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Whoa, have we lost our minds?

Letters to the editor

Tim Mannello Williamsport On April 7 at 8 p.m., the President of the United States wrote this on his social media page: “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” Pause for a moment and let this sink in: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to exist again.” Do we truly understand the gravity of that? Do we grasp what is being done in our name? Or do we simply drift on to the next medication commercial after the news report, barely noticing what we just heard? This threat would mean the murder of 24 million Iranians who are babies, toddlers, kids in ...

Man gets diagnosed with PSC, which then morphed into cancer

Columns

DEAR DR. ROACH: No parent should ever outlive their children. A couple of years ago, my son, who is now approaching 54 years young, was diagnosed with what I am told is an extremely rare illness called primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). Since he required special bile duct tubes to be installed and repeatedly changed out, he had been waiting for a proper liver transplant. When this was finally about to happen, the disease apparently morphed into abdominal cancer, thus rendering the (long-awaited) liver transplant no longer viable. I had never heard of this illness before, but ...

Debunking five tax day myths

Columns

Every April, Americans spend more than 7 billion hours filing taxes and roughly the same amount of time arguing over them, almost entirely on the basis of several common myths. Here are the five most consequential. —Myth No. 1: The Rich Don’t Pay Their Fair Share This is the most repeated claim in American tax politics and one of the least supported by actual data. The top 1% of earners take in 22% of total income and pay 40% of all federal income taxes. The top 10% earn about half the nation’s income and pay 72% of its taxes. The bottom half of earners, collectively, pay ...

Skin scratch testing reveals a false-positive peanut allergy

Columns

DEAR DR. ROACH: I recently underwent skin scratch testing for food allergies. I was shocked that among the positive findings was peanuts. I have eaten peanuts all of my life (I’m 55) and have never had any type of reaction to peanuts. I was given an EpiPen and was told to avoid peanuts. The same skin testing results were confirmed by a second allergist. I’m afraid that avoiding peanuts will sensitize me to them when I feel that I’m currently desensitized. I do have chronic inflammation and rheumatoid arthritis, so I don’t want to ingest something that may cause an ...

Dear Annie: Resetting a pandemic friendship

Columns

Dear Annie: My neighbor and I became friendly during the pandemic. We’d pick up things for each other at the grocery store, help water each other’s plants, chat on our porches in the evening. Somewhere along the way, she decided we were much closer than I did. Now she’ll drop by unannounced and even text things like, “I miss you, haven’t seen you today!” if I don’t respond quickly. This type of thing was fine when we were all locked at home, but we’re not living in a pandemic anymore. I’m too busy to entertain her all the time. She’s a really nice woman, but ...

What the end of Viktor Orban means for the New Right

Columns

Viktor Orban, the proudly “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary, beloved by various New Right nationalists and MAGA American intellectuals, was crushed at the polls this weekend. Over the last decade or so, Hungary became for the New Right what Sweden or Cuba were to the Old Left. For generations, various American leftists loved to cite the Cuban model as better than ours when it came to healthcare, or education. Some would even make wild claims about freedom under Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Susan Sontag famously proclaimed in 1969 that no Cuban writer “has been or is in jail ...