Author: Lance Garrison

By Emi NietfeldProduced by Kristina SamulewskiHarvard University is among the latest institutions to announce it is reversing its test-optional policy and requiring students to submit test scores in their applications. For the writer Emi Nietfeld, it’s a positive sign. Growing up homeless and in the foster care system, she didn’t have a lot of control over her education or resources that would bolster her college applications. But one thing she did have control over was studying for standardized tests. In this audio essay, Nietfeld explains how Scantron sheets helped her unlock a better life.(A full transcript of this audio essay…

The Supreme Court is hurting.I can say that with confidence — not based on any inside information but on the external evidence of how hard some of the justices are working to show that everyone on the court really does get along.“When we disagree, our pens are sharp, but on a personal level, we never translate that into our relationship with one another,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an audience at the National Governors Association conference in February. “We don’t raise our voices, no matter how hot-button the case is,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said at the civics forum at George…

Yes, tax breaks benefit the billionaire class, which has the lowest effective tax rate in the country. And yes, they benefit large corporations, many of which pay no federal income tax. The outrageous tax shenanigans of the ultrawealthy have deservedly drawn the ire of the American public, further aggravated by congressional inertia on the matter.But we should recognize that tax breaks also prop up the wealth of millions of affluent Americans who take advantage of exemptions that are very hard, perhaps impossibly hard, to defend on either practical or moral grounds.Last year, tax breaks for dividends and capital gains —…

Ahead of the release of “Civil War,” the new alt-history action-drama from the director Alex Garland, A24, the studio that produced the film, released a map of the United States showing the lines of the conflict. There was the “New People’s Army” of the Pacific Northwest, the Mountain West and some of the Great Plains. There were the “Western Forces” of Texas and California. And there was the “Florida Alliance,” encompassing most of the Southeast. What remained was labeled “the Loyalist States.”This little bit of information spurred a torrent of speculation on social media about the political contours of the…

In September 1958, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed with a seven-inch steel letter opener. He had been autographing copies of his first book in Blumstein’s department store in Harlem. The woman who stabbed him was named Izola Ware Curry.When Dr. King found out she was schizophrenic, he harbored no ill will toward her, saying instead, “I know that we want her to receive the necessary treatment so that she may become a constructive citizen in an integrated society where a disorganized personality need not become a menace to any man.”Dated description aside, King recognized that people…

For anyone with sincere and absolute convictions on abortion, pro-life or pro-choice, Donald Trump’s attempts to reposition himself this week should be somewhere between depressing and infuriating.For pro-lifers, the problem is the cynicism — the reminder that Trump is purely transactional in his relationship to their ideals, a lousy spokesman for the cause of unborn human life and a willing betrayer when politics requires it.For pro-choicers, the problem is the chutzpah — the man who did so much to overturn Roe v. Wade trying to disavow responsibility for its policy consequences.But Trump’s cynicism is also one of his political strengths.…

The suffering of civilians in Gaza — tens of thousands dead, many of them children; hundreds of thousands homeless, many at risk of starvation — has become more than a growing number of Americans can abide. And yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his ultranationalist allies in government have defied American calls for more restraint and humanitarian help.The United States commitment to Israel — including $3.8 billion a year in military aid, the largest outlay of American foreign aid to any one country in the world — is a reflection of the exceptionally close and enduring relationship between…

In early 2014, Ilene Ruhoy, MD, PhD, was not feeling well. She tired more easily than usual, had frequent headaches, and was sometimes dizzy and nauseous. A hospital-based neurologist, Ruhoy made appointments with several of her colleagues. “Everyone kept telling me that I was working too hard, that I was too stressed out, that I should take some time off,” she recalls.At first, she was inclined to believe that; after all, she was working a lot. But as the headaches became more persistent, she grew more concerned. She typically got one or two migraines a year, but now she was…

For years now, I’ve had advocates who work with survivors of domestic violence tell me that two events in 1994 changed entirely the landscape for victims’ services in their field: the passage of the Violence Against Women Act and the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.In fact, many advocates cite her death in June of that year as instrumental in Congress’s prioritizing the passage of the Violence Against Women Act that September, which in turn authorized the creation of the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Indeed, hotlines sprang up in the wake of the murders, and some local newspapers ran columns with…

We were surprised when inflation rose. We were surprised when inflation fell. And we were surprised again when inflation stopped falling. The message of all these surprises is that we — including professional economists — really don’t have a strong grasp on why prices go up and down.The shakiness of our understanding is no small problem because inflation matters, a lot. A big reason President Biden is lagging in the polls is that voters, rightly or wrongly, blame his policies for the inflation surge of 2022, when the annual change in the Consumer Price Index briefly hit 9.1 percent. The…