The news that thousands of Burning Man festival goers were told to conserve food and water after torrential rains left them trapped by impassable mud in the Nevada desert led some to chortle about a “Lord of the Flies” scenario for the annual gathering popular with tech lords and moguls. Alas, I have to spoil the hate-the-tech-rich revelries. No matter […]

“You have cancer.” Ask anyone who has been told this: It’s terrifying. That’s one reason we need to rethink what we call cancer. Despite amazing advances in our understanding of the disease, we have neglected to update how we define what has been called “the emperor of all maladies.” Some cancers have extraordinarily low risks of altering the quality or […]

The tides of history sand down complex events to smooth, shiny baubles, and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — whose 60th anniversary arrives Monday, Aug. 28 — is no exception. This oversimplification of history is at work not only with respect to Martin Luther King’s historic speech, which decried persistent Black poverty before dreaming of racial […]

Liberalism is under siege. It is not just a problem for America’s Democratic Party, which once again may face either losing an election to Donald Trump or claiming victory with a bare majority. Around the world, the entire outlook of political liberalism — with its commitments to limited government, personal freedom and the rule of law — is widely seen […]

More from our inbox: To the Editor: Re “What I Saw on That G.O.P. Debate Stage Was Complete and Utter Moral Cowardice” (Opinion, nytimes.com, Aug. 24): Frank Bruni is on target regarding those candidates who raised their hands in support of a Donald Trump candidacy, even if he is convicted. It was astonishing to see people willing to show fealty […]

By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist If you’ve seen the movie “Oppenheimer,” which you should — trust me, it’s gripping even though it’s three hours long and you know how the story ends — you probably noticed several appearances by the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi, who is portrayed in some ways as Oppenheimer’s voice of conscience. I was a bit puzzled […]

If you asked nearly anyone in 1981 what they imagined when they heard the word “Madonna,” they would have answered the Virgin Mary or another idealized woman cloaked in modesty — submissive, gentle, embracing, calm. If you asked the same question a decade later, the answer would have been radically different. By then, the world had discovered a new Madonna, […]

More from our inbox: To the Editor: “Mayor Adams Turns His Back on Immigrants and His City’s Legacy,” by Mara Gay (Opinion, Aug. 4), is deeply offensive to thousands of New York City public servants who are almost single-handedly managing an international crisis. In the span of a year, our shelter population has more than doubled. We’ve manufactured space for […]

The date was Jan. 20, 2021, and Stephen Miles Lewis was trying to keep the peace. Two weeks before, a mob of pro-Trump protesters had stormed the Capitol building, and the circles Mr. Lewis ran in were now brimming with tension. Many of his closest friends had been outraged by what they saw. But he also knew someone who had […]

Where can our children safely play? In big cities, dense with buildings and people, bustling with traffic, this question has beleaguered generations of parents. And it was one I asked myself when I moved back with my four children in 2017 to Philadelphia after two decades away. I was happy to return to the city to start a new job […]