Author: Lance Garrison

Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIt can often feel as if politicians use a lot of words without saying much of anything. So how do journalists and citizens make sense of what’s said (and unsaid) in the many congressional reports, court decisions and campaign memoirs that pour out of Washington?This week on “Matter of Opinion,” Carlos Lozada makes the case for reading the Capitol, and uses insights from his new book, “The Washington Book,” to help his co-hosts decode everyone from Donald Trump to Mike Pence to Barack Obama.(A full transcript of this…

The world’s leading institution on geology declined a proposal on Wednesday to confirm that the planet has entered a new geologic epoch, doubling down on its bombshell announcement earlier this month. The notion that we’re in the “Anthropocene” — the proposed name for a geologic period defined by extensive human disturbance — has become a common theme in environmental circles for the last 15 years. To many proponents, the term is an essential vindication, the planetary equivalent of a long-sought diagnosis of a mysterious illness. But geologists weren’t convinced.The international geology commission’s decision this week to uphold its vote of…

Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’American policy is uniquely hostile to families. Other wealthy countries guarantee paid parental leave and sick days and heavily subsidize early childhood care — to the tune of about $14,000 per year per child, on average. (The United States, by contrast, spends around $500 per child per year.) So it’s no wonder our birthrate has been in decline, with many people saying they’re having fewer children than they would like.Yet if you look closer at those other wealthy countries, that story doesn’t entirely hold. Sweden, for example, has some of the most generous work-family policies…

It’s not often that a poll result causes me to do a double take. This month, however, a Pew Research Center survey grabbed my attention. As part of a comprehensive poll on the importance of religion in public life, Pew compared Americans’ knowledge of and support for Christian nationalism between September 2022 and February 2024 and found no meaningful change at all. The exact same percentage of Americans said they’d heard or read about Christian nationalism — 45 percent in 2022 and 45 percent in 2024. The exact same percentage of Americans said they’d never heard or read about Christian…

For many years, Ohio has been thought of as a bellwether state: With rare exceptions, whoever won Ohio in a presidential election won the nation as a whole. But in 2020, Donald Trump won Ohio by about eight points even as Joe Biden led the national popular vote by more than four points and, of course, won the Electoral College vote.Then Ohio’s 2022 Senate election was won by J.D. Vance, who has staked out a hard-line ideological position that may be more thoroughly MAGA than that of Trump himself. And in Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary, Trump’s endorsement was enough to…

People in some parts of the world have used herbal remedies to treat diseases for centuries. But in the United States, we tend to rely heavily on traditional Western medicine.Still, the use of dietary supplements has taken off in the last few decades. A 2011 survey from the CDC found that more than half of all adults in the U.S. take one of these products.And in general, over half of people with rheumatoid arthritis take them, too, says Eric Matteson, MD, a rheumatologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.But they can have side effects, and they don’t always work…

America will always be divided. There is no way to gather more than 300 million people from every race, faith and ethnicity across the globe, place them in one nation together and expect anything like unanimity on important religious, cultural or political issues. The real question is whether our divisions are sustainable or potentially fatal.That might be the central question of the current political moment, and it’s against that backdrop that we should evaluate the meaning of several recent reports that American politics might be undergoing a racial realignment of sorts. Looking at electoral results and polling trends, there is…

To the Editor:Re “Raising Stakes, House Passes a TikTok Bill” (front page, March 14):The bill passed by the House of Representatives would require TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform to an American company in order to continue operating in the United States.We understand that TikTok has inspired joy and creativity for millions of users. But we also know that the Chinese Communist Party has used similar technology in the past to steal sensitive information and make Americans less safe.We simply cannot allow entertainment software — no matter how fun and engaging it may be — to compromise…

March 21, 2024 – For Courtney Stinson, ensuring her daughter’s comfort is a constant battle against the challenges of congenital myopathy. At 9 years old, she relies on a ventilator to breathe, has multiple respiratory treatments daily, and is under the constant care of rotating skilled caregivers. Last year alone, she endured 36 doctor appointments.To ease her daughter’s struggles with sleep, and after consulting a pediatrician, Stinson turned to melatonin, a hormone naturally produced by the body to manage sleep. She gave her daughter a low dose of melatonin and saw significant improvement in her ability to settle down, especially…

Bathing, getting dressed, and cooking can all be a challenge when you have ankylosing spondylitis. The good news is that there are many different tools you can use to make life easier. Here, four ankylosing spondylitis advocates share their favorite tools and tricks.For Everyday LifeCanes. “It’s a simple cane with three feet on the bottom. I’ve found that when I walk up to a counter to get something off the shelf, it’s a pain to look for a spot to lean my cane against. I just let it go and it stands on its own. I also use it to walk outside…