Health

To some in the Biden Administration, the supply chain crisis can be dismissed as a loss of East Asian-made consumer trinkets that, as Vox tells us, we could all be better off without—or as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki suggested, amounts to little more than “the tragedy of the delayed treadmill.” Yet, in reality, a broken supply chain is hardly  read more »

A new class conflict is emerging across the world. You can see its face in the mass protests over COVID-19 restrictions from Paris, Berlin and London to southern California and Melbourne.  read more »

For months, corporate hegemons, real estate brokers and their media acolytes have insisted that a return to “normalcy,” that is, to the office, was imminent.  read more »

In their new book, Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and David Cutler characterize COVID and related issues as an “existential threat to the urban world, because the human proximity that enables contagion is the defining characteristic of the city” (see our review, Survival of the City: The Need to Reopen the Metropolitan Frontier (Review).  read more »

For thousands of years before 1900, the population of the world hovered around one billion on the entire planet. In the short 120 years since 1900 the world population has “exploded” to the current 8 billion now living on this planet. What caused that quick growth from 1 to 8 billion?  read more »

Australia’s response to Covid-19 has quickly turned from laudable to laughable. For a nation which only a few months ago seemed to be the toast of world leaders for having so effectively limited the spread of the virus and still growing its economy, to a nation now lagging on vaccination and struggling with lockdowns, the turnaround has been dramatic.  read more »

In America and across the globe, COVID-19 is diminishing people’s prospects, exacerbating inequality and creating ever-more feudal societies as the pandemic ravages the health and the pocketbooks of the poor and the poorly educated.  read more »

In Europe, North America, Oceania and East Asia, the Covid-19 pandemic has been a tragic, wrenching experience, creating more depressed and divided societies. Yet, as we have been gazing obsessively at our own problems, a spectre infinitely worse is emerging in the most populous, fastest growing and least resilient parts of the world.

Covid has caused a deep crisis in the already suffering developing world, which contains nearly half of all humanity. And this will have serious implications for the future of the world economy and political order.  read more »

One of the first lines of prose that popped into my head after my diagnosis was “so much of my life has been spent being afraid of dying. With the time I have left, I endow not to die afraid.” This thought wakes me up in the morning. It looks at me when I look in the mirror. It lives in my sleep.  read more »

Even as vaccination increases across the United States and an end to the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic seems in sight, the economic, fiscal, political, and geographic fallout from the virus cannot be overstated: a massive public health crisis that left more than half a million Americans dead, an economic catastrophe that caused record unemployment and small-business closures, and a seismic political event that surely helped tip the presidential election. The pandemic will pass, and the economy will revive, as it is already doing.  read more »