I barely even feel the needle. It is over so quickly that I begin to take it all in only afterward, as I claim a seat in the waiting area. There are a handful of us there, each of us newly vaccinated and waiting the designated 15 minutes before we can leave. I watch an […]

The end of the year has been awkward for Gov. Andrew Cuomo. As he promotes his new, self-congratulatory book about navigating New York through its first coronavirus wave of in the spring, he is also battling a new surge of cases. He’s not been too happy. At a news conference in late November, he lashed […]

A funny thing happened just before Christmas Eve – there was a mini-furore in the normally quiet Eurasian community. Old Chang Kee announced that it was going to launch a Devil’s Curry’O puff, which was based on the Eurasian community’s classic curry devil dish, on Boxing Day. Even before tasting it, a few Eurasians were […]

As President-elect Joe Biden rolls out his climate and environment team, it is worth recalling, if only to grasp the distance between then and now, the hopeless bunch President-elect Donald Trump presented us with four years ago. Mr. Trump tapped Scott Pruitt to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Ryan Zinke the Interior Department and Rick […]

On the first day of 2020, my anxiety roared as I approached the summit of Mount Pierce in northern New Hampshire. At about 4,300 feet elevation, the wind was picking up, the visibility dropping to near zero. I was about to turn around in defeat when I heard faint voices ahead of me: two women, […]

Is Texas the new Silicon Valley? This month Oracle said it was moving its headquarters to Austin after more than 40 years in California. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, descended from the Valley’s original garage start-up, is off to Houston. Elon Musk has moved to Texas, too, and has hinted that Tesla, the car company he co-founded […]

To the Editor: Re “When Did Republicans Start Hating Facts?” (column, Dec. 15): The line from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump and our current situation may be even straighter and darker than Paul Krugman paints it. Consider the following core Reagan messages: Government is your enemy. White people are the real victims of racism. Taxes […]

The Tulsa, Okla., police department set the stage for mass murder in the spring of 1921 when it deputized members of a mob that invaded and destroyed the prosperous Black enclave of Greenwood. The armed marauders who swept into the community in the early hours of June 1 wreaked havoc in the spirit of a […]

This has not been a great period for free expression. The range of socially acceptable opinion has shrunk, as independent-minded journalists and experts have been eased out of their jobs at places ranging from New York magazine to Boeing and Civis Analytics for saying unorthodox things. The esteemed scholar James R. Flynn wrote a book […]

In 1492, Christopher Columbus touched land for the first time in the Americas, reaching the Bahamas, Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) and eastern Cuba. After he returned to Spain he reported that he had encountered islands rich in gold. A few years later his brother Bartholomew, who also traveled to the Americas, reported that […]