Author: Lance Garrison
The Supreme Court reputedly has a long-awaited conservative majority committed to enforcing the meaning of the Constitution as it was understood when it was adopted. This commitment to originalist interpretation will soon be tested in two cases now before the court that have what lawyers call “bad optics.”One case, United States v. Rahimi, involves a Second Amendment challenge to a federal statute criminalizing the possession of firearms by people subject to certain domestic violence restraining orders. State courts typically use these orders to forbid threatening or abusive conduct toward the subject’s “intimate partner.” The federal gun ban is automatically imposed…
Compared with the mounting push from anti-abortion activists to ban the procedure nationwide, however, Trump’s stance is designed to look almost moderate. And if you were born yesterday, you could even say that Trump was beginning his pivot to the center, to blur the difference on abortion between himself and other Republicans. If Trump can persuade skeptical voters that he’s not a Mike Pence or a Ron DeSantis, then he’s one step closer to a second term.But there’s no reason to take Trump’s rhetoric at face value. Trump is aware, like virtually everyone who follows American politics, that Republicans are…
What’s one word you would use todescribe Joe Biden as a person? What’s one word youwould use to describe JoeBiden as a person? “Tenacious” Miguel, 48, Ariz., ind. “Experienced” Kevin L., 35, Wis., Dem. “Old” Sang Jun, 29, Nev., Dem. In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — a remarkable shift from 2016, when they backed Mr. Trump by 11 points. That swing was decisive enough to put Mr. Biden in the White House. Another shift in men’s votes may well determine the outcome of this election, too. For the latest Times Opinion focus…
When it comes to economic news, we’ve had so much winning that we’ve gotten tired of winning, or at any rate blasé about it. Last week, we got another terrific employment report — job growth for 39 straight months — and it feels as if hardly anyone noticed. In particular, it’s not clear whether the good news will dent the still widespread but false narrative that President Biden is presiding over a bad economy.Start with the facts: Job creation under Biden has been truly amazing, especially when you recall all those confident but wrong predictions of recession. Four years ago,…
Key to these plans is the Comstock Act, the 19th-century anti-vice law named for the crusading bluenose Anthony Comstock, who persecuted Margaret Sanger, arrested thousands, and boasted of driving 15 of his targets to suicide. Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act banned the mailing of every “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article,” including “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” intended for “producing abortion.” Until quite recently, the Comstock Act was thought to be moot, made irrelevant by a series of Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment, contraception and abortion. But it was never actually repealed,…
Maybe it takes an extraterrestrial event to bring this shredded country together. For a phenomenon that traversed the country from the contentious southern border to the far reaches of New England, Monday’s eclipse attracted remarkably few conspiracy theories or accusations. From where I stood, in Buffalo, the major threat to the moment was a forecast of heavy clouds.Bring on the ominous metaphors: We don’t have the foggiest idea where we’re going. This year, the eclipse passes America by. Here comes the rain again.Perhaps I was too primed to seek meaning, having found unexpected significance in the last major eclipse to…
In 1857, William Stanley Jevons was 22 years old and was working as an assayer for the Sidney Mint. Two eclipses passed over Australia that year, and Jevons enthusiastically tracked both. “After sleepless night got up about 3:30 and started to Bellevue Hill in dark,” he wrote in his diary about one, which must have happened shortly after dawn. “About 5 a.m. commenced observations concerning eclipse.” (After the eclipse, he went to work, wrote a detailed report on it for a local newspaper, had tea with the mint’s chief engineer and in the evening caught a performance of “Much Ado…
April 8, 2024 — When Mary Claire Haver, MD, became interested in the potential of collagen supplementation about a decade ago, she struggled to find many gold-standard studies that showed major improvements in the aspects that mattered most to her patients, such as cellulite, wrinkles, and bone health.Now the data seems to be more plentiful, though still murky. Collagen supplements appear to be safe to take and somewhat effective, depending on what problem you’re trying to solve, what type of supplement you take, and which ingredients are included.“I always say to look for the evidence,” Haver said. “I saw randomized…
To the Editor:Re “The Two-State Solution Is a Fantasy,” by Tareq Baconi (Opinion guest essay, April 7):Coursing through Mr. Baconi’s essay about the impossibility of a two-state solution is the notion that Jews have no legitimate presence in the Middle East to begin with, and that their presence there represents only the last gasp of the dying British colonial empire.This argument turns history on its head. Jews and Judaism are of course indigenous to the region (when we end the Passover Seder in a few weeks, we will recite, as Jews have for millenniums, “next year in Jerusalem”) and the…
April 8, 2024 — Some people love to chat. I learned this 15 years ago when I moved to a small village in France. They chatted with the boulangerie owner, with the grocery clerk, with the town hall official, and with each other: joking, gossiping, bantering. For me, fresh from urban North America, this was inefficient and frustrating.But it’s probably healthy. Talking to strangers may be good for our bodies and minds, science suggests. Call it “vitamin S,” for social contact. That’s the term used by social psychologist Paul van Lange, PhD, and his colleagues at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, for…