Author: Lance Garrison
Has U.S. inflation come down? Yes. We have two main measures of inflation: the Consumer Price Index, which pretty much everyone knows about, and the Personal Consumption Expenditures index, which the Federal Reserve prefers as a guide to monetary policy; explaining the differences between these measures would probably be telling you more than you want to know. Anyway, the P.C.E. is currently looking more benign than the C.P.I., but both show that the rate of price increases over the past year was much slower than it was when inflation was at its peak in 2022:It’s true that there was an…
“The film you are about to watch is a compilation of video diaries I recorded on a volunteer medical mission into Gaza. What I saw there was worse than any war zone I’ve ever been to. I can’t be clear enough: The video is hard to watch, the footage is very graphic, but there are times when the world needs to see the horrors of war. I believe this is one of those times. There’s a young girl named Amira that you’ll get to meet. She has gruesome injuries. Amira should be on everyone’s mind every day that this war…
Re “Dear Boomers, the Student Protesters Are Not Idiots,” by Elizabeth Spiers (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, May 17):Ms. Spiers’s characterization of the student protests misses the mark. As a recent college graduate myself, I don’t disagree that college students “are capable of having well thought-out principles,” but the principles underlying these protests are troubling.Ms. Spiers alludes to my generation possessing elevated moral sensibilities due to our experience with mass shootings. But the calls for “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the intifada” — ubiquitous in campus protests across the country — would require the killing of innocent Israelis…
In the Opinion video above, Dr. Samer Attar, an American surgeon from Chicago, shows us the unfathomable brutality of the war in Gaza. He was a member of the first delegation of international doctors to embed in the northern part of the territory this spring.Over two weeks, Dr. Attar volunteered at local hospitals and filmed what he saw. Al-Awda Hospital — one of the locations where he worked — has been under siege since Sunday and recently ran out of drinking water, with staff members and patients trapped inside.Dr. Attar’s video diaries capture the war’s toll on civilians and the…
Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’“The Jetsons” premiered in 1962. And based on the internal math of the show, George Jetson, the dad, was born in 2022. He’d be a toddler right now. And we are so far away from the world that show imagined. There were a lot of future-trippers in the 1960s, and most of them would be pretty disappointed by how that future turned out.So what happened? Why didn’t we build that future?The answer, I think, lies in the 1970s. I’ve been spending a lot of time studying that decade in my work, trying to understand why…
The tide of globalization is receding, at least from American shores. Two successive presidents have come down firmly on the side of tariffs rather than trade agreements as the preferred mechanism for managing international commerce.History shows that we should proceed with caution. While there are political and security reasons for tariffs, America’s new protectionist stance will raise prices, limit consumer choices and risk our future growth. The past aggressive and widespread imposition of levies of this sort has made clear that restraining trade brings with it serious risks to economic prosperity, both for the United States and other affected countries.Last…
Donald Trump may be regularly depicted as an impetuous toddler in chief, but he appears to possess genuine convictions about international relations. Ever since he gave an interview to Playboy magazine in 1990 decrying Mikhail Gorbachev for failing to hold the Soviet empire together (“not a firm enough hand”) and praising the Chinese Communist leadership for crushing the student uprising at Tiananmen Square (“they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength”), Mr. Trump has extolled authoritarian leaders as possessing the right stuff, while he has dismissed democratic ones as weak and feckless.This impulse is not…
In a large part of American political discourse, overt cynicism is the currency of sophistication. It is a sign of political savviness, even worldliness, to know that politicians are creatures of pure self-interest, with no solid beliefs, concerns or preoccupations. It becomes a little naïve to take politicians at their word and to say, even adjusting for political considerations, that people tend to say what they believe and try to act on those beliefs.Consider abortion rights. For years, the savviest position was the cynical one: Their vocal opposition notwithstanding, neither Republican lawmakers nor conservative judges would actually try to overturn…
An earlier generation of Supreme Court justices seemed to possess the capacity for shame.In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned his seat for accepting a $20,000 consulting fee (which he returned) from a foundation led by a man who was convicted of securities fraud.Whatever Justice Fortas believed about his own honor and morality, he understood that the Supreme Court is an inherently fragile institution, and that its nine justices cannot afford the slightest whiff of bias or corruption. As the Times editorial board wrote then, “a judge not only has to be innocent of any wrongdoing but he also has to…
If I’d pictured Donald Trump’s first criminal trial a few years ago, I’d have imagined the biggest, splashiest story in the world. Instead, as we lurch toward a verdict that could brand the presumptive Republican nominee a felon and possibly even send him to prison, a strange sense of anticlimax hangs over the whole affair.In a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll, only 16 percent of respondents said they were following the trial very closely, with an additional 32 percent following it “somewhat” closely. “Those numbers rank as some of the lowest for any recent news event,” wrote Yahoo News’s Andrew Romano.…