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Columns/Opinion

Heat waves are deadlier than hurricanes. Let’s make them natural disasters, too

Unlike other natural disasters, extreme heat doesn’t topple buildings, flood streets or turn road signs into missiles. It doesn’t provide a dramatic backdrop for daredevil weather reporters. What it mostly does is kill people, quietly and efficiently. It’s long past time we respect its destructive power, which will only grow as a warming planet makes heat waves more frequent and intense.This discussion is particularly relevant this week, as a “heat blob” that has punished Mexico and the Southwestern U.S. for months creeps into the Midwest, Northeast and Canada, subjecting ...

U.S. exceptionalism is dead no matter who wins the election

A facile way to frame the future of American foreign policy is to set up two scenarios as a binary choice. If former President Donald Trump returns to the White House, the United States becomes isolationist. If President Joe Biden wins reelection, the U.S. remains broadly internationalist.That framing neglects a change that may be less obvious but more consequential for other countries, a shift that will keep playing out no matter who wins in November: For the first time in its two-and-a-half centuries, the U.S. will stop looking at the world through the lens of its own exceptionalism, ...

Accessto new Alzheimer’s treatments bogged down by Medicare

Alzheimer’s is a progressive, fatal disease that boggled scientists for a century.In the past 30 years, $42 billion has been invested in research and development of drugs that could treat it. More than 150 trials ended in failure.Now, at last, we have two treatments with significant clinical benefit — one, lecanemab, approved by the Food and Drug Administration and another, donanemab, recently endorsed by its advisory panel — and a scientific pathway that could one day point the way toward a cure.Unfortunately, it’s not clear how quickly patients and their families will be able ...

Population decline isn’t the problem. Hungry kids are

Humanity is about to turn a major population corner, according to a new estimate. A recent article in the Lancet predicts that by 2030, we’ll no longer be reproducing fast enough to replace ourselves.We aren’t about to go extinct, but this is an unexpected trajectory. As recently as 2017, the United Nations predicted human numbers wouldn’t peak until 2100 when we’d reach more than 11 billion people. According to the new estimate, our numbers could rise from the current 8.1 billion to a maximum of just 9.5 billion before declining by the early 2060s.While a catastrophic ...

We are bowling alone

A quarter century has passed since Robert Putnam released “Bowling Alone,” his heralded work on America’s decaying social fabric. The book was sobering at the time. Things are worse now: Not only are we still bowling alone, but now we’re playing an altogether different game.Putnam was fascinated by whether Americans were abandoning those very institutions — family, schools, places of worship, community organizations, even the voting booth — that, historically, have bound us together. Were we pulling back from those civic centers that gave our collective lives meaning, he ...

The Supreme Court’s role in our partisan polarization has been greatly exaggerated

Conventional wisdom suggests that the Supreme Court, like the country, is deeply divided along partisan and ideological lines. But this overlooks the court’s historic recent run of unanimous decisions and the fact that the liberal and conservative justices often don’t vote as blocs. Court critics tend to respond to these inconvenient realities by saying something like, Sure, but on the big cases, the culturally divisive ones, the conservatives form the majority and the liberals the dissenting minority. This is obviously true sometimes. The Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe ...