Author: Lance Garrison
The war in Gaza has become President Biden’s war, the Times Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof argues in a recent column criticizing what he describes as a moral failing on Biden’s part. In the following conversation, the Opinion editor Sarah Wildman asks Nick to elaborate on where he thinks Biden went wrong and what he hopes the president will do to try to end the conflict in the Middle EastBelow is a lightly edited transcript of this episode. To listen to this episode, click the play button below.Sarah Wildman: Hello, I’m Sarah Wildman, staff writer and politics editor for New York…
But Van Bavel quickly added that these strategies “are up against all the other factors that are currently driving conflict and animosity, including divisive leaders like Donald Trump, gerrymandering, hyperpartisan media (including social media), etc. It’s like trying to bail out the Titanic.”Simply put, it is difficult, if not impossible, to attempt to counter polarization at a time when partisan sectarianism is intense and pervasive.Bavel described polarization asboth an illness from various problems in our political system and an outcome. As a result, the solution is going to be extremely complex and involve different leadership (once Trump and his inner…
In our Trump-era politics, there’s always the question of how crazy is too crazy — how disruptive and extreme an elected official can get before becoming so embarrassing that members of her own team feel compelled to abandon her?Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to have reached that outer limit. Again.It’s not simply that Ms. Greene has taken such a Putin-pleasing approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine (Ukrainian Nazis? Really?) that the term “useful idiot” feels unavoidable. She has, in very little time, undermined the influence of her party’s entire right flank, driving less unhinged Republicans — most notably the House…
In emergencies, patients don’t have the luxury to choose whom to trust, and medical decisions must happen hastily, in minutes even. So part of our job is to build rapport quickly. That becomes harder, impossible even, when we enter into the climax of a medical crisis to find that whatever trust our patient may have once had long ago has been eroded. Many of our patients started their medical journeys wanting to believe in their doctors. But then the medical system that they wanted to trust failed them, in small ways and large, from haphazardly rescheduled appointments to real medical…
Scientists can scan your entire DNA library. That’s more than 20,000 genes. This kind of testing, called genomic testing, has transformed the diagnosis and management of cancer and rare genetic diseases.But like other kinds of health care, racial and ethnic minorities are underserved when it comes to all kinds of genetic services and research. Medical mistrust, lack of access, and language barriers can make it harder to get these kinds of tests.And sometimes people or families have cultural or financial reasons for not seeking genomic tests, says Yong-Hui Jiang, MD, PhD, professor and chief of medical genetics at Yale School…
Netanel Crispe, from Danby, Vt., is a 21-year-old junior studying American history at Yale. He is also, to his knowledge, the university’s only Hasidic undergraduate. When he chose Yale, he told me this week, he was “looking for an institution that asserted its position in terms of maintaining and protecting free expression while not backing down on its principal values.”It hasn’t worked out that way.On Saturday evening he and his friend Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore and an Orthodox Jew, paid a visit to the university’s Beinecke Plaza, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had set up an encampment.“I was wearing my black…
Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4’33”,” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that period of time.I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon, because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty…
On Saturday the House of Representatives finally overcame MAGA opposition and approved a new aid package for Ukraine. The Biden administration presumably had matériel ready to ship, just waiting for congressional authorization, so the effects of this legislative breakthrough will be quick.Like many observers, I’m simultaneously relieved, ashamed, angry and worried by what has happened. I’m relieved that a nation under siege will probably — probably — get aid in time to survive, at least for a while, something that was increasingly in doubt given overwhelming Russian artillery superiority. I’m ashamed that things got to this point — that America…
April 23, 2024 – It’s becoming more of a “when” then an “if” TikTok will be banned in the United States, which would leave the 170 million Americans who use the social media app to find another option. Gone, too, would be the growing community of health care professionals who use the platform to share legitimate health information and advice to their followers.The U.S. Senate is expected to vote on legislation this week that would give ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owners, up to 1 year to sell the company or be outlawed in the U.S. President Joe Biden has indicated he…
When the far-left politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley were first elected to Congress roughly half a decade ago, many moderate Democrats saw their unapologetically progressive vision for America as an albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party.That certainly seemed to be the view of Democratic leaders, who seemed intent on making “the squad,” as the progressive caucus is known, a group of permanent outsiders.“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, told Maureen Dowd in 2019. “But they didn’t have any following,” Ms. Pelosi said of the squad.…