Author: Lance Garrison

What followed was a very slow 12-year recovery of satisfaction across almost the entirety of the Obama and Trump administrations, with a post-2004 high of 45 percent reached in February 2020, on the eve of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. By January 2021, the level of satisfaction was back down to 11 percent, just two points off its historical low. Under Joe Biden, Americans briefly became somewhat more upbeat — but figures have sunk again from the mid-30s to the high teens and low 20s in recent months.These findings mirror what other pollsters have found when they asked respondents…

In the field of death and dying, one of the most enduring and influential figures is the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who in the 1960s came up with the five stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. She’d been studying the emotional arcs of terminally ill patients, but later she and her colleague David Kessler repurposed the stages to apply to the grief of the bereaved, and the five-stage model became deeply embedded in Western culture.In a 2007 paper, the Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist Steven Running applied those stages to the climate crisis, characterizing denial as the…

Bret Stephens: Good news, bad news, Gail. The economy added just over 300,000 new jobs last month, which gives Joe Biden something to brag about. But illegal immigration is now the No. 1 concern for voters, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal, and in one February poll 65 percent of Americans disapproved of Biden’s handling of the border.You still feeling chipper about the president’s chances this year?Gail Collins: Yep. It’s one thing to be cranky about the state of the union. It’s another to want to hand it over to a multiply indicted jerk who is supposed…

IgA nephropathy can raise some big questions. Will your symptoms be so mild you hardly notice a change in daily life? Will you need dialysis one day? Should you prepare for a kidney transplant 10 or 20 years down the road? You may not get answers until you’ve lived with the disease for many years. “That uncertainty is incredibly challenging,” says Susan Rubman, PhD, a medical psychologist with Yale Medicine. She treats people who get organ transplants. You can live a long life with IgA nephropathy. But your odds of depression, anxiety, and ongoing stress are higher than someone without the condition. Along…

Until now, Republicans who opposed Mr. Trump could point to state and local politics, where non-MAGA Republicans — and, much more rarely, anti-MAGA Republicans — have won elections, sustaining a Republican rump faction that holds MAGA at arm’s length. Non-MAGA Republicans believed that the party would feel stung by MAGA’s record of regularly losing elections that Republicans ought to have won, including the loss of the presidency by an incumbent, control of the Senate in the 2020 election cycle and the fizzle in the 2022 midterms, when voters in race after race surgically excised extreme MAGA candidates.Non-MAGA Republicans expected that…

We’re at an inflection point in electric-car optimism. Over the past few years, as electric vehicle sales increased substantially and car companies announced an onslaught of new battery-powered models, it seemed that electric cars were a near-term inevitability. But for all the heady promise, E.V. enthusiasm seems to be cooling.Ford recently announced that it’s cutting production targets for the Lightning, its electric truck. Brag-and-bluster Tesla projected that sales growth in 2024 would be “notably lower” than in recent years. Hertz is selling off about a third of its electric cars and Audi is slowing its transition to E.V.s. There are…

This month, across the country, a new cohort of students is being accepted into colleges. And, if recent trends continue, the start of the new school year will kick off another record-breaking season for anxiety on campus.I’m talking about the parents. The kids are mostly fine.Let me explain. Most emotions, even unpleasant ones, are normal. But the word is out about increasing rates of mental health problems on campus, and that’s got parents worrying. Fair enough. The statistics are startling — in 2022, nearly 14 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds reported having serious thoughts about suicide.But parents are allowing their…

Deepfakes — A.I.-generated imagery that often uses real people’s faces and identities — have proliferated online. A recent study found that 98 percent of deepfake videos online are pornographic, and 99 percent of those target women and girls. The activist and survivor Breeze Liu’s image was used by multiple sites. In this audio essay, she tells her story to the columnist Nicholas Kristof. They argue that search engines such as Google and Bing have the power to combat the scourge of deepfake pornography. “Google can be socially responsible when it wants to be,” Kristof explains. “But in this case, it…

Where starlings are concerned, I thought my heart was a stone.Starlings descend in great flocks on orchards and farms, decimating crops and dining on feed meant for livestock. In the air, they can bring down airplanes. Their excrement fouls city streets and walkways. And that’s just the nuisance they cause to people. European starlings also outcompete native birds for roosts and nest holes. What is there to love about a bird whose presence causes so many problems? A bird who doesn’t even belong here?And yet, despite my deep environmental convictions, I have somehow fallen in love with starlings.I love the…

By Alexa Federico, as told to Skylar HarrisonBefore I became an advocate for those with Crohn’s and IBD, my mom was mine.“Her nails are blue. She’s lost weight. She’s really cold,” she’d tell doctors again and again about her 12-year-old daughter’s alarming symptoms, but they never seemed to take us seriously.“She’s just a skinny girl,” one doctor told us. But my mother, a nurse, knew we needed answers. Something was wrong. Alexa Federico It started with fatigue and then joint pain in my knees and sores in my mouth. By the time my GI issues appeared – stomach pain, diarrhea,…