Author: Lance Garrison
Occasionally, we would adjust those figures for population size, which yielded per capita measures that showed the country doing only somewhat worse than most rich nations considered American peers. By this measure, Britain became the poster child for rich-world failure — “Plague Island” it was often called in the British press.But these statistics, though valuable records of the sheer scale of suffering and tragedy within nations, were also biased in two big ways when it came to international comparisons. First, they depended on how much Covid testing was being done: Countries with better disease surveillance tended to register more official…
April 3, 2024 — When the COVID-19 pandemic hit 4 years ago, Jenn Kearney felt extra thankful for her years of therapy. The 34-year-old digital communications manager from Boston said her 11 years of doing therapy — specifically cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT – prior to the pandemic had given her skills and “ways to cope and adapt that not only benefited me, but the people around me,” she said. “I had spent a lot of time working with my therapist on, specifically, managing my anxiety through unexpected incidents,” she said. That was especially useful when her husband contracted COVID at the end…
To the Editor:Re “Trump’s Attacks on Judge’s Family Lead to Expansion of a Gag Order” (news article, April 2):If an indicted drug dealer or terrorist made threats against prosecutors, judges, court staff and their families, that person would be locked up and likely held in prison until their trial was completed and a verdict rendered.In Donald Trump’s case, we have someone with a history of inciting violence who was criminally indicted by separate grand juries in four different jurisdictions. Yet, Mr. Trump routinely makes public threats not only against prosecutors, judges and their families, but also against our current president,…
A few days before Leslie Crowder started chemotherapy for breast cancer in Marietta, GA, she received a gift from her mother who was visiting from Philadelphia: a pink silk scarf printed with elephants.“I have always loved elephants,” Crowder says. “As female creatures, they are fiercely protective of each other. When a female elephant is having a baby, or if she’s sick and needs to lie down, all the other females gather around her in a circle, facing out, so they can see what’s happening 360 degrees around and protect her.”With the scarf, Crowder’s mother had found a way to circle…
Contrary to what we might assume, avoiding “sex” doesn’t serve the cause of inclusivity: not speaking plainly about males and females is patronizing. We sometimes sugarcoat the biological facts for children, but competent adults deserve straight talk. Nor are circumlocutions needed to secure personal protections and rights, including transgender rights. In the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020, which outlawed workplace discrimination against gay and transgender people, Justice Neil Gorsuch used “sex,” not “sex assigned at birth.”A more radical proponent of “assigned sex” will object that the very idea of sex as a biological fact is suspect.…
The G.O.P. has a Donald Trump money problem. The former president is facing multiple indictments, and fighting those legal battles hasn’t been cheap. Unfortunately for Trump — and the Republican Party — big donors have noticed and are losing interest in filling the G.O.P.’s draining coffers. That means trouble for states like Michigan and Arizona, which are in desperate need of party money for down-ballot races.In this audio essay, the Opinion politics correspondent Michelle Cottle makes the argument that the Republican Party needs a better, more stable leader to guide it through this financial crisis and that Trump is not…
Two days later, the test was positive.Despite my training in medicine, I was blindsided. Dengue, a mosquito-borne illness, is surging through Latin America and the Caribbean, including in Puerto Rico, where a public health emergency was declared last week. This year is likely to be the worst on record, in part because of El Niño-driven temperature spikes and extreme weather linked to climate change. As temperatures rise and precipitation patterns grow more erratic, the problem will get only worse.But neither the traveling public nor our frontline health workers are prepared. Without urgent reforms to how we educate travelers, doctors, nurses…
The right-wing networks Trump can count on are ready for action.
Recently, the Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Amy Coney Barrett spoke together publicly about how members of the court speak civilly to one another while disagreeing, sometimes vigorously, about the law. Considerable disagreement on professional matters among the Supreme Court justices, important as they are, remain professional, not personal. The members of the court can and do get along well personally. That matters. In my tenure, this meant that we could listen to one another, which increased the chances of agreement or compromise. It means that the court will work better for the nation that it serves. And I…
In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey,…