense the popular GLP-1 medications to club members, combining the new, easier method of losing weight with the old, more challenging one.Take Life Time Fitness, for example. Late last year, Jeff Zwiefel, chief operating officer, said the gym chain would pilot a program to prescribe weight loss drugs for members. They plan to bring health care professionals into the gyms to deliver the medications, working with their members, primary care doctors, trainers, and nutritionists to form a “comprehensive plan” that includes the medicine…

Many people who’ve had breast cancer take medications – tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors – to help prevent the cancer from coming back. Doctors prescribe them for people with “hormone positive” tumors, which accounts for about 2 out of 3 breast cancers.This approach saves lives. “It is extremely effective in reducing the risk of cancer recurrence anywhere in the body,” says Erica Mayer, MD, MPH, director of breast cancer clinical research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.For most people who take hormone therapy medications, there aren’t major issues. “In general, very few patients will have side effects that are severe…

In January 2022, I was planning a summer trip to Ukraine and Russia for my 4-year-old son and me.I spent half of my childhood in Ukraine and half in Russia before moving to the United States when I was a teenager. When I became a parent, my one, obsessive goal — as a mother raising a child in America with a man who spoke only English — was to teach my son Russian. It wasn’t about his future résumé; it was because Russian forms such a deep-rooted part of my immigrant identity that I couldn’t imagine talking to my child…