Author: Lance Garrison
“Conspiracy theory believers are not simply naïve or mistaken; they chose to endorse some alternative explanations of events and then find the ways to rationalize them,” Dieguez wrote me in an email. He said his latest research indicates that people who see lots of coincidences have a “deep-seated bias to look for an ultimate cause, function or purpose for things, nature, people, events and the world in general.” That ultimate cause can be God, but it can also be “a preordained plan designed by a powerful and malevolent agency,” he wrote.Hallucinations by large language models in artificial intelligence are, I…
March 18, 2024 – When Ken Aaron, 51, woke up from his first-ever colonoscopy last February to his doctor mouthing the words “we found a tumor,” there was no one more surprised than he was. The married father of two had some very mild GI discomfort before he booked the scan, but, besides that, there was nothing significantly amiss with the writer, an avid hiker and skier who lives in the Adirondacks.“If I ate a fried meal, I’d feel blah,” he said. “It was more like ‘I don’t think I want that hamburger today – I don’t feel like it…
To the Editor:Re “Trump Says Some Migrants Are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Blood Bath’ if He Loses” (nytimes.com, March 16):In a campaign speech in Ohio on Saturday, former President Donald Trump said that if he didn’t get elected, “it’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”His warning was not a prediction. This was a brazen threat: If the election disappoints Mr. Trump and his followers, they will revolt. Mr. Trump might be increasingly inarticulate, but the peril is clear in his own words.In Trump v. Anderson, the Supreme Court recently dodged the question of whether Mr. Trump’s…
Beverly Gadson-Birch is, supposedly, retired.But spend any time with Ms. Gadson-Birch, a community activist, business owner and grandmother in Charleston, S.C., and you may struggle, as I did, to keep up with her. She holds political meetings at local hotels. She wants to restart a local newspaper. She buttonholes friends, family members and strangers, reminding them to vote. She does all this while tapping at her Apple Watch or racing through town in a sleek S.U.V. “My husband said to me one day: ‘Girl! Where’d you learn to drive that way?’”Many Americans have grown weary of politics and disengaged. Ms.…
Silence. Last September, when I visited a makeshift hospital in Adré, Chad, where young Sudanese refugees were being treated for acute malnutrition, that was all I heard: an eerie silence.I had tried to prepare myself for the wails of children who were sick and emaciated, but these patients were too weak to even cry. That day, I saw a 6-month-old baby who was the size of a newborn and a child whose ankles were swollen, and whose body was blistered, from severe malnourishment.It was equal parts newly horrific and tragically familiar.Twenty years earlier I had visited the same town and…
And yet, there are still tens of thousands of jobs in news media in America, with exceptional journalism being produced every day. Some major organizations have even found ways to thrive in the digital age. Prominent foundation leaders have started an effort to pour hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars into local journalism, and a movement has formed to push for federal and local legislation to direct public funding to news. An initiative to “replant” local news has founded dozens of nonprofit newsrooms in cities around the country. While a small but growing group of organizations are redefining the way…
Most Latinos are not rootless, illegal transients as some citizens may think, but a force for American progress.
Does that song on your phone — or on the radio — or in the movie theater — sound familiar? Private equity, the industry responsible for bankrupting companies, slashing jobs and raising the mortality rates at the nursing homes it acquires, is making money by gobbling up the rights for old hits and pumping them back into our present. The result is a markedly blander music scene, as financiers cannibalize the past at the expense of the future and make it even harder for us to build those new artists whose contributions will enrich our entire culture.Take Whitney Houston’s 1987…
Gail Collins: Bret, I feel obligated to start out by asking you — TikTok? Potential foreign agent?Bret Stephens: I think of TikTok in two ways. First, as a gigantic vacuum cleaner of personal data — possibly including your location — that goes directly from the unsuspecting eyes, thumbs and minds of its 170 million users in America to a company based in Beijing and beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. Second, as a potential conduit of disinformation, steering users toward content that could be used for mischief in, say, a critical forthcoming presidential election.That’s why it has been banned in…
It’s hard to explain how it feels to be behind an artillery piece when it fires. First is the roaring sound that no movie can ever match. Then comes the sight: the gun jerking violently, smoke billowing from its tube as the crew scrambles to load the next round. Finally, there’s the physical feeling of the explosion that threw a hundred-pound shell for miles, knocking the breath out of you and causing your bones to shudder.Each firing left me with a dull pain in my head, like I had just gotten hit in the face. But then it would fire…