Author: Lance Garrison
For many adults, the first and last time they willingly submit to living with a total stranger is their freshman year of college. And now is the time of year when many kids, just accepted into college, decide they won’t do it.Cohabitating with anyone in 150 square feet isn’t easy. It’s hard enough to share a room with someone you love. Their intermittent snores, the way they hum while cleaning or just miss the trash can when flinging dirty tissues.But forcing kids from widely diverging backgrounds, ethnicities and economic classes to live in close quarters is one of the benefits…
Justice Stephen Breyer spent 28 years on the Supreme Court. During that time, he witnessed fiery disagreements among his peers over abortion, voting rights and marriage equality. What he never saw, though, was his colleagues hurling personal attacks over their differences in points of view. That’s a lesson, he says in this audio essay, that our politically divided nation should learn as well.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin.…
For all the attention to and debate over the unfolding trial of Donald Trump in Manhattan, there has been surprisingly little of it paid to a key element: its possible outcome, and specifically, the prospect that a former and potentially future president could be sentenced to jail time.The case — brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, against Mr. Trump — represents the first time in our nation’s history that a former president is a defendant in a criminal trial. As such, it has generated lots of debate about the case’s legal strength and integrity, as well as its…
Let’s talk about why President Biden is spending three days in Pennsylvania this week — a lot of time by campaign standards. By now, you probably know that just a few swing states are pivotal to winning the White House in November. For Mr. Biden, the Keystone State is the most crucial.It’s not just that Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes — the biggest haul of any battleground. And it’s not just that it is part of the Blue Wall, the string of industrial states that helped Democrats win the presidency for years until Donald Trump cracked it in 2016. This…
Newspapers devoted rapturous front pages to the coming occasion, and when I flew to my former home Kolkata on the eve of the big day, my neighbors there declared their anticipation by setting off firecrackers late into the night. The next morning, on Jan. 22, loudspeakers and television screens tracked me through the city with Sanskrit chants and images of the ceremony taking place at the temple. Mr. Modi, as usual, was at the center of every visual. Friends in Delhi and Bangalore complained about insistent neighbors and strangers knocking on their doors to share celebratory sweets. Courts, banks, schools,…
One of Kamala Harris’s most memorable moments during the 2020 presidential election cycle was when, during a Democratic primary debate, she sharply criticized Joe Biden for working with segregationists in the Senate in their shared opposition to busing.She personalized her criticism, saying: “There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”The power in the attack was not only the point being made but that she — a person affected from a group affected — was…
You’d love to stop smoking. The health reasons are a mile long and your body is (between coughs) telling you that it’s time. But you have fears about quitting smoking. Will you gain weight? How can you manage stress and cravings? Will you lose your smoking buddies?Don’t let such worries keep you from quitting. Some are false or exaggerated. Others can be overcome. But, you can calm your concerns and finally leave cigarettes behind. The health effects of a small amount of weight gain is really outweighed by all the benefits of quitting smoking. Pamela Ling, MD, dir., Ctr. for…
To a lay reader like me, the idea does indeed appear promising: a $250 one-time treatment to crowd out the bacteria that’s in my mouth now, producing lactic acid anytime I eat sugar, with an engineered variety that will not. (The process is a bit like “gene drive” proposals to outbreed disease-carrying mosquitoes with varieties that can’t harbor malaria or dengue or other diseases menacing to humans.) But it is nevertheless disorienting to find myself, reading about Lumina, in the position to decide, on my own, whether it’s worth it, or safe, to give a novel bacterium a permanent home…
After 15 years of smoking, Adrian Diaz Bulibasa decided it was time to quit. “I wanted to have a baby and I didn’t want the health of my future baby to be affected by my choices,” he says.But quitting was hard. Bulibasa, who lives in London and is the editor-in-chief of the website bestformyfeet.com, loved smoking and the culture surrounding it. He liked going to restaurants with friends and family, sitting on the terrace, and having a cocktail or coffee with a few cigarettes.Simply telling himself to quit didn’t work. He needed to figure out where, when, and why he…
Why don’t we talk more about guns?Not that the issue doesn’t come up. But think about the public debate on gun control versus the one we’re having on abortion rights. Perhaps the two biggest long-running social issues in American politics, and the gulf does seem huge.A lot of politicians who were historically opposed to abortion have clearly gotten very nervous about public opinion, worrying that being anti-choice is costing them votes. Take Arizona’s Kari Lake, one of the Republican Party’s most famous crazy-person candidates, now running for a Senate nomination. In 2022 when she was trying to get elected governor,…