Author: Lance Garrison
A potential remedy for New York’s housing crisis — and the similar crises in other coastal cities — is on display in this small New Jersey town two miles west of the George Washington Bridge.Palisades Park is one of the few places in the New York metropolitan area where it is legal to replace a single-family home with something other than another single-family home. Over the last few decades, developers have bulldozed many of the old houses and replaced them with bigger, fancier duplexes.There have been some growing pains, but many more people are now able to live in Palisades…
One of the hardest things to reconcile about living in the American South is how this region of extraordinary natural beauty, this still-wild place of irreplaceable biodiversity, is mostly in the hands of politicians who will gladly sell it to the highest bidder. It’s hard to reconcile how even land that’s ostensibly protected is never truly safe. And how state regulators charged with protecting it will often look the other way when the highest bidder violates the state’s own environmental regulations.An egregious example of this pattern is unfolding now in Georgia, where state officials are poised to approve a strip…
Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. It goes without saying that we wish Catherine, Princess of Wales, health and strength in her battle with cancer. Other than that, I think the best we can do to respect her privacy is to say as little about it as possible.Gail Collins: Absolutely no reason to torment public figures in such dire circumstances — unless, of course, they’re running a country. Princesses are obviously a different matter. But let’s move on: Who would you like to carp at first?Bret: Thomas Edsall had a great essay in The Times last week noting that the Democratic Party…
I was in London last week when the febrile madness of Where Is Kate? was blowing up social media, and The Curious Mystery of the Doctored Mother’s Day Photograph consumed every news outlet and dinner table conversation.After The Associated Press issued a “kill notification” on the botched Photoshopped image of a suspiciously glossy Princess of Wales flanked by her beaming progeny, there was a typical outburst of tabloid pomposity questioning whether Kensington Palace could ever be considered a “trusted source” of news.Huh? When was the last time any tabloid considered the palace a trusted source of news? As editor of…
By the time I was in my mid-20s, I was a walking archetype of how to succeed in that world because of the belief system I followed: suck it up, persevere, win. I was used to pushing the level of climbing further, used to doing things that no other women had done — and even, a couple of times, things that no guys had done.I specialized in free climbing, a particular (and particularly challenging) discipline that requires a climber to rely on her gear only for protection from a fall, not for any assistance in moving up the rock. I…
Imagine you wake up with blurry vision. Your doctor refers you to a specialist but your insurance blocks the referral. Call me to defend why you think this patient needs this. That causes you to go blind. Imagine you have multiple sclerosis. Without warning, your insurance stops your medications. No, you cannot give this drug. So you become paralyzed. Imagine your father has cancer. His doctor orders an M.R.I. No, you cannot order this imaging. Prescribes chemotherapy. Have you considered this other less expensive option? His insurance causes delay after delay. No, you don’t need this surgery. He dies. An…
Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, has been in office for just over 100 days. Since his inauguration on Dec. 10, Mr. Milei, a far-right libertarian, has been on a mission to end what he has described as “an orgy of public spending” by previous administrations that left him with “the worst inheritance” of any government in Argentina’s history.The extreme libertarian program that Mr. Milei says will make Argentina great again — along with his unruly hair and tongue — has attracted countless comparisons to Donald Trump and won him high praise from Mr. Trump and other powerful admirers. Elon Musk…
Daphne Richemond-Barak, the author of “Underground Warfare,” writes in Foreign Policy magazine: “Never in the history of tunnel warfare has a defender been able to spend months in such confined spaces. The digging itself, the innovative ways Hamas has made use of the tunnels and the group’s survival underground for this long have been unprecedented.”In other words, in this war, Hamas is often underground, the Israelis are often aboveground, and Hamas seeks to position civilians directly between them. As Barry Posen, a professor at the security studies program at M.I.T., has written, Hamas’s strategy could be “described as ‘human camouflage’…
If you’re trying to guess whether people are Republicans or Democrats, knowing a few basic facts about them will take you a long way. What’s their race and gender? How far did they get in school? What part of the country do they live in and is their community urban, suburban or rural?Between 2016 and 2020, for example, white Americans without college degrees favored the Republican Party by nearly 24 percentage points. Strike up a conversation about politics with such a person in rural central Maine, near where I live, and chances are that his or her sympathies will lie…
To the Editor:Re “The Mystery of White Rural Rage,” by Paul Krugman (column, Feb. 27):In 2006 I rode my bicycle across the country. From San Diego to Georgia I traveled over long stretches of empty road that connected small rural communities.What I sensed in each of these small communities was the comfort of familiarity. The people know one another. Because of this intimacy, this community family if you will, they’re inclined to forgive within the family but, I think, are inclined to blame others on the “outside” for the ills that befall them.Christian values, love of God and country, are…