global pandemic

How to Survive a Pandemic
by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

Washington Post, August 23. 350. Osterholm M, Colwell R, Garrett L, Fauci AS. 2005. The Council on Foreign Relations meeting: the threat of global pandemics. Federal News Service, June 16. cfr.org/publication.html.?id=8198. 351. Bor J. 2005. A versatile virus: an expert in infectious diseases explains why avian flu could trigger the next pandemic. Baltimore Sun, July 1. 352. Osterholm M, Colwell R, Garrett L, Fauci AS. 2005. The Council on Foreign Relations meeting: the threat of global pandemics. Federal News Service, June 16. cfr.org/publication.html.?id=8198. 353. Arnst C. 2005. A hot zone in the heartland.

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Public Broadcasting System. American Experience Transcript. 1918 Influenza. pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/filmmore/transcript/transcript1.html. 646. Osterholm M, Colwell R, Garrett L, Fauci AS. 2005. The Council on Foreign Relations meeting: the threat of global pandemics. Federal News Service, June 16. www.cfr.org/publication/8198/threat_of_global_pandemics.html. 647. Antigua KJC, Choi WS, Baek YH, Song MS. 2019. The emergence and decennary distribution of clade 2.3 4.4 HPAI H5Nx. Microorganisms. 7(6):e156. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms7060156. 648. Weekly Epidemiological Record. 2005. H5N1 avian influenza: first steps towards development of a human vaccine.

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Lederberg J, Shope RE, Oaks SC. 1992. Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States (Washington, DC: National Academies Press). 657. Osterholm M, Colwell R, Garrett L, Fauci AS. 2005. The Council on Foreign Relations meeting: the threat of global pandemics. Federal News Service, June 16. www.cfr.org/publication/8198/threat_of_global_pandemics.html. 658. Garrett L. 2005. The next pandemic? Probable cause. Foreign Affairs 84(4). www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84401/laurie-Garrett/the-next-pandemic.html. 659. Lurie N, Saville M, Hatchett R, Halton J. 2020. Developing Covid-19 vaccines at pandemic speed.

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story
by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja
Published 15 Jan 2021

The UK government, in partnership with the Wellcome Trust, WHO, G7, EU and other organisations, is launching the Global Pandemic Radar (GPR). This will be a global surveillance system with a clear purpose: to identify clusters of disease; to prevent clusters seeding epidemics; and to prevent epidemics turning into pandemics. It will unite traditional public health knowledge with twenty-first-century technology, such as genomic sequencing, the smarter use of data, artificial intelligence, plus non-traditional sources of information like rumours on social media. The blueprint for the Global Pandemic Radar is being finalised and, given there is no time to waste, should be functional this year.

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CHAPTER 3 AM I SUPPOSED TO CALL THE FBI? CHAPTER 4 WORRYING ABOUT A RIPPLE ... CHAPTER 5 IF THE PLAN IS CHICKEN POX PARTIES ... CHAPTER 6 IT’S TAKEN AN EMOTIONAL TOLL ON EVERYONE CHAPTER 7 ARE WE COMPLICIT IN THE OUTCOMES? CHAPTER 8 THE VACCINES VS THE VARIANTS CHAPTER 9 THIS DID NOT HAVE TO BE A GLOBAL PANDEMIC NOTES GLOSSARY DRAMATIS PERSONAE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1 If anything happens to me, this is what you need to know ... 30 DECEMBER 2019 Known cases: 4 I WAS IN AN AIRPORT lounge on New Year’s Eve 2019 when my mobile rang. I was heading back to England from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I had been visiting the Ebola vaccination centres in Rwanda across the politically fraught border region of North Kivu.

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It was also the day that he asked us all a question that would stay with me: ‘Two weeks from now, are there things that we wished we could have done to reshape the challenge we will likely face? ... We have a very narrow window to act.’ The aim, Carter said, was to ‘shape the battlefield’. After Davos, I was sure this was turning into a global pandemic. I discussed with Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, the UK government’s chief scientific and medical advisers, how the country should prepare and that we should try to start vaccine clinical trials as soon as possible in case US President Donald Trump refused to share future American-made vaccines.

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again
by Richard Horton
Published 31 May 2020

Since Wuhan’s lockdown began on 23 January, that meant at least ten weeks of the most extreme measures to extinguish virus transmission. Wuhan did cautiously start lifting its restrictions on social mixing on 8 April. But many schools, shops and cinemas remained closed. Gabriel Leung, who correctly predicted that a global pandemic would ensue from the events in Wuhan, was working intensively to define what an exit strategy should look like.8 He and his team in Hong Kong warned against relaxing restrictions too soon. If the Ro crept above 1 again, a second wave of the pandemic would be inevitable. He advised resuming economic activity in lockdown settings under what he called an Ro<1 constraint.

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The WHO pushed China’s misinformation about the virus, saying it was not communicable and there was no need for travel bans … The WHO’s reliance on China’s disclosures likely caused a twenty-fold increase in cases worldwide and it may be much more than that. The WHO has not addressed a single one of these concerns nor provided a serious explanation that acknowledges its own mistakes of which there were many. I believe that President Trump’s decision to cut funding to WHO in the middle of a global pandemic constituted a crime against humanity. Is that claim an exaggeration? No, and here is why. WHO exists to protect the health and wellbeing of the world’s peoples. A crime against humanity is a knowing and inhumane attack against a people. By attacking and weakening WHO while the agency was doing all it could to protect peoples in some of the most vulnerable countries in the world, President Trump has, in my view, met the criteria for the act of violence the international community calls a crime against humanity

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Its budget was savaged, reducing epidemic prevention efforts across the world, including in China. The position of White House director for global health security and biothreats was axed by John Bolton, then national security advisor, in 2019, leaving no one to identify and call out the dangers of a global pandemic. The US was spectacularly unprepared for SARS-CoV-2, largely owing to its own acts of self-harm. These turns away from investment in national and global health security reflect a larger trend: a general political antipathy to globalism – that is, an appreciation of the importance of international interdependence, solidarity and cooperation between nations and peoples.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

Assembling them in one place reveals how they overlap and reinforce one another. There are links between debt accumulation and debt traps, easy money and financial crises, artificial intelligence (AI) and workplace automation, deglobalization, geopolitical clashes among great powers, inflation and stagflation, currency meltdowns, income inequality and populism, global pandemics and climate change. Each hampers our ability to address the others. A single threat sounds distressing. Ten megathreats happening at once is far, far worse. After examining each threat in its own chapter, I will consider our collective prospects for surviving them. Spoiler alert: without amazing luck, almost unprecedented economic growth, and unlikely global cooperation, this won’t end well.

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The peristent talk and practice of deglobalization and fragmentation of the global economy; the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the risk that this conflict could expand geographically and in unconventional ways; the drum-beats of talk of a new Cold War between the US (and its Western allies) and China (and its effective allies Russia, Iran, and North Korea), and the rising tensions between the US and China on Taiwan; the massive droughts and heat waves from India and Pakistan to Sub-Saharan Africa and to the West of the United States, as global climate change is becoming more severe; the Chinese growth slowdown and the risk of a hard landing given its misguided Zero Covid tolerance policy; a global pandemic that was not yet controlled in many poorer nations and likely to mutate further in new variants; the risk of energy insecurity, of hunger, and even famines given the spike in food, energy, and other commodity prices. These were all ominous signs of a much worse and dangerous future and megathreats in the decade ahead.

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Today, we can see enormous amounts of debt wherever we look. Yet, like an iceberg, much more implicit debt lies below the surface. We know precisely how much money binds lenders and borrowers. We cannot measure the implicit cost of salvaging unfunded elderly health care and pension liabilities, the costs of climate change, the costs of future global pandemics, and other untold liabilities. Our debt crisis would still be terrible even if it was the only megathreat we faced, and even if our policy makers were as wise as Solon. Yet it’s much worse. All of our lessons from history have been based on a world of growing population, with growing labor pools to help local economies climb out of trouble.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic
by Bill Gates
Published 2 May 2022

People from GERM would have to work closely with them, making it clear that their job is to support, not supplant, local expertise. If GERM becomes—or even appears to be—something imposed from the outside, some countries will reject its recommendations. For countries that need additional support, GERM should fund or loan public health experts who would participate in this global pandemic-prevention network. They would train and drill together to keep their skills sharp, and they would stay ready to respond locally or globally when they’re needed. Countries with greater need and a high risk of outbreaks would bring in more GERM team members from the network and host them to build local expertise in infectious diseases.

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See epidemic disease surveillance dexamethasone, 113–14, 136 diagnostic tests, 12–13, 19, 61–66 accuracy, 62, 63, 64 antigen tests, 63, 63, 251 cost reduction, 66, 226 innovation in, 64–66, 223–24, 234 lateral flow immunoassay technology, 63, 224 LumiraDx machines for, 64, 224 mass testing, 81 Nexar system, 65 PCR tests, 62–65, 63, 71, 224, 253 prioritizing recipients, 82 speed of results, 62–63, 64, 65 trucker testing, Uganda, 27, 27 ultra-high-throughput processing, 65 U.S. testing failures, 28–30, 29n diarrheal diseases, 5–6 deaths, sub-Saharan Africa, 199 Gates Foundation and, 58 prevention, 6 reducing child mortality and, 215 vaccines and, 6, 6n, 169 digital future, 237–50, 237n COVID lockdowns and digital tools, 237 e-commerce and, 238 education and, 238, 246–48 health data collection, 245 “metaverse,” 242–44 online meetings and platforms, 238, 241–43 remote-work options, 239–41 smartphones and, 237 telehealth services, 244–45 video calls, 249–50 video conferencing, 238 workplace augmented reality, 244n workplace automation, 244 workplace productivity, 241 disease modelers, 77–80 benefits for public health, 79 COVID deaths prediction, 80 data for, 79–80, 82 meteorologist analogy, 78–79, 79n Douglas Scientific, 65 drug development, 122–38, 222 accidental invention, 123 of acetaminophen, 123 of antibodies, 134–35 of antiviral drugs, 123–24 of chloroform, 123 CHO platform and, 134–35 clinical trials, 117, 126–27, 126n costs, 131–32 COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, 129–30, 129n drug candidates, chance of success, 140, 140n global pandemic plan and, 220–21 high-throughput screening, 125 history of, 122–23 of HIV antivirals, 124–25 human challenge study, 130–31 identifying targets (proteins), 124 infection-blocking drugs, 174–75, 220 innate immune response boosters, 137 innovations, 123–25, 130, 137–38 of Paxlovid, 124 phases of, 125–28 placebos, 126–27 Probability of Technical and Regulatory Success, 140 production/manufacturing, 131, 221 RECOVERY trial, U.K., 128, 221 regulatory approval, 128, 220–21 structure-guided drug discovery, 124 synthesized drugs, 122–23 targeting patients and training health care workers, 136–37, 137n E Ebola, 4, 11 contact tracing and, 97 EOCs in Nigeria and, 50, 213 epidemic (2014), 11–13, 56, 213 genetic sequencing and finding origins of an outbreak, 70 mutations (variants), 69 outbreaks (1976 to 2018), 7 polio surveillance teams and, 56 preventing outbreaks, 70 transmission, 11, 12 viral-vectored vaccine for, 156 endemic disease, 6, 188, 226 COVID as, 6, 216, 218 endemic killers, 7 EOCs (emergency operations centers), 49–51, 50, 212 epidemic disease surveillance, 53–82, 217 active or passive, 56, 226 birth/death records and, 57–58, 225 blog posts and social media, 56 causes of death, 58–59, 81 child mortality and, 58–59 computer modeling and, 82 diagnostic tests, 54, 61–66 digital data system, 64 disease modelers, 77–80 experts linking with governments, 76 genetic information on pathogens and, 68–70, 69, 76–77, 81, 225–26 global pandemic plan, 225–27 health systems and, 55–56, 77, 81 integration of systems, 226 in Japan, postal workers and, 57 on the local level, 54 mass testing and, 81 obstacles to, 54 ongoing for COVID, 217 reporting from pharmacists, 57 Seattle Flu Study and, 66–76 signals in the environment, 57 steps to take, 81–82 underinvestment in, 53 wastewater testing, 57 West African polio surveillance teams, 57 epidemics, 6, 7, 13 Global Fund and, 252 “silent epidemics,” 7–8 epidemiology/epidemiologists, 47, 68–70, 69, 76 European Union (EU) COVID vaccination in, 154 development aid by, 232 vaccine approval and, 169 vaccine manufacture and, 221 vaccine purchase, 229 Exemplars in Global Health, 26 F Famulare, Michael, 72, 72n, 80 Fauci, Anthony, 15–16, 86, 88, 153 FDA (U.S.

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See epidemic disease surveillance dexamethasone, 113–14, 136 diagnostic tests, 12–13, 19, 61–66 accuracy, 62, 63, 64 antigen tests, 63, 63, 251 cost reduction, 66, 226 innovation in, 64–66, 223–24, 234 lateral flow immunoassay technology, 63, 224 LumiraDx machines for, 64, 224 mass testing, 81 Nexar system, 65 PCR tests, 62–65, 63, 71, 224, 253 prioritizing recipients, 82 speed of results, 62–63, 64, 65 trucker testing, Uganda, 27, 27 ultra-high-throughput processing, 65 U.S. testing failures, 28–30, 29n diarrheal diseases, 5–6 deaths, sub-Saharan Africa, 199 Gates Foundation and, 58 prevention, 6 reducing child mortality and, 215 vaccines and, 6, 6n, 169 digital future, 237–50, 237n COVID lockdowns and digital tools, 237 e-commerce and, 238 education and, 238, 246–48 health data collection, 245 “metaverse,” 242–44 online meetings and platforms, 238, 241–43 remote-work options, 239–41 smartphones and, 237 telehealth services, 244–45 video calls, 249–50 video conferencing, 238 workplace augmented reality, 244n workplace automation, 244 workplace productivity, 241 disease modelers, 77–80 benefits for public health, 79 COVID deaths prediction, 80 data for, 79–80, 82 meteorologist analogy, 78–79, 79n Douglas Scientific, 65 drug development, 122–38, 222 accidental invention, 123 of acetaminophen, 123 of antibodies, 134–35 of antiviral drugs, 123–24 of chloroform, 123 CHO platform and, 134–35 clinical trials, 117, 126–27, 126n costs, 131–32 COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, 129–30, 129n drug candidates, chance of success, 140, 140n global pandemic plan and, 220–21 high-throughput screening, 125 history of, 122–23 of HIV antivirals, 124–25 human challenge study, 130–31 identifying targets (proteins), 124 infection-blocking drugs, 174–75, 220 innate immune response boosters, 137 innovations, 123–25, 130, 137–38 of Paxlovid, 124 phases of, 125–28 placebos, 126–27 Probability of Technical and Regulatory Success, 140 production/manufacturing, 131, 221 RECOVERY trial, U.K., 128, 221 regulatory approval, 128, 220–21 structure-guided drug discovery, 124 synthesized drugs, 122–23 targeting patients and training health care workers, 136–37, 137n E Ebola, 4, 11 contact tracing and, 97 EOCs in Nigeria and, 50, 213 epidemic (2014), 11–13, 56, 213 genetic sequencing and finding origins of an outbreak, 70 mutations (variants), 69 outbreaks (1976 to 2018), 7 polio surveillance teams and, 56 preventing outbreaks, 70 transmission, 11, 12 viral-vectored vaccine for, 156 endemic disease, 6, 188, 226 COVID as, 6, 216, 218 endemic killers, 7 EOCs (emergency operations centers), 49–51, 50, 212 epidemic disease surveillance, 53–82, 217 active or passive, 56, 226 birth/death records and, 57–58, 225 blog posts and social media, 56 causes of death, 58–59, 81 child mortality and, 58–59 computer modeling and, 82 diagnostic tests, 54, 61–66 digital data system, 64 disease modelers, 77–80 experts linking with governments, 76 genetic information on pathogens and, 68–70, 69, 76–77, 81, 225–26 global pandemic plan, 225–27 health systems and, 55–56, 77, 81 integration of systems, 226 in Japan, postal workers and, 57 on the local level, 54 mass testing and, 81 obstacles to, 54 ongoing for COVID, 217 reporting from pharmacists, 57 Seattle Flu Study and, 66–76 signals in the environment, 57 steps to take, 81–82 underinvestment in, 53 wastewater testing, 57 West African polio surveillance teams, 57 epidemics, 6, 7, 13 Global Fund and, 252 “silent epidemics,” 7–8 epidemiology/epidemiologists, 47, 68–70, 69, 76 European Union (EU) COVID vaccination in, 154 development aid by, 232 vaccine approval and, 169 vaccine manufacture and, 221 vaccine purchase, 229 Exemplars in Global Health, 26 F Famulare, Michael, 72, 72n, 80 Fauci, Anthony, 15–16, 86, 88, 153 FDA (U.S.

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order
by Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright
Published 23 Aug 2021

Kessel, and Melissa Chan, “Made in China, Exported to the World: The Surveillance State,” New York Times, April 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/ecuador-surveillance-cameras-police-government.html; “Chinese Tech Supports Ecuador’s Response to COVID-19,” Xinhua Net, May 30, 2020, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020–05/30/c_139100735.htm; Aidan Powers-Riggs, “Covid-19 Is Proving a Boon for Digital Authoritarianism,” Center for Strategic & International Studies, August 17, 2020, https://www.csis.org/blogs/new-perspectives-asia/covid-19-proving-boon-digital-authoritarianism.   39.  Erica Chenoweth et al., “The Global Pandemic Has Spawned New Forms of Activism—and They’re Flourishing,” The Guardian, April 20, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/20/the-global-pandemic-has-spawned-new-forms-of-activism-and-theyre-flourishing; Anna Lührmann et al., Autocratization Surges—Resistance Grows: Democracy Report 2020 (Gothenburg: V-Dem Institute, 2020), 21, https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/de/39/de39af54–0bc5–4421–89ae-fb20dcc53dba/democracy_report.pdf.   40.  

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No one knew what the ultimate death toll could be, but a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation was terrifying. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that up to 1.7 million Americans could die. German officials worried that they could lose half a million people. Everyone had known some sort of global pandemic was possible; some countries had even planned for it. But now that one had arrived, many leaders were flying blind. To curb the spread, economies were deliberately shut down, but that triggered an unimaginable worldwide recession that rivaled that of the Great Depression of the 1930s (or so it seemed for a while).

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This was apparent in the two decades following the Great War and the Great Influenza, commonly referred to as the “interwar years”—one of the most turbulent and consequential periods in modern times. The events of the interwar period are worth reflecting upon. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Great Influenza demonstrated the potential for global pandemics to shape international order by undermining the material capabilities of key states and by producing contingent historical events, such as the illness of Woodrow Wilson, that ripple through time. In the immediate postwar period, the hangover from the pandemic was not the sole—or in many cases the primary—driver of world events.

How to Work Without Losing Your Mind
by Cate Sevilla
Published 14 Jan 2021

From ill members of staff to remote working to IT issues with everyone working remotely to furloughing or laying off staff and closing entire departments or completely shutting down – managers and those in leadership positions were very quickly forced to deal with issues and situations that most had never had to tackle before – and certainly not all at once, during something as intense and as threatening as a global pandemic and threatened economic collapse. But no matter the exact circumstances or situation, managing in a crisis will put anyone’s management skills to the test. While there wasn’t a ‘How to Manage in a Global Pandemic’ rule book to consult (although I’m sure several will have now been published), there are certain things to keep in mind during a crisis of any kind. Be transparent. Even if you don’t have all the answers, share the ones you’re able to.

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Work, for those lucky enough to have it – whether a ‘9 to 5’, steady freelance gigs or enough paid hours to pay the rent – was what gave our days, weeks and lives structure – the takeaway coffee on the way to the station, the podcasts listened to on our daily commute, the faces of colleagues seen day in and day out, the misery of train delays on the way home. The global pandemic blew all of this to smithereens. People worldwide lost their jobs in incomprehensible numbers. The world of work has been changed in unprecedented ways. People who had never worked from home before were suddenly doing it every day. People who previously had no idea what Zoom was were suddenly using it several times a day for important meetings (and the occasional pub quiz).

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They’ll allow you to manage your professional reputation, your work and your sanity well. You’re teaching people how to treat you at work, and hopefully setting a positive example for other people in the office at the same time. Setting boundaries when you don’t work in an office For those of us who were able to work at home during the global pandemic, working remotely brought with it a whole new host of problems. Suddenly a huge part of the world’s workforce were communicating via video calls, huddled in messy kitchens while their toddlers wailed in another room, or hid from their partner’s loud conference call while stuffed in whatever corner of their home wasn’t piled with laundry.

Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic
by Scott Gottlieb
Published 20 Sep 2021

Honest debate is one thing, but our response was demoralized by a sizable enterprise devoted to manufacturing skepticism about any steps that could potentially reduce the scope of the spread, even obviously effective measures like masks or vaccines. In this book, I examine the shortcomings that exposed America to the worst effects of this virus, and I try to draw some lessons on how we can make ourselves more resilient to similar threats. We must be better prepared when another dangerous pathogen inevitably emerges and threatens a global pandemic, but our purpose shouldn’t be simply to make sure we’re better equipped to respond, but to secure a greater assurance that a global contagion on the scale of COVID can never happen again. Reflecting on where our response fell short can provide a roadmap for how to be more effective when the next virus emerges.

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Our health officials were overwhelmed early on with repatriating Americans from China and focused too little attention on preparing the homeland for the inevitable spread of the virus. Many publicly clung to a tragic view that SARS-CoV-2 wouldn’t become epidemic here. By March, when the evidence that it would spark a global pandemic could no longer be discounted, it was too late. That relative complacency was being fed by reliance on faulty information that had US officials believing that the virus wasn’t spreading here, even long after it had actually arrived in our communities. It was driven largely by a failure to field a test that would let us screen for it.

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Most countries still had laws in place that tied their local action not to the declaration of a PHEIC, but to the declaration of a pandemic by the WHO—a higher standard that had not yet been met in the WHO’s estimation. Indeed, the WHO wouldn’t declare the novel coronavirus to be a pandemic until five weeks later, on March 11, well after it was clear to anyone watching the news that a global pandemic was already under way. “We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” the director general said at a briefing held to announce the belated declaration of a pandemic.75 By that point, the ground was shifting. A day earlier, on March 10, President Xi visited Wuhan to mark the culmination of a harsh seventy-six-day lockdown of that city that had largely succeeded in arresting the epidemic there.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Published 11 Oct 2021

Across the country at the state, local, and federal levels, political actors rammed through hundreds of structural changes to the manner and oversight of elections, resulting in what Time magazine would later call “a revolution in how people vote.”15 Some of these changes were enacted by state legislatures, some by courts, and others by state and county election officials. Many changes, allegedly justified by the global pandemic, were broad reforms that Democrats had long desired. The crisis was their chance to sneak in contentious policies through the back door. The bedrock of the American republic is that elections must be free, fair, accurate, and trusted. Election lawyers will tell you that fraud is almost impossible to conclusively find after the fact, and that to fight it, strong rules and regulations are needed on the front end.

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His final stop in Cleveland was at Burke Lakefront Airport, where masked guests in one hundred spaced-out vehicles honked in the place of polite applause.4 In Pennsylvania, he hosted small drive-in events in Allegheny County and Pittsburgh. The last two weeks of the 2020 election had been the most normal anyone on the campaign had experienced in months. Just as Biden locked up his nomination in March, the country locked down in response to the coronavirus outbreak, a global pandemic that had spread across the world from its origin in Wuhan, China. The pandemic crushed the thriving economy, one of Trump’s major selling points as the country underwent what he liked to call a “blue-collar boom.”5 His deregulatory agenda, tax cuts, willingness to tackle illegal immigration to stop the flood of cheap labor into the country, and renegotiation of trade deals to strengthen industry had jump-started an economy that had been flagging throughout his predecessor’s two terms.

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Trump was the first president in forty years who hadn’t invaded a country or launched a new war.4 He brought peace to the Middle East, brokering a series of historic deals between Arab nations and Israel.5 And he shifted the nation’s foreign policy focus to China, a nation that much of the country had come to view as a serious adversary. The spread of the COVID-19 virus from China changed everything. The global pandemic squelched the thriving economy that was Trump’s best argument for re-election. In fact, it shut down the country entirely.6 Children were banned from school. Religious adherents were prevented from worship. Restaurants and gathering places were shuttered. It gave the media massive reserves of fuel for their unhinged anti-Trump operation.

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis
by Jeanna Smialek
Published 27 Feb 2023

Likewise, prominent Democrats in 2020 considered trying to use one of the market rescue programs the Fed had established to funnel cheap money to state and local governments in lieu of passing legislation. These issues are unlikely to go away. While the Fed’s actions in 2020 came in response to an unprecedented global pandemic, the pages ahead will make clear that the financial vulnerabilities that necessitated huge Fed action were kindling waiting for a spark. They were known weaknesses, and many of them still exist. It is somewhere between possible and likely that Fed market interventions like the ones that took place during the pandemic will be required again in the future.

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Nobody, however, questioned that they needed to do whatever they could to fix the government bond market. So it was, on a Sunday in March, that the central bank voted to begin rescuing Wall Street and the economy for the second time in a dozen years. * * * — The root cause of the crisis in 2020 was a global pandemic, not irresponsible risk-taking by banks and investors. Likewise, the solution was no repeat of the bank-specific bailouts of 2008. This time around, the Fed would buy government-backed bonds—huge sums of them—until the market traded more normally. It was a pumped-up version of a bond-buying program that had first been enacted more than a decade earlier.[7] Of course, some investors would undeniably benefit, including hedge funds that had amassed huge Treasury holdings as part of a trade that was usually safe but that had turned disastrous in the face of the March 2020 volatility.

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“We were always too slow and too timid in responding to the crisis,” Kashkari told 60 Minutes, referencing the prior meltdown.[11] “Today, whether it’s healthcare policy makers, fiscal policy makers, which means Congress, or the Federal Reserve, we should all be erring on the side of overreacting to try to avoid the worst economic outcomes.” The Fed would do just that in the months ahead. In the spring of 2020 and over the two years that followed, as the global pandemic first imperiled society’s most important financial markets and then—together with massive government spending—touched off an unexpected chain of events that revived long-dormant inflation, America’s central bank would more fully embrace its role as the most powerful economic institution the modern world had ever known.

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick
by J. David McSwane
Published 11 Apr 2022

And all 330 million Americans were along for the ride. Moments after our “invisible enemy” was named, the nation’s foremost disease expert, speaking at a public forum in Aspen, Colorado, sought to elucidate the virus. He said the risk was “relatively low” to most Americans but hedged. “Is there a risk that this is going to turn into a global pandemic?” said Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Absolutely, yes.” For more than thirty-five years, Fauci had served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, under the National Institutes of Health, advising six presidents on everything from HIV/AIDS to Ebola to the disease that had been named just moments before.

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On March 9, many weeks after Bright and Bowen and others had sounded the alarm on the looming mask shortage, Kadlec’s office sought a meeting with the CEO of 3M to get more masks flowing into the stockpile, according to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. On March 11, the WHO made it official: COVID-19 was a global pandemic. That same day, responding to an outbreak in New Orleans, officials in Louisiana requested tens of thousands of respirators, masks, face shields, and gowns. Oregon requested 400,000 N95s and 600,000 surgical masks. And the requests kept coming. Officials in North Carolina, seeing little help from the federal government, reached out to the home improvement chain Lowe’s, which is headquartered there, to see about buying every mask the company had.

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“How are you today? What can I do for you?” It was near 5 p.m. on March 15, 2020, the same day the CDC warned against gatherings of more than fifty people, just two days after President Donald Trump had declared a national state of emergency, four days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and many weeks after this call should have come. “Health and Human Services has asked for some logistics planning help,” VanHerck said. Polowczyk took that to mean that HHS secretary Azar or ASPR Kadlec had reached out for help from the Defense Department. “Yeah, uh, okay,” Polowczyk said.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa Moyo
Published 3 May 2021

The coronavirus may have amplified the challenges facing today’s global companies, but I believe now more than ever in the positive role these corporations—and their boards—can play in society. Businesses are reckoning with a period of shocks, tremendous uncertainty, and heightened complexity that is testing whether corporations, and indeed capitalism itself, will survive. The damage caused by the 2020 global pandemic—both in economic terms and in the cost to human health—has intensified a debate about corporate power that was already underway. Today, popular opinion is turning against large corporations, and political, social, and cultural landscapes are shifting at a rapid clip. Boards go about their work acutely aware of the stakes of their decisions.

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Failure could imperil the health of the global economy and, with it, jobs, prosperity, human progress, and the “American way of life” that not only Americans but people around the world have long pursued. No one organization, government, or individual can provide stability amid the turbulence. But the 2020 global pandemic has revealed that corporations have an important and central role to play in navigating global disruption. In all times, but especially in times of turmoil, corporate boards have a responsibility as custodians not just of a single organization, but of our economic well-being as a whole. The prosperity of society relies on corporate boards succeeding.

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The growth of anti-corporate sentiment in recent years has even led some to hope for such an outcome—there are those who would cheer the destruction of the corporate landscape as we know it. Of course, they overlook the devastating consequences of such a scenario: the economy would contract, investment in innovation would plummet, millions of jobs would be lost, pension and health-care benefits would evaporate, and living standards would collapse worldwide. The 2020 global pandemic and economic shutdown has offered an unnerving idea of what economic carnage might look like in terms of spiking unemployment and plummeting growth prospects, especially in the most affected sectors of travel, tourism, and retail. Recent memory provides plenty of examples of the fallout of individual corporate failure.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

In many ways, we’re even more vulnerable today. Densely packed cities, wars, natural disasters, and international air travel mean a deadly virus propagated in a small village in Africa can be transmitted almost anywhere in the world, including the United States, within 24 hours. . . . Biosecurity and global pandemics cut across all national boundaries. Pathogens, viruses, and diseases are equal-opportunity killers. When the crisis comes, we will wish we had more funding and more global cooperation. But then, it will be too late. It was too late. We had ample warning to gird ourselves for Covid-19. But beyond the specific dangers of a pandemic, we should have recognized the general possibility of a shock to our system.

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Economic anxiety bred cultural anxiety, hostility to immigration, and a nostalgic desire to return to a familiar past. Right-wing populism gained strength across the West. The third shock is the one we are living through. It may be the biggest of them all, and it is certainly the most global. What began as a health-care problem in China soon became a global pandemic. But that was only the start. The medical crisis prompted a simultaneous lockdown of all business across the globe, resulting in a Great Paralysis, the cessation of economics itself. By some measures, the economic damage from this pandemic already rivals that of the Great Depression. The political consequences will play out over the coming years in different ways in different countries.

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A couple of months later, the British politician Michael Gove was quizzed about his advocacy for Brexit and asked to name a few economists who supported his view that leaving the European Union would be good for business. His response: “People in this country have had enough of experts.” Now that the world has experienced a global pandemic, it should have become painfully clear that people need to listen to experts. But that is not exactly how things have worked out. To be sure, in many countries, particularly in East Asia, there was a strong, instinctive deference to authority, especially scientific authority. Taiwan’s near-flawless response was overseen by its vice president, a Johns Hopkins-educated epidemiologist who previously steered Taiwan through the SARS epidemic as health minister.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

To get a more effective national government, we must first collectively agree on shared objectives—like preventing pandemic and extending life spans. We must then judge our national leaders on their ability to achieve those objectives, just as we already fire our mayors when they take too long to clear the streets of snow in winter. The fight against global pandemic requires not only more national competence, but also a multinational entity that monitors the globe for new outbreaks and speedily closes the travel routes that spread death. Across the world, a plague that begins in an Indian pit latrine or a Chinese open-air market can infect billions. Even the best-run countries were flattened by COVID-19.

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After World War II, NATO was given a clear mission—preventing an attack on its members by the Soviet Union—and a budget commensurate with it. NATO was spectacularly successful. In the same way, a revitalized international health organization must monitor the emergence of any new infectious disease and set rules about disease risk, reporting, and travel. To reduce the risk of global pandemic, the rich world should be willing to contribute more to ensure better sanitation in the world’s poorest cities. The price of that aid could be the enforcement of bans on excessive mixing of humans, bats, pigs, and other animals involved in spreading viral disease, along with limits on excessive use of antibiotics that might seed the next superbug.

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It must have the ability to investigate without restraint. There must be consequences for countries that fail to limit risks. And it must be sufficiently resourced. After World War II, the West invented such a structure, and it defended Europe from the Soviet Union for forty years. The threat of global pandemic is similarly dire and requires no less a commitment. Even with such a structure, pandemics can still occur. The risk will never be zero. In this chapter, we have focused on the first source of urban vulnerability. Cities are nodes on a global network, and they provide the ports of entry for any new disease.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
by David Quammen
Published 30 Sep 2012

When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis. It’s a mildly technical term, zoonosis, unfamiliar to most people, but it helps clarify the biological complexities behind the ominous headlines about swine flu, bird flu, SARS, emerging diseases in general, and the threat of a global pandemic. It helps us comprehend why medical science and public health campaigns have been able to conquer some horrific diseases, such as smallpox and polio, but unable to conquer other horrific diseases, such as dengue and yellow fever. It says something essential about the origins of AIDS. It’s a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the twenty-first century.

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(It’s a little confusing, I concede, that they use R0 as the symbol for basic reproduction rate and plain R as the symbol for recovered in an SIR model. That’s just a clumsy coincidence, reflecting the fact that both words begin with the letter R.) R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald. 28 Plasmodium falciparum isn’t the only malarial parasite of global concern. Outside of sub-Saharan Africa, most human cases are caused by Plasmodium vivax, the second-worst of the four kinds adapted particularly to infecting people. (The other two, P. ovale and P. malariae, are far more rare and not nearly so virulent, causing infections that usually pass without medical treatment.)

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Most of those papers are narrowly technical, addressing the details of molecular evolution, reservoir relationships, or epidemiology, but some take a broader view, asking What is it that makes this virus unusual? and What have we learned from the SARS experience? One thought that turns up in the latter sort is that “humankind has had a lucky escape.” The scenario could have been very much worse. SARS in 2003 was an outbreak, not a global pandemic. Eight thousand cases are relatively few, for such an explosive infection; 774 people died, not 7 million. Several factors contributed to limiting the scope and the impact of the outbreak, of which humanity’s good luck was only one. Another was the speed and excellence of the laboratory diagnostics—finding the virus and identifying it—performed by Malik Peiris, Guan Yi, their partners in Hong Kong, and their colleagues and competitors in the United States, China, and Europe.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

Only about a third of Americans trusted Donald Trump’s medical advice.22 One poll in late April showed that 62 percent of the French had no confidence in their government’s handling of the crisis, with commentators, on both the right and the left, comparing France’s response to Covid to the country’s “strange defeat” by Germany in 1940.23 At its worst, this distrust created conspiracy theories: that the virus had been deliberately manufactured, either by China or Big Pharma or indeed the United States; that it spread through 5G towers and masks; that it was a plot to kill off the old. Bill Gates was blamed, because long before Covid he had (correctly) warned about the danger of a global pandemic in a TED talk, and invested cash in trying to find a cure. This nonsense has consequences: people have burned down scores of 5G towers, including sometimes towers that served medical facilities. A third of Americans say that they won’t get themselves vaccinated if one is found. OVERLOADED—AND OVER?

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“The model of how democracy began,” says Bass, “is also a study in how it can founder and fall.”6 Britain was slow into lockdown not just because Boris Johnson was incompetent but also because of his libertarian instincts (Johnson has a bust of Pericles on his desk). In France, Macron went ahead with the elections that helped spread the virus, partly because he thought it was the right thing to do. But wait. If there was ever a test that autocracies ought to ace, it is a global pandemic. The problem is what these draconian administrations do to you the rest of the time. Moreover, there is actually nothing antidemocratic about giving elected officials more power in the short term, in order to beat a disease—providing those powers are temporary and pragmatic. Governor Cuomo’s decision to tell the National Guard to look for ventilators in New York and Johnson’s decision to instruct the army to build a hospital in East London were admirable responses to a crisis—not Covid coups.

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Covid-19 was the third outbreak of a Coronavirus this century—after SARS (2003) and MERS (2012). It had also watched the damage done by swine flu in 2009, Ebola in 2014, and Zika in 2016. For a while America looked prepared. Under Bill Clinton it created a National Pharmaceutical Stockpile to store supplies. George W. Bush warned the American public to beware of a global pandemic, declaring that “if we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.” Barack Obama drew up ambitious plans to produce twenty million reusable face masks and cheap ventilators. But when the stockpile was tapped to deal with swine flu, Ebola, and Zika, the supplies were never fully replaced.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson
Published 1 Jan 2008

I thought long and hard about including fear and anxiety in this list, but in the end I decided to add them to a list of 5 things that won’t change over the next 50 years, which appears at the very end of the book. Why these 5 key trends? Any list is inevitably highly personal and subjective, but ageing is hard to disagree with. Indeed, demographic trends are more certain than virtually anything else because short of a global pandemic, nuclear annihilation or rogue asteroids, we can be pretty sure how many people will be around in 50 years’ time based on how many are already here and on current death and fertility rates. Global connectivity is a little less certain, not least because there are some good arguments about the end of globalization and the emergence of (re)localization.

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Industrial markets will split between luxury and low-cost options, with access to services like health and education, transport and 16 FUTURE FILES security similarly polarizing, depending on your ability to pay. The economic middle class will eventually disappear in most developed countries, with people either moving upwards into a new global managerial elite or downwards into a new enslaved working (or not working) class. Anxiety If “they” don’t get you, a global pandemic or high interest rates probably will. At least that’s how many people will feel in the future. Trust in institutions will all but evaporate and the speed of change will leave people longing for the past. This insecurity is to some extent generational, but whether you are 18 or 80 there will be a growing feeling of powerlessness and a continual state of anxiety that will fuel everything from an interest in nostalgia and escapism to a growth in narcissism and localization.

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The average person now carries two to three times as much weight in their pockets and bags as they did two decades ago, so targeted personal fitness programs will soon have to appear unless someone invents a lightweight alternative or micro-payments become more widely accepted. Coins and banknotes could also disappear almost overnight for another reason. In all the recent talk about the consequences of a global pandemic, it appears to me that one important implication has been missed: banknotes and coins tend to be dirty, so people will refuse to handle them if they think they could be a conduit for disease. In Japan, some ATMs already heat banknotes as a precautionary hygiene measure; in an age of anxiety, “hot money” could be a very cool idea.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

The Future of Agriculture Lessons from Brazil Making Race: The Politics and Economics of Racial Identity Contents List of Figures Preface 1 Introduction 2 Engines of Progress 3 Levelling Up 4 Divided Cities 5 Remote Work: The Threat to Cities 6 Cities, Cyberspace and the Future of Community 7 Beyond the Rich World 8 The Spectre of Disease 9 A Climate of Peril 10 Conclusion: Better Together Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index List of Figures Figure 1: More than half the world’s population now lives in cities Figure 2: Income dispersion across cities varies from country to country Figure 3: Rising sea levels will leave many cities under water Preface We live in tumultuous times. In the space of just a few years, we have witnessed a surge in populist politics across the world, a global pandemic, a spike in environmental disasters and a fraying of geopolitical relations demonstrated by the tragic war in Ukraine and escalating tensions over Taiwan. That has all occurred against a backdrop of dramatic technological changes that are fundamentally altering the way we work and relate to one another.

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In 1987, on the back of these triumphs, the US Surgeon General William Stewart boldly declared: ‘The war against diseases has been won.’10 Even in poor countries, where rates of death from preventable infectious diseases are still much higher, progress has been enormous. Infectious diseases seemed poised for defeat. The devastating toll of the Covid-19 pandemic has shattered this naiveté. That global pandemic has led to the loss of over 20 million lives, a similar death toll to the First World War.11 Most of these deaths have occurred in poor countries, though rich countries have certainly not been spared, with over one million deaths in the US alone. Many of our readers will have lost loved ones, with the burden of mortality having fallen disproportionately on the elderly, medics and essential workers who were most exposed to the pandemic, particularly in the first year before vaccines became available.

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About 250 people can fit into a single carriage on the New York subway, greater than the size of a typical medieval village.23 In 2019, prior to the pandemic, the global aviation industry completed 4.5 billion passenger journeys, nearly all of which departed and arrived in cities.24 Only through cities can an outbreak of a novel disease in central China cascade in a matter of weeks into a global pandemic. The Origins of Infectious Disease When our ancient ancestors transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture, they forever changed our relationship with the world of infectious diseases. Rising population density made it easier for microorganisms to establish themselves in multiple hosts.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

The British economist Lord Nicholas Stern once remarked that climate change results from history’s greatest market failure—the failure to attach a price to the costs of CO2 emissions.23 If this is true, then as the coronavirus crisis of 2020 demonstrates, the failure to build adequate defenses against global pandemics must be a close second. Even the best-funded global public health infrastructure cannot offer guarantees, but as 2020 began, the disproportion between pandemic risk and the investment in global public health was nothing short of grotesque. * * * — To talk in terms of “market failure” understates the force of the point.

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Kristalina Georgieva, IMF managing director, repeated the warning she had made in Munich the week before. But what those warnings added up to was a downward revision of the IMF’s growth forecasts for China from 6 to 5.6 percent. Bad news, but hardly a disaster. That was about to change. With hindsight, we can see that it was in the third week of February that the global pandemic began in earnest. Starting on February 15, significant outbreaks were registered in South Korea, Iran, and Italy. The first death in Iran may have occurred on January 22, though it was not registered at the time.30 The regime was too busy celebrating the forty-first anniversary of the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran and rigging local elections.

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“For the neighborhood salesmen, for the shop owners in city centers, for domestic employees, for millions of Brazilians, Brazil cannot stop,” the ad said. Would there be casualties? Yes. As Bolsonaro remarked with a shrug: “Sorry, some will die.” On the familiar left-right political spectrum, President AMLO of Mexico is the antithesis of Bolsonaro, but even after the global pandemic was officially declared, he showed a similar disregard for the disease. Early cases were largely imported by wealthy Mexicans holidaying in America. This gave succor to the idea that the Mexican masses enjoyed immunity.54 AMLO urged audiences across the country not to be disturbed by exaggerated media reports.55 He accused conservatives of delighting in the spread of the epidemic and exaggerating failures of policy so as to destabilize his government.56 While establishment media spluttered with indignation, AMLO himself flouted scientific advice, refusing to wear a mask or to comply with social distancing.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
by Sathnam Sanghera
Published 28 Jan 2021

Empire explains why we have a diaspora of millions of Britons spread around the world. Empire explains the global pretensions of our Foreign and Defence secretaries. Empire explains the feeling that we are exceptional and can go it alone when it comes to everything from Brexit to dealing with global pandemics. Empire helped to establish the position of the City of London as one of the world’s major financial centres, and also ensures that the interests of finance trump the interests of so many other groups in the twenty-first century. Empire explains how some of our richest families and institutions and cities became wealthy.

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Nearly two centuries after the company’s foundation and more than 150 years after the opening of the Suez Canal, which permitted wealthy Britons to visit Asia in comfort and style, the British are the world’s fourth most enthusiastic tourists, spending $71.4 billion on tourism every year, behind Germany, the USA and China, but ahead of France, Canada and Korea.9 More than three-quarters of residents in England and Wales hold passports, according to the last Census in 2011, compared to just 40 per cent in the USA.10 In 2018, when global pandemics were merely the stuff of dystopian fiction, the British took over 71.7 million trips abroad and in the month of August 2019 alone11 British travellers made 9.4 million trips abroad.12 Five per cent of these trips were to America, which has remained a popular destination for the British since the colonies were settled in the early seventeenth century.13 But it’s not just our predilection for travel and relocation that has been shaped by our imperial history – the way we travel and live abroad has been influenced by it too.

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For when it comes to the question of how our politics has been shaped and influenced by empire, there is one issue that dominates all else – a political event which has been compared to Suez by many, and which also happens to be the most divisive and contentious political issue of our lifetime: Brexit. Difficult as it has been confronting the subject of empire in the middle of a global pandemic, I have consoled myself during these challenging months that I have at least been offered respite from the enervating question of our relationship to Europe. There turns out, however, to be no escape, with the argument that our departure from the European Union has been ultimately inspired by our experience of empire being one of the most common criticisms of Brexit.

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World
by Mo Gawdat
Published 29 Sep 2021

This is what we witnessed with COVID-19, which is infectious while lying undetected for up to two weeks. Hiding for two weeks allows it to jump from one carrier to many others before it is detected, and sparing most of its victims allows it to live longer and continue to spread. Spreading through the air we breathe while being this smart is what turned COVID-19 into a global pandemic. But intelligent as it may be among viruses, COVID-19 is superstupid when compared to the lowest level of superintelligence humanity is currently creating. And yet how has our collective intelligence served us in our handling of the COVID-19 outbreak? Our mistakes, fortunately, did not lead us to total destruction, simply because COVID-19 itself did not have that capability, at least at the time of writing this.

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Our mistakes, fortunately, did not lead us to total destruction, simply because COVID-19 itself did not have that capability, at least at the time of writing this. Here are some of the glaring mistakes we made. We ignore the evangelists For years prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, scientists, public health experts, prominent public figures and global organizations warned us about the possibility of a global pandemic. They provided evidence for this and estimated the impact it would have. They made it clear that we needed to prepare for an imminent, widespread pandemic. Despite the outbreaks of SARS and other infectious diseases acting as a clear and present reminder of the possibilities, reports by the World Health Organization fell on deaf ears.

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And yet here we are, decades on from Turing and Good’s warnings, still unprepared, even as the speed of development outpaces our wildest expectations. What can I say? When the warnings depict a scenario that is far removed from our common experience, our impulse is to ignore it. We’re ignoring the messengers warning of the threat of superintelligence. Just as we ignored the threat of a global pandemic. And even as the events start to unfold to confirm the validity of the warning . . . We hide the facts and react late The story of the pandemic is well known, of course, but it’s worth revisiting here because there are many potential parallels between the way we reacted to the virus and the way we are reacting to the potential threat of AI.

Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (In a Big Way)
by Roma Agrawal
Published 2 Mar 2023

They have created and changed our technology, of course, but have also had a sweeping impact on our history, society, political and power structures, biology, communication, transportation, arts, and culture. I selected these seven objects during the first 2020 lockdown in England, in the midst of a global pandemic. Trapped at home, I let my mind roam free, looking around at my possessions and the objects I could see from my window, and mentally (or sometimes physically) deconstructing them to see what lay inside. I revisited the ballpoint pen and saw it built around a spring, a screw, and a revolving sphere.

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I try to capture fleeting moments in pictures. My memories feel muddled and unreliable. Time feels warped by your presence. Zarya, I am grateful that I have you, even though my journey to you was rocky. Even though my journey after you were born has been so, so very tough, not least because of a global pandemic. Even during all these challenging times, I find hope, inspiration, and amazement; in you, of course, but also in the people that made your life possible. I don’t just mean Appa and me, or Nani, Nana, Mausi, and Ajji. I don’t just mean the specific embryologist who joined you together, or the doctor who placed you back inside me.

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Bringing together the principles of civic engineering, conscious consumption, and knowledge of how our stuff works can only be a good thing, but we also need manufacturers themselves to get on board, as well as policy and government. Overall, Danielle is optimistic. During the last few years, she’s seen a rise in community repair hubs, where people help each other fix things, and an increase in advertising for refurbished phones and second-hand tech. Lockdowns in response to the global pandemic forced remote working and study for people who may not have had the tools they needed, so there has been a leap in creating affordable electronics. By breaking things down and delving into the small, hopefully I’ve illustrated that far from being overwhelming and cold, engineering – past, present, and future – is stimulating, empowering and human.

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis
by Dr Dominic Pimenta
Published 2 Sep 2020

The word jarred because, as doctors, we are always taught that “trust” simply isn’t good enough. Plan for the worst and hope for the best. But we were only doing the latter. All the while we could physically see our own future coming down the line, just two weeks ahead of us in Italy. It was obvious then that global pandemic was inevitable, and yet we weren’t reacting. That evening I wrote some of these thoughts down, at first as a thought experiment. Later, I developed it into an article covering the scale of the potential need for intensive care and PPE, the high burden of deaths, the lack of current NHS capacity and the major issues with those non-coronavirus patients who would not get looked after for every COVID patient that came in.4 It’s almost difficult to imagine what it was like writing down the numbers that we had been talking about in the abstract for weeks prior.

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There are now two obvious and inescapable truths – that the virus can no longer be contained, because we aren’t testing or finding contacts anymore, and that without widespread measures it will continue to double every two to three days. And yet still nothing changes. It occurs to me then, puffing in my running gear and looking at the collective journalism of our country spread before me, that a global pandemic is now inevitable. At least the tone of the conversation has changed – there is some realization of the scale of this disaster – but it is no less ill-thought through. The next tabloid reads “Govt will call up retired medics to fight coronavirus”. A group of men and women in a high-risk group, coming back to a service they’ve only just, I can only assume happily, retired from.

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She’d sweep the floors during a hurricane. “No, Beck, come now. We don’t know when we’ll be allowed to travel next afterwards.” “Okay, okay. I’ll come today. You finally get what you want.” “To get you to live in our attic, and to stop working at the spin studio and focus on your music?” “Yes.” “And all it took was a global pandemic.” Beck laughs, and rings off. In the midst of the chaos it’s a cheering thought, to know that Dilsan and Beck will be together, especially as they get on so well. I’ll know that Beck is safe and looked after, the kids can see their Aunty “Buckie”, as Ayla is wont to call her, and I can stop worrying about her being alone in the midst of the pandemic

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 14 Oct 2021

Despite the tragedies of Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and a long list of other school shootings, we don’t protect our students and restrict the kinds of guns that can be purchased because some people’s allegiance is to the Second Amendment and not to the safety of our youth. Hell, look at the national response to Covid-19 in America. We can’t even come together in the face of a global pandemic. After nine months of the federal government spreading disinformation, coupled with the nation’s “me first” mentality, which resulted in many people refusing to wear a mask and socially distance, more than three thousand people were dying per day, meaning that each day we were surpassing the total deaths on 9/11.

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If letter writing could keep a marriage alive during the entirety of the Civil War, then I’m sure my working relationship with Heather can thrive via the emails I send her while taking a dump. If this stance paints me as antisocial, then so be it. I just believe that working from home during a global pandemic is taxing enough—after all, we’re expected to maintain the same level of productivity we had pre-Covid—so having to carry on as though we’re not experiencing collective trauma, all the while putting on our professional bests or code-switching for the Zoom cameras is . . . well, frankly, none of us are getting paid enough to do that.

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But for real, I knew nothing about trees except to say “tree” like Jodie Foster in Nell when I see one—#DeepCutReference—yet I instantly mourned the end of ignoring trees on my way home from Target after capitalizing on a two-for-six-dollars face scrub deal. Of course, that’s a trivial thing to miss, but I believe that when soul-shaking, life-changing, world-breaking things like a global pandemic happen, your brain turns to anything that can help you self-soothe. For some, that might’ve been making a box cake and eating half of it in one sitting. For others, maybe it was buying three twelve-pack rolls of toilet paper. By the way, who were all these overly confident people who knew their shit schedule for the next six weeks?

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Published 10 May 2010

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Introduction Chapter 1 - The White Swan Chapter 2 - Crisis Economists Chapter 3 - Plate Tectonics Chapter 4 - Things Fall Apart Chapter 5 - Global Pandemics Chapter 6 - The Last Resort Chapter 7 - Spend More, Tax Less? Chapter 8 - First Steps Chapter 9 - Radical Remedies Chapter 10 - Fault Lines Conclusion Outlook Acknowledgments NOTES SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ALSO BY NOURIEL ROUBINI New International Financial Architecture (with Marc Uzan) Bailouts or Bail-Ins? Responding to Financial Crisis in Emerging Economies (with Brad Setser) Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy (with Alberto Alesina and Gerald D.

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Since banks were not lending to each other or to nonbank financial firms or even to nonfinancial corporate firms, central banks were forced to become lenders of first, last, and only resort. The storm engendered little in the way of the “creative destruction” that Joseph Schumpeter would have celebrated. Instead, strong and weak alike remained in a state of suspended animation, awaiting the final reckoning. Chapter 5 Global Pandemics An old saying in financial markets has it that “when the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.” However clichéd, that observation contains plenty of truth: the United States is the biggest, most powerful economy in the world, and when it gets sick, countries that depend on its insatiable demand for everything from raw commodities to finished consumer goods find themselves in trouble too.

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However clichéd, that observation contains plenty of truth: the United States is the biggest, most powerful economy in the world, and when it gets sick, countries that depend on its insatiable demand for everything from raw commodities to finished consumer goods find themselves in trouble too. This dynamic takes on dangerous potency in times of financial crisis. An outbreak of some financial disease in the world’s economic powerhouse can swiftly become a devastating global pandemic. A crash in the stock market, the failure of a big bank, or some other unexpected collapse at the epicenter of global finance can become a countrywide panic and then a worldwide disaster. It’s a scenario that has played out many times, whether in Britain in the nineteenth century or in the United States since that time.

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus
by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green
Published 7 Jul 2021

Disease X was a placeholder, representing a future, hypothetical disease. No one knew what the disease would be, or when it would emerge, but experts agreed that the emergence of something, sometime soon, was inevitable. Looking back now, it’s interesting to see that then, the planning was for an epidemic, meaning an outbreak in one geographical area – but not a global pandemic. Nonetheless, the very act of putting Disease X on the list was an important recognition of the need to prepare for pathogens we don’t yet know, as well as the ones we do. So how could we prepare for a disease that we don’t yet know about? How do you design a vaccine against an unknown pathogen?

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In the committee room in the Palace of Westminster I spoke about the vaccine development work we were doing in Oxford, how it followed on from other work we had done on the MERS vaccine, and why it was both possible and essential to proceed very quickly. I also said that we needed funding for the work as a matter of urgency. The following day, 11 March, the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic. The next few weeks were some of the most hectic and surreal of my life. I was running in parallel half a dozen stages of vaccine development that would usually happen over years and in sequence. At the same time we were starting to attract a lot of media interest, setting up a deal with big pharma, and going into lockdown.

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We expected to be making at least two more, but that number would only go up as more ‘variants of concern’ were identified. Although it felt like an end to the pandemic could be in sight with the rapid vaccine roll-out, it also felt like missteps over new variants could set us back again. I was not sure the team could take that. Our resilience was close to crumbling. — There will be a next time. The next global pandemic will come. And well before the start of 2021 we were thinking about what we needed to do to be ready for it. But it also became clear in the early months of 2021, as the world started to roll out our vaccine and others, that we were not finished with SARS-CoV-2, and it was not finished with us.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

(Chuyuan later came under some criticism for suggesting his company’s herbal medicine could stave off the disease.) But unknown to the Davos crowd, the first case had already arrived within the United States—later confirmed in Washington state on January 21. The virus hit southern Europe in force in February, and by March, it was declared a global pandemic. The “global society,” long heralded as a supreme advance of the modern era, aided the spread of the disease. In the coming weeks travel bans were announced, and when the spread continued, lockdowns began. California was the first with a statewide stay-at-home order. On the East Coast, New York state became the epicenter of the coronavirus, with Governor Andrew Cuomo ordering all nonessential businesses closed.

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He was feeling the pressures around personal protective equipment, the N95 masks in particular. 3M had started ramping up its manufacturing of PPE before it hit the American public that the need was desperate here at home. Roman explained: “Coming out of SARS, we had developed a strategy to have idle capacity available for the next pandemic. We didn’t anticipate a global pandemic like we’re facing with COVID-19. We responded and have been ramping up capacity ever since.”12 The priorities were clear to his leadership: “Protect our employees, so we could keep executing, fight the pandemic from every angle, and deliver for our customers and shareholders, as we went through the uncertainty that we were facing.

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NO LOSS OF MOMENTUM Competition is the core of the free market economy. It is competition that drives companies to improve quality and reduce prices, to become more efficient, to innovate. Competition is the magic that makes capitalist economies successful. But solving society’s biggest problems—like a global pandemic—requires cooperation as well as competition. The scientists at pharmaceutical companies were competing with each other to be the first to develop vaccines and treatments for COVID. But they also were sharing data, knowledge, and even their facilities in ways that never would have been imaginable before the pandemic.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

While the node in the supply chains of Asia I was about to tour had already been growing in importance and was fast becoming something like the next China—a hub of low-cost manufacturing rapidly transforming into a hot spot of high-tech expertise—what I couldn’t have predicted was that the black swan of the coronavirus was about to make everything I would see that day, and in the days following, so much more important. Just as the Saigon River on which we traveled had shifted its course across the Mekong Delta countless times before, eradicating one shoreline as it built up another, its path dictated by forces beyond human scale, the supply chains that had until the global pandemic of 2020 seemed adequate were about to whipsaw into new configurations, a flood of goods reshaping them to fresh and urgent needs. The day I stepped from our yellow speedboat onto the concrete pier of Cai Mep International Terminal, part of one of the largest container ports in Southeast Asia, shipping containers in its yard contained a not insignificant portion of the goods that people, businesses, and hospitals across the globe would be panic-buying in the months ahead.

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After racking up more than seven years of time at sea, broken up by time ashore to attend maritime university, Jeff, as he likes to be called, was on his final tour on a container ship. Jeff has black hair, a disarmingly boyish face, and nearly half a million subscribers on YouTube, where he posts videos about life at sea. He was supposed to be on board the Brussels, which circumnavigates Earth every seventy-seven days, for just six months. Thanks to the global pandemic, he would stay on the ship for nearly a year. Under normal circumstances, containerized shipping companies exchange 150,000 sailors every month, pulling as many off ships as they put on, for a total movement of 300,000 people. But when Covid-19 struck, the companies invoked the legal principle of force majeure—extraordinary circumstances—to keep officers, captains, and crew on board their ships until ports allowed sailors to disembark again and cross-border travel on international flights could be worked out.

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By this point, the e-commerce giant was already sold out of toilet paper and dozens of other household goods. A study published by a pair of economists in January 2021 will find that all over the world, panic buying reached its highest intensity in the week after governments declared restrictions on movement within a state or country. It turns out this USB charger, manufactured when the global pandemic had yet to start, put on a ship just as China began its shutdowns, ordered from Amazon just today, wasn’t an idle purchase. It was one tiny element of the mass shift in the global economy from services to goods, from being out in the world to working, entertaining, and learning from home. It’s just a tiny, inexpensive gadget, but it’s also an embodiment of the journey of billions of dollars’ worth of other goods, all part of a tsunami of creative destruction that has permanently transformed the way we live.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

This book is invaluable right now, a must-read for anyone working to dismantle prisons and borders, and to end poverty and war.” —Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) “As communities and social movements scramble to respond to the threat of a globalized far-right against the apocalyptic backdrop of a global pandemic and impending ecological disaster, Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule reminds us of how we got here. With clinical precision, Walia unravels the genealogies and histories of border militarization, incarceration, and imperialism, laying bare the webs of domination and exploitation that threaten the poor and vulnerable everywhere, from those incarcerated in Australia’s offshore immigration camps to the victims of drone warfare in Yemen.

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My material privileges are built atop the unceded jurisdictions of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations and, in continuities of oppression, also the extracted lands, exploited labor, and expendable lives of many others locally and globally. This book is in service to dismantling the violences we are bound up in and to imagining relations and worlds anew. Foreword I write these words amid a global pandemic. The twenty-four-hour news cycle is saturated with images of suffering and death as well as a parade of healthcare professionals recruited to share stories from the front lines or impart expert opinion. These workers are often South Asian, Latinx, Caribbean, Filipino, and African American, many presumably immigrants or children of immigrants.

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After years of watching footage of unarmed Black people beaten and killed by police for walking, loitering, running, standing in front of their homes, showing insufficient deference, protecting their kids, or being a kid, these scenes of white men brandishing AR-15s in the face of police and government officials and evading jail, injury, or death begs incredulity. Harsha Walia’s incisive and prescient book, Border and Rule, could not have been timelier. She reminds us that these wars are not new. This global pandemic is just the latest manifestation of capitalism’s five-hundred-year war on the earth by means of land enclosure, dispossession, occupation, extraction, exploitation, commodification, consumption, destruction, pollution, immiseration, and oppressive forms of governance. It is war on the people in the form of military violence, executed in the name of “security”—securing resources, borders, life, and “liberty” against dictators, terrorists, and communists.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
by Orly Lobel
Published 17 Oct 2022

To change what is wrong, we need to imagine what a world that is human made, embracing technology for good, can look like. Examples of using AI for such good are all around us. Machine learning shows promise for addressing intractable challenges from poverty to climate change to ocean pollution to global pandemics. The stories of those who have skin in the game—who are doing good and adding diversity, all while doing well in the field—can motivate the next generation to join in. In debates about the future of technology, I see how scholars are far more willing to accept the role of AI in areas such as medicine, climate studies, and environmental sustainability—which they perceive as more purely scientific—than in other areas such as employment, social justice, domestic violence, and equal pay.

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She writes, “In a world where the commonly held wisdom is that technology isolates us, it’s worth considering another side of the story.”4 Newman’s love letter to Siri is incredibly sweet and tender. Her book captures not only the unique challenges of raising a child with developmental differences, but also the universal challenges we face in the modern world, including, of course, isolation because of a global pandemic or other natural disaster. Even amid our cautiousness and at times trepidation, we should celebrate the benefits of chatbots and their potential to do good. They help us remember things, save us time, and alleviate life’s burdens, even lessen our loneliness. At the same time, a feminist examination of the chatbot phenomenon also needs to grapple with the market’s thirst for artificial housewives—how it started, how it’s going, and how we can shape AI to better emulate tomorrow’s society rather than yesterday’s.

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A dramatic population gap has resulted: it is predicted that by 2030, China will have over 30 million more men than women, which means that countless men will end up lonely and isolated, facing barriers to starting human relationships. All over the world, the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated starkly how socially isolated we can become, and the mental health problems that can ensue. The loneliness and isolation of a global pandemic offer a poignant use case for the value of having robots (sexual and otherwise) in our homes. In an interview with Forbes, the CEO of Realbotix and creator of the sex robot Harmony claimed that sales were 75 percent higher than they were before the pandemic.14 Another possible benefit of sex robots is a safer sex industry.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
by Extinction Rebellion
Published 12 Jun 2019

Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape. There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability and complexity.

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In essence, zero-carbon targets save cities by starting to untangle the energy system that keeps capitalism, and our ceaseless growth paradigm, going. That’s the big challenge. The second big area of action is transport. This is about the urgent task of how and why we need to lock down city car culture. Almost all modern ills can be understood through the rise of the private fossil-fuel-powered automobile: unnecessary road deaths, the global pandemic of urban air pollution, mounting greenhouse-gas emissions, geopolitical wars, the concentration of corporate wealth and mounting consumer debt, depression, status anxiety, obesity, alienated streetscapes, the decline of vibrant public life and the corrosive effects of individualism. We simply need to lock down city car culture: privatized, corporate-led, fossil-fuel-hungry automobile dependency, and growth-based planning.

The Atlas of Disease
by Sandra Hempel
Published 15 Sep 2018

Equally, none of the 450 inmates of the local workhouse fell ill. The workhouse had its own water supply and never used the pump. Modern outbreaks During the second half of the nineteenth century, when people were provided with efficient sewers and clean drinking water, cholera largely disappeared in the developed world and the great global pandemics were consigned to history. However, the disease continues to be a threat when sanitary conditions are poor in countries where it is endemic, particularly when the infrastructure is damaged by natural disasters or war. In 1961 a new, less deadly strain of the bacterium, known as El Tor, caused a pandemic that started in Indonesia and spread to Bangladesh, India, the Middle East, North Africa and by 1973 into Italy.

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Transmission Transmitted to humans by wild animals, then spreads from person to person through body fluids Symptoms Fever, severe headache, muscle pain, weakness, fatigue, diarrhoea, vomiting, abdominal pain, haemorrhaging Incidence and deaths 28,616 cases in the 2014–16 epidemic and 11,310 deaths. Average case fatality rate is around 50 per cent. Prevalence Two isolated outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the global pandemic of 2014–16 Prevention In affected areas, avoid contact with: body fluids; infected medical equipment and bedding, and bats and non-human primates and bush meat from these animals Treatment No proven treatment but treatments for different symptoms and support to maintain the body’s functions Global strategy Fast containment of outbreaks combined with health education for health workers and general population An illustration of a cross-section through an ebola virus particle.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

And each element of the intersectional agenda is becoming increasingly more radical. During the 2020 election cycle, Democrats, afraid of alienating black Americans, ignored the rioting and looting associated with Black Lives Matter protests; embraced the ideological insanity of CRT; indulged mass protests against police in the middle of a global pandemic; and fudged on whether they were in favor of defunding the police as crime rates spiked. Afraid of alienating LGBT Americans, Democrats embraced the most radical elements of gender theory, including approval of children transitioning sex; they pressured social media companies to punish Americans for “misgendering”; they vowed to crack down on religious practice in the name of supposed LGBT rights.

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After all, science has a method, a way of distinguishing truth from falsehood; science is designed to uncover objective truths rather than to wallow in subjective perceptions of victimization. Science should have been at the bleeding edge of the pushback. Instead, science surrendered, too. Next, we’ll take a look at why. Chapter 4 How Science™ Defeated Actual Science Two thousand twenty was a banner year for science. In the midst of a global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus, scientists in laboratories across the world stepped into the breach. They researched the most effective methods of slowing the virus’s spread. They developed new therapeutics designed to reduce death rates, and researched new applications of already-existent drugs.

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But authoritarian leftist politicians could count on members of the public health establishment to back their play, manufacturing anti-scientific narratives in the name of science. More than one thousand “public health specialists” signed an open letter supporting the largest protests in American history in the middle of a global pandemic, claiming that such protests were “vital to the national public health,” and adding, “This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-at-home orders.” Infectious-disease expert Ranu S. Dhillon of Harvard Medical School told The New York Times, “Protesting against systemic injustice that is contributing directly to this pandemic is essential.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling , Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Published 2 Apr 2018

Either way, we stop thinking, give in to our instincts, and make bad decisions. The Five Global Risks We Should Worry About I do not deny that there are pressing global risks we need to address. I am not an optimist painting the world in pink. I don’t get calm by looking away from problems. The five that concern me most are the risks of global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty. Why is it these problems that cause me most concern? Because they are quite likely to happen: the first three have all happened before and the other two are happening now; and because each has the potential to cause mass suffering either directly or indirectly by pausing human progress for many years or decades.

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It is the probability that something we have not yet even thought of will cause terrible suffering and devastation. That is a sobering thought. While it is truly pointless worrying about something unknown that we can do nothing about, we must also stay curious and alert to new risks, so that we can respond to them.) Global Pandemic The Spanish flu that spread across the world in the wake of the First World War killed 50 million people—more people than the war had, although that was partly because the populations were already weakened after four years of war. As a result, global life expectancy fell by ten years, from 33 to 23, as you can see from the dip in the curve here.

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For a fact-based view of a longer list of major risks, see Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years, by Smil (2008). For those who find numbers calming, this is where you will find the big picture of the proportional risks and uncertainties of all kinds of possible fatal discontinuities. See gapm.io/furgr. The risk of global pandemic. A small version of Spanish flu is more likely than a large one; see Smil (2008). While we should work against the obscene overuse of antibiotics in the meat industry—see WHO[14]—at the same time we must be careful not to make the mistake we made with DDT and become overprotective. Antibiotics could save even more lives if they were even less expensive.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

One was the core QAnon followers, whose belief system often became even more profoundly strange. Another formed the global #SaveTheChildren movement – perhaps the most well-meaning and yet malign global trend of the internet era. But it was the third that propelled ideas QAnon had taken on into the stratosphere – a global pandemic, begun in China, which damaged Donald Trump’s electability and saw Joe Biden enter the White House was just the breakthrough any conspiracy theory needed. We might hear the name ‘QAnon’ less than we used to. But that’s just in the same way that it’s easier to see a smaller mountain than a larger one, or to see more of an iceberg that’s far away.

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It is in fact, in the interests of full disclosure, so inescapable that it also funds the global health reporting team at my employer, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and so paid part of my salary as Global Editor there (I was employed by TBIJ while writing this book, but will have left by the time you are reading it).22 That means that if anyone is looking for a Gates Foundation connection to a particular public health issue, they will find it. On a basic level, Bill Gates had publicly warned about the risk of a global pandemic long before Covid-19 happened. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2017, Gates said: Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years.

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(The same study revealed that 21 per cent of Republican voters said they had a favourable view of QAnon.)68 A separate US poll by PRRI that same month found a strong and overt connection between QAnon and anti-vaccination sentiment. Forty-two per cent of vaccine refusers told pollsters they also believed in QAnon, while 22 per cent of those describing themselves as vaccine hesitant said they believed Q.69 The digital pandemic had, beyond the point of doubt, become part of a real-world global health emergency. Global pandemic, global radicalisation The levels of oddness and denial among those who come to regularly stage anti-lockdown or anti-vaccine protests can be truly surreal, with an often-familiar cast of characters with tenuous connections to the corridors of power who can then allude to familiarity with the workings of the state to online and offline followers.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

Out of Options Epilogue Dwelling in Possibility Glossary of the Housing Crisis Notes Further Reading Acknowledgements Index Copyright Author’s Note This is a work of non-fiction written between 2017 and early 2022, drawn from five years of research. When I began, Britain had just voted to leave the European Union and was embarking on the process of Brexit. As I finished, a global pandemic spread, making people’s homes into a frontline defence amid a major public health crisis and, in doing so, revealed that home was not a very safe place for some people. During that period, it felt at times as though the country was, at once, imploding and exploding. While some British people saw their dream – independence from Eurocracy – realised, others felt that just over half of the country had voted for something they did not want but would have to live with.

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The Chancellor’s support package made no mention of financial assistance for anyone who lost their job and fell into rent debt to their landlord as a result, but instead a flimsy suggestion that landlords – who could access mortgage holidays – should be ‘flexible’ and ‘negotiate’ with renters whose finances were damaged. That is how Anthony – like many others – found himself caught in the crosshairs of two social and economic disasters: a global pandemic and a housing emergency. If you do not own your own home in Britain, precarity is a fact of life. It comes in the form of rent rises, eviction notices and knowing that, ultimately, your landlord has control over the one place in the world you should feel safe. Banking on Housing My grandparents, though they had the chance to, didn’t buy their flat in Dorrington Court through Right to Buy.

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As I moved my thumb across the screen, I noticed that the estate agent in question had borrowed a quote from a philosopher I return to regularly for his human and poetic descriptions of home, Gaston Bachelard: The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. But if they are unaffordable, houses are not places where people can dream, let alone live in peace. We all need somewhere affordable to live, but it is our collective home – the state – which should provide for all eventualities. It took a global pandemic to remind us that human society is a delicate ecosystem: overcrowding spreads disease, bad housing makes people sick. Similarly, the slightest temperature rise in one corner of the housing market risks infecting other parts of the economy – how much we spend on housing dictates how much disposable income we have, how much we can save, how much we can borrow and how well we fare if we fall on hard times.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

But it would not be the kind of opponent that I had in mind during my impeachment testimony. 13 The Horrible Year In the immediate aftermath of President Trump’s first impeachment trial came more vulnerabilities. Without any doubt, 2020 was a horrible year—and not just because of dramatic political upheavals that were bookended by two presidential impeachments. January 2020 saw a novel coronavirus, COVID-19, turn into a global pandemic. It was the worst health crisis in a century, since the influenza pandemic of 1918. Other emergencies exacerbated and magnified its effects. The year was marked by the largest number of hurricanes on record battering the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean. There were widespread wildfires in California, droughts and floods across other parts of the country.

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Lost generations in all three countries foresaw nothing but persistent disadvantage and lack of opportunity and wanted someone, preferably some strongman, to fix things for them with a series of bold moves. The strongmen had arrived, but the rest of the populist dream had gone unfulfilled. And now life was upended. Everyone was imperiled by a deadly disease. The global pandemic was another shock to fragile systems, a negative force multiplier that compounded preexisting problems. If ever there was proof that the decline of opportunity posed an existential threat, this was it. The Populists’ Pandemic Populist governments are, almost by definition, ill-suited to handle complex problems of governance.

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Our inability to get our act together on most major policy issues (the fifth risk of incompetence and the failure of project management) hindered the projection of American soft power, essentially the power of our example. As a result, we reduced our overall global competitiveness with rising powers such as China. Political polarization is ultimately a national security threat as well as a domestic challenge. It is a barrier to the collective action necessary for combating catastrophes like global pandemics, mitigating the effects of climate change, and, as I saw in my time at the White House, thwarting external threats from adversaries such as Russia. In the Trump administration, every peril was politicized. It was turned into fodder for personal gain and partisan games. Successive national security advisers, cabinet members, and their professional staffs were unable to mount a coherent response or defense to a national security threat in the face of personalized, chaotic, and at times simply opportunistic policymaking at the top.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
by Julia Hobsbawm
Published 11 Apr 2022

By 2016 we were in what the World Economic Forum called the famous ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, which predicted, correctly, a massive realignment in the relationships between humans and machines. This was the era when the concept of mindfulness and the desire to switch off became mainstream; reskilling became a major preoccupation and the idea of well-being at work acknowledged the epidemic of work-related stress. But no one anticipated the black swan event of a global pandemic, let alone prepared for it. Far from it. This made 2019 the last year of modern working life as it had been known since 1945. And so we come to today, to the fourth phase of work, the Nowhere Office Years, which is the subject of this book. Beginning in 2020, it represents the working era in which several shifts are happening at once.

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See Juliet Hassard et al., ‘The Cost of Work-Related Stress to Society: A Systematic Review’, http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/30155/1/PubSub7909_Hassard.pdf; also Jean-Pierre Brun, ‘Work-Related Stress: Scientific Evidence-Base of Risk Factors, Prevention And Costs’, WHO, 13 March 2007, https://www.who.int/occupational_health/topics/brunpres0307.pdf; see also Gallup State of the Global Workplace report, ‘A Global Pandemic and Its Impact on Global Engagement, Stress and the Workforce’, Gallup, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx; and John M. Ivancevich, Michael T. Matteson, and Edward P. Richards, ‘Who’s Liable for Stress on the Job?’, Harvard Business Review, March 1985, https://hbr.org/1985/03/whos-liable-for-stress-on-the-job 8.

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success
by Scott Davis , Carter Copeland and Rob Wertheimer
Published 13 Jul 2020

The NMA project was dropped as part of a broader rethinking of what future product development processes should look like, and PFS was eliminated from the vocabulary of those in supply chain–facing roles. Boeing realized the need to focus on rebuilding trust with the stakeholder groups (regulators, employees, suppliers, the flying public) that had taken a backseat to shareholders for an extended period of time. Sadly, these actions were lost in the noise of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which only two months into Calhoun’s tenure called the company’s future into question. To continue to produce MAX aircraft during the grounding, Boeing took on billions of dollars in debt and swung from a position of net cash to a position of net debt for the first time since the 787 crisis earlier in the decade.

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In hindsight, Boeing’s bet on a quick recovery was incredibly unlucky and ill-advised, and it left the company seeking government support, something unimaginable when the company’s stock was soaring to all-time highs just before the MAX crisis only a year earlier. The swing from the world’s most valuable industrial company to one whose liquidity and solvency were being questioned in such a short period of time is still mind-boggling. While almost no one foresaw the extent of the impact that a global pandemic could have on the market for airplanes, it undoubtedly will redefine how everyone evaluates the future. And just like the crises that preceded it, it will forever reshape how the company and all its stakeholders evaluate risk. POSTMORTEM Over much of the last three decades, Boeing has struggled to effectively balance the needs of key stakeholder groups, overemphasizing the importance of one or two for extended periods of time.

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Drawing the lines on customer data use and weighing them against the pursuit of profit and higher share prices is a similar evaluation. It’s inevitable that the influence of nonfinancial and nonemployee stakeholders will only continue to rise in the future. And the industry is not immune from its own megacrisis. In fact, cybersecurity threats for Big Tech could prove to be the equivalent of a global pandemic for industrial firms and travel-focused companies. Boeing’s task in the 2020s is now unprecedented. Successfully recovering from the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic dominates the focus in the short term. Finding a stable financial position and building a sufficient cash buffer for future crises will inevitably be a primary focus for several years.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

He called Yaneer Bar-Yam, a friend and expert in complexity theory—the broad, interdisciplinary study of interactions within and among systems ranging from cells to forests to the global climate—and the disturbing dynamics of pandemics in the modern world. “You’ve got to pay attention to what’s going on in Wuhan,” Taleb told him. Bar-Yam agreed. Founder of an elite research center called the New England Complex Systems Institute, or NECSI, Bar-Yam had for years been growing progressively worried about the outbreak of a global pandemic. He’d worked with the United Nations on the Ebola virus and saw how it had nearly jumped well beyond Africa’s borders. In 2016, he’d written a report called Transition to Extinction: Pandemics in a Connected World. Highly fatal pathogens tend to spread quickly at first, then burn out as they kill all their hosts.

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In a March 2020 article about Feigl-Ding’s Twitter post and the backlash it sparked, New York magazine’s David Wallace-Wells observed that if the rest of the world had responded to the outbreak with the same measure of fear and apprehension early on, it would have been much better off. “As I’ve written before about climate change, when the news is alarming, the only responsible response is to be alarmed—and raise alarm,” he wrote. “And like runaway climate change, the threat of a global pandemic, which graybeards have been warning about for years, is a reminder that we should always build public policy around the precautionary principle, rather than waiting until uncontestable and inarguable evidence arrives that action is necessary. If we wait that long, it will always be too late.” Among those who took the new estimate very seriously was Nassim Taleb.

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Literal flames were frying its forests. I met Litterman in Washington, D.C., hours after his Senate testimony. It would be my last face-to-face meeting for months—as well as his—as lockdowns gripped the country in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Litterman told me he worried the Covid-19 virus would soon become a global pandemic, and he was right. “It’s a perfect example of when you have a risk-management problem—it’s urgent, you don’t know how much time you have,” he said. “With coronavirus, we wasted so many weeks.” The same was true for the climate. “We’ve got to slam on the brakes,” he said, referring to carbon emissions—and his experience with the flaming tanker.

The Stolen Year
by Anya Kamenetz
Published 23 Aug 2022

She doesn’t find it “helpful” to dwell on feelings. She’s a problem solver. She has the knowledge and research skills to fuel endless cycles of anxiety and planning, so she tries to avoid spiraling. “My rabbit holes are deep,” she says. “But they’re not frequent, because I go places people don’t even know.” But with a looming global pandemic, she had no choice. “I started figuring out—I started playing a game in my mind. How do you quarantine your family from you if you’re positive or even exposed? And I started thinking about the floors of my house and the rooms and the bathrooms—and most specifically I want to protect my youngest.”

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Her two-year-old daughter’s childcare center closed. And her husband’s also working full-time from home. And her mother-in-law kept sort of telling her, oh, you should be enjoying this time with your daughter, this is a special time. This is such a gift to have this extra time with your daughter.” Record scratch. It’s a global pandemic! Not a vacation! “Hearing that from her mother-in-law and hearing that from other people in her life just gave her a sense of doubt and made her feel like a failure as a mother, and then also thinking about the work that she would normally be able to get done, feeling like a failure as a worker as well.”

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She would sit up in bed for her school’s roll call on the computer, and then go back to sleep. Gradually she filled the wall behind her bed with detailed pencil drawings on paper. One of them shows a girl sitting on her bed with arms crossed, looking out the window. There is a padlock on the frame. “Global Pandemic! Schools Cancelled!” it says. Dayana started talking to the school psychologist over Google Meet. In the morning and the evening she played nature sounds and did breathing exercises. And she wrote, publishing pieces in a student journal. “Writing poetry and stories have been a great help to me.

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
by Jennifer Carlson
Published 2 May 2023

But conservative gun politics are an illuminating place to start if we want to understand contemporary conservative politics and how these politics come to matter for the people who embrace them. Accordingly, this book draws on in-depth interviews with a particularly revealing group of conservative Americans: gun sellers, who experienced 2020 as a year of record gun sales amid a global pandemic, anti-racist uprisings and civil unrest, and democratic instability. Listening to gun sellers helps illuminate the broader conservative movement that has shaped their political sensibilities by providing the civic tools they used to navigate their political realities. And in doing so, we can understand just how, and with what consequences, defending gun rights has become a means of doing democracy.

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It was at once a defense of individual rights, a reinforcement of the means of safety and security, and a rejoinder—in their view—that the will of the people fundamentally relies on their ability to protect themselves. As Andrew, a biracial California gun seller, told me, “the Second Amendment—as a fundamental human right, a natural right that is only protected but not granted by the Constitution—does not get suspended for a global pandemic.” In contrast to California and Michigan gun sellers, gun sellers in Arizona and Florida28 were confident that their respective states would not interfere in their business operations. For example, Arizona gun sellers unanimously agreed that their state’s reputation as a staunch supporter of gun rights translated into freedom for their business operations.

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Rather than follow public health guidance developed by scientists and disseminated by mainstream media, then, gun sellers entertained a variety of theories—ones that often transformed the pandemic from an unfortunate happenstance into a nefariously instigated global crisis for the benefits of elites within and outside the United States. Responding to what they saw as exaggeration, misinformation, and even outright fabrication, they forwarded a different social construction of coronavirus, one that recognized the virus not as a global pandemic threatening widespread death but as a fearsome plot hatched by opportunistic politicians. A few gun sellers were partial to a particular explanation. Eli, a white gun seller in his forties in Arizona, explained, The hospitals are definitely getting a kick-back from saying that it’s coronavirus, and putting them [patients] on intubation rather than saying it’s just the flu.

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo
by Rebecca Walker
Published 15 Mar 2022

I won’t list all the stories told here, all the burdens laid down, but I will say that they span the gamut from the perils of technocracy to the financial implications of transgender identity, from the loss of material inheritance to the discovery of spiritual wealth, from fat as a financial issue to foster parenting as an act of resistance. It is a wonderful and inspiring collection, and I love it more, now that it is finished, than I ever thought I could. I am heartened to imagine how these stories might impact the global discussion of women and money in the shadow of a global pandemic that has hit women, and especially women of color, extraordinarily hard. To all who find themselves here I say: may these essays, these voices, help you write your own story of money, and put to rest forever the thought that you have to carry it alone. REBECCA WALKER Los Angeles, California April 2021 ONLY RICOS HAVE CREDIT DAISY HERNÁNDEZ AT FIFTEEN, I land my first job.

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I understood the challenges of community violence because I’d seen it myself; of single-parent households and immigration and racism because I’d known them myself; of the incredible opportunity of a good education because I’d been blessed with one myself. But I’d been healthy, had never questioned my very ability to live and breathe. Until suddenly I couldn’t. I’m not 100 percent better. But I’m better enough—and in a global pandemic, when no one’s ability to breathe can be taken for granted, better enough is just fine. I’m better enough to have resumed the activities that bring me joy, including exercise and backpacking trips. I’m better enough to have reengaged with my work—both job and writing—with a renewed sense of purpose.

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Watching sponsorship inquiries trickle to nothing, I moved my moneymaking endeavors away from social media. And I moved my home from California to the land where I grew up, on Maui, to live in a two-hundred-square-foot studio. Here, I am confronted daily with questions of what it means to be a white settler living (and making money) on occupied Native Hawaiian land, particularly during a global pandemic and financial crisis. What does it mean for me to be a coconspirator in ensuring wellness for all in this place, in this community? I haven’t yet figured out how to dismantle capitalism or white supremacy, but I took on a consulting job for a nonprofit that allowed me to do nothing but be honest about the challenges our human and earth communities were facing.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming media services were booming, a welcome distraction from the grim news outside. Bandwidth consumption catapulted to such enormous levels that telecommunications carriers were putting caps on streams and downgrading video quality to ensure the internet didn’t overload. Miraculously, it all hung together, and for that you were grateful. But the global pandemic also accentuated all of social media’s shortcomings. Cybercrime and data breaches also skyrocketed as bad actors capitalized on millions of people working from home, their kitchen routers and jerry-rigged network setups never designed to handle sensitive communications. In spite of efforts by social media platforms to remove misleading information and point their users to credible health sources, disinformation was everywhere, sometimes consumed with terrible effects.

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Over half of the world’s population is not yet connected to the internet, but that is changing fast. It’s difficult to measure with precision the carbon emissions and overall energy consumption related to our communications ecosystem, but it’s fair to say they’re large and growing. Prior to the global pandemic, I had seen references to estimates that placed the internet’s energy and carbon footprints on a par with, or even exceeding, the airline industry’s. One study suggests that the world’s communications ecosystem currently consumes approximately 7 percent of global electricity, a number that could increase to as much as 21 percent by 2030.344 A study by the American Coal Association (strange, I know) estimated that a smartphone streaming an hour of video on a weekly basis uses more power annually than a new refrigerator.345 Some have tried to break down the energy consumption and carbon emissions by individual digital routines, to make it easier to comprehend.

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What if everyone quite literally unplugged? How would we then manage ourselves, our social relationships, our problems, and our politics? How would we address, to borrow a phrase from John Dewey, “the public and its problems” if the “public” had no means to exchange information and communicate? And if the global pandemic showed us anything, it is that the “public” is now truly planetary in scope and scale. Thanks to hundreds of years of modern industrial technological development, we now live in a “global village” (to borrow McLuhan’s phrasing).397 There’s no turning back. Complex interdependence binds us together in a single habitat that systems theorist and futurist Buckminster Fuller once aptly called “Spaceship Earth.”398 We’re in this together, for better or for worse.

The Deepest Map
by Laura Trethewey
Published 15 May 2023

Watching Nautilus explore online was helpful, but it was not quite close enough. At times, I wanted to sit down beside the ocean mapper and experience it all myself. I kept emailing and calling other organizations and researchers, kept watching E/V Nautilus prowl along the West Coast, and waited for the global pandemic to subside. A year later, just as I was starting to despair that I might never get an inside look at mapping the seafloor, the expedition leader aboard Nautilus called me back. She had an empty berth on a mapping expedition that would be leaving in just over a month. Did I want it? Yes, I said.

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Arviat is a young town with an average age of twenty-five and nearly 40 percent of the population under the age of fourteen.15 Here, the youths serve as the mapmakers and the inspiration for charting the coastlines. New technology, including cell phones and GPS, has brought conveniences to the north, along with a false sense of security. Of course, distracted teens are not a problem only in Arviat. Human society writ large is suffering from a global pandemic of distraction. But on the Arctic tundra around Arviat, something as simple as forgetting to charge a satellite phone could be fatal. Step outside your front door, and the wilderness begins. A polar bear might be foraging in your garbage bins. An ATV might blast past on the dark road. (Just a few days after I left, a drunk driver struck and killed a teenager in Rankin Inlet, the next town over.)16 Venture far outside the hamlet’s grid of streets, and you could get lost on the flat tundra without any obvious land markers.

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The delegate would begin with some pro forma niceties, such as congratulating the secretary-general on his reappointment or thanking Jamaica for hosting the meeting. Then would come the shit: a pointed observation, criticism, or suggestion that showed a country’s hand. Then the delegate would finish with a congratulation or compliment. After the last three years of living through the chaos of a global pandemic when public health rules had been openly flouted, I enjoyed a bit of rule following these days. But the council felt almost comically divorced from the rough reality of working offshore. There are few people to observe and report crimes at sea, and so more crimes are committed with impunity.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett
Published 31 Oct 1994

While the chances of the planet’s entire human population becoming immune to a rare virus such as Ebola were nil, it was possible that an easily transmitted, ubiquitous respiratory virus like influenza would infect billions of human beings in less than five years’ time, kill off all the susceptibles, and leave the world’s survivors completely immune. Global pandemics were, in fact, a hallmark of influenza that spanned recorded human history. Charlemagne’s conquest of Europe was slowed by an A.D. 876 flu epidemic that spread across the continent and claimed much of his army. Many suspected influenza epidemics followed, though history can only vaguely discriminate between ancient accounts of influenza and other respiratory diseases.

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The greater the number of neuraminidase molecules, Kilbourne argued, the more rapidly viruses could complete their budding process and spread. In essence, Kilbourne had found a possible key to both high transmissibility and virulence, explaining why some epidemics produced viruses that rapidly flooded the bloodstreams of infected people and readily became global pandemics, while others caused fairly localized mild outbreaks.13 He proved his point by quantifying the density of neuraminidase proteins on the surface of the influenza strain responsible for the 1957 flu pandemic, a fairly severe wave that swept the world and claimed an estimated 60,000 American lives.

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The physicians had to treat it without knowing its nature, and it was among them that the greatest mortality occurred.” It was later thought that the epidemic, which Thucydides said caused illness in every Athenian and killed up to half the population, was either typhus, the plague, or smallpox.7 Hundreds of great global pandemics followed. Four diseases that seemed to William McNeill and other medical historians of the 1970s to have gained particular benefit from the urban ecology over the previous 2,000 years were pneumonic plague, leprosy (Hansen’s disease), tuberculosis, and syphilis. As far as could be discerned from historical records, these were rarely—if ever—seen prior to the establishment of urban societies, and all four exploited to their advantage human conditions unique to cities.

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere
by Tsedal Neeley
Published 14 Oct 2021

Between 2000 and 2015, U.S. multinational companies alone hired 4.3 million employees domestically versus 6.2 million employees overseas—that means millions of people who need digital technology if they are to communicate with the United States, not to mention the millions of domestic workers who work virtually from home over a distance of a few miles. McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the global labor workforce will reach 3.5 billion people by 2030. Remote work is increasingly here to stay. The future is in remote work. None of these trends or predictions, however, accounted for a global pandemic that would require the wholesale migration of nearly entire companies to remote work in a matter of weeks. The remote work revolution, long in coming, was accelerated by the sudden and severe coronavirus outbreak. Chances are you are part of the massive transition that has forced companies to rapidly advance their digital footprint including cloud, storage, cybersecurity, and device and tool usages to accommodate their new virtual workforce.

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They also tried to anticipate how political leaders might respond, both in Mexico and around the world. However, this first situation framing could only do so much. Molinas admitted that she prefers not to spend all her time trying to pin down what the future will hold, an activity she calls “fortune-telling.” Instead, she found it more productive to simply accept that the global pandemic had “disrupted everything,” and that no one—CEO or entry-level assistant—can be certain of an assessment. In place of certainty, she pursued clarity about what choices could be made and their impact on daily work. To adapt to the new situation, she held virtual town-hall meetings where management addressed employee questions, organizational psychologists spoke about mental health challenges, and senior leaders offered insights.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix
by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski
Published 18 Apr 2022

One creator and showrunner behind a top Netflix title said Disney’s entry, in particular, triggered a restlessness in the atmosphere and sparked a frenzy to spend lavishly to secure top talent. While the atmosphere changed, though, there was plenty of reason for Hastings to feel confident. As the global pandemic darkened movie theaters, silenced concerts and festivals, and hobbled professional sports, Netflix had only gained momentum, emerging as the entertainment choice of preference for a home-bound, bored world seeking an escape. Its shows had entered the zeitgeist, whether with a lurid obsession like Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness; a goofy reality show based on the game the Floor Is Lava; or an adrenaline-filled action flick such as Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction.

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It targeted a group of influencers known to be swayed by elaborate promotional campaigns, or dinner and a movie (screening)—the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the ninety-member group that awards the Golden Globes. Whatever Apple did worked. The Morning Show received a trio of nominations in 2020—one for best television drama and two for best actress, Aniston and Witherspoon. More than any wining and dining or awards campaigning, the global pandemic changed Apple’s fortunes. As the lights went dark in the nation’s theaters, anxious film studios began seeking out other forms of distribution that could bring in revenue during the box-office drought. Film studios became distressed sellers, angling for a buck. The cash-flush Apple was happy to oblige, though it would do so opportunistically, and with care not to overpay.

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The summer debut had been timed to coincide with NBC’s exclusive U.S. broadcast of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, though the cornerstone launch programming crumbled beneath it in March, when the International Olympic Committee postponed the games until July 2021 because of the pandemic. “When we targeted April 15th as the launch date we knew we had our work cut out for us,” Strauss and NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell wrote in a joint email to staff. “But we never imagined we would be faced with the challenges that this global pandemic has created.” The nationwide stay-at-home orders, however, created what NBCU recognized as a once-in-a-century opportunity for media companies, as Nielsen reported a 60 percent spike in streaming across the country. Strauss and Shell hoped to meet this demand by throwing open its film and television vaults.

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
by Steven W. Thrasher
Published 1 Aug 2022

From refugee camps on the Greek island of Lesbos to a makeshift shantytown in West Virginia—even in the best of times, living tightly in tent cities without adequate sanitation makes people more vulnerable to all sorts of viruses, bacteria, and harm. That is to say nothing of the kind of risk that staying in cramped temporary housing poses during a global pandemic. In the United States, people without housing are more likely to become positive with hepatitis A or HIV. It also makes them more likely to be arrested and less likely to adhere to HIV medication protocols—meaning their viral load will not become or stay undetectable. According to a 2019 paper published in Social Science and Medicine, people who are unhoused also “had disproportionately higher adjusted risk of opioid-related” overdose deaths “compared to low-income housed individuals treated at the same hospital.”

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This is part of why lethal health disparities plague queer and trans people at such high rates, and why viruses circulate more often in our bodies. When I heard about Lorena Borjas coughing but not wanting to go to the hospital because she feared what would happen to her there, I thought about that receptionist. My heart hurt for Lorena. * * * By the time Lorena got in the ambulance, the true center of the global pandemic was not just in the United States or in New York City, but in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens. You could even argue that the epicenter of the epicenter had moved inside Elmhurst Hospital, where the ambulance took Lorena. Her neighbors, the so-called “essential” workers—day laborers, nursing home orderlies, fast-food workers, and sex workers—had not been able to protect themselves by working from home.

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And because California’s prisons were among the most powerful COVID-19 hot spots in the nation, so many firefighters were sick or under quarantine that there weren’t enough available to fight the hundreds of fires. It was a moment in which America’s twin epidemics of incarceration and COVID-19 entered into a three-way race with the global pandemic of the climate crisis. This was a disaster of the Democrats’ making. Governor Gavin Newsom, a darling of Gay Inc. since he’d supported same-sex marriages as mayor of San Francisco in 2004, slowly began releasing some incarcerated firefighters in the summer of 2020. But he could have done so months or years earlier.

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives
by Chris Bruntlett and Melissa Bruntlett
Published 28 Jun 2021

In response, Coralie started the “Cats of Delft” Instagram account to share pictures of the many felines we encountered walking through the city, which Etienne then took over, using his COVID-19 walks to hunt for kitties to photograph. Living in a place with low traffic meant that as parents, we never once worried for our children’s safety. Their mental health breaks didn’t negatively affect our own mental health, and that fact is incredibly valuable, not just in times of a global pandemic but on a day-to-day basis as well. Parents inherently worry about their children; it’s normal behavior. Choosing a city that has afforded them incredible freedom and autonomy by creating safe places to travel has taken away one level of stress for them and for us. Coralie and Etienne can enjoy time to themselves, and we in turn can relax in the comfort of knowing they’re relatively safe and happy.

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(Modacity) By prioritizing pedestrians and cyclists over a fragile car-based system, Delft has positioned itself to deal with the challenges of a twenty-first century city below sea level: including fuel shortages, rising temperatures, and extreme weather. And as it turns out, it was also well placed to deal with a global pandemic. In the months that followed those first days of lockdown, the biggest change to our daily existence was that we were no longer traveling to work or school each day, and had reduced our trips to the grocery store. Without knowing or planning it, we landed in a place where the built environment helped mitigate the physical and emotional impacts of a worldwide catastrophe, a place resilient enough against external stresses that it helped residents take care of themselves and each other under the most difficult of circumstances.

Working Hard, Hardly Working
by Grace Beverley

The social or cultural contract which defines what ‘success’ looks like in today’s society – the one that told us that if we found a good job and worked hard, we would be able to buy a house, pay off the mortgage, and retire with some savings – is breaking down. Instead, post-2008 crash, mid-global pandemic and pre(?!)-environmental crisis, our future seems more uncertain than ever. We’re staring at mass unemployment in the face, many of us are working from home for the first time, and there’s a confusing paradox of both loving this newfound homely freedom and missing the workplace camaraderie (often both at the same time).

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There’s nothing wrong with having a side-hustle – it would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise – but there are significant questions to be asked about the impact of it as a culture. It’s become an illustrious dream that turns any second you’re not earning money into an anxiety, and the mental effects of that are draining. As I write this in the midst of a global pandemic, we’re feeling the fear more than ever. Our isolation within our home-office hybrids has led to viral shame, directly linking our self-worth to our ability, not only to adapt, but also to become some sort of productivity machine so that somehow, when all this passes, we are not only alive and virus-free, but also ten years ahead of our peers, trilingual, oh, and a national hero.

Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away
by Julien Saunders and Kiersten Saunders
Published 13 Jun 2022

Having a freezer would allow her to store more food and ultimately serve more families. So that’s what we did. We bought one small five-cubic-foot freezer for our garage and funded the purchasing of a fourteen-and-a-half-cubic-foot freezer for her organization. The timing couldn’t have been better, because at the time we were in the middle of a global pandemic and several families were in desperate need of delicious and nutritious meals. Our intention was to help one family, but our community directed us on how we could help hundreds more. If it weren’t for them, we likely would never have heard of Erica or the amazing work she’s doing right in our own backyard.

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And for those who prefer visual definitions, memes and GIFs of people guzzling oversize cocktails while crying uncontrollably or simply staring into the abyss of their screens with bloodshot eyes summed up the year spent mostly inside. Our feelings were no different, having spent the majority of the year in a daily battle against the intense sadness forced upon us by a global pandemic. Simple everyday acts like going to the grocery store, taking a walk, or opening mail became matters of life or death. As parents of a toddler, we struggled with the decision of whether to send our son to day care and assume the increased risk of COVID-19 exposure. Having been in day care for only a short while and having just begun to build his first relationships outside home, our son, like most kids, hated having to learn and socialize through a screen.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader
by Colin Lancaster
Published 3 May 2021

California just declared a state of emergency. The tape bombs are flying. Uncertainty is high. Markets hate uncertainty. Crude is getting drilled again. The entire energy space is burned out—and airlines, travel, casinos, hotels—everything is getting pounded. The World Health Organization has just declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. At a press briefing, Trump issues an order to control the spread of the virus in the USA: “My administration is recommending that all Americans, including the young and healthy, work to engage in schooling from home when possible. Avoid gathering in groups of more than ten people. Avoid discretionary travel.

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It’s too late to hedge. Liquidity is gone. You do your damnedest to fucking just stay alive, maintain fewer positions, figure out where the pain is. Trade small so you can widen stops. Don’t get cute. Don’t try to be a hero. It’s insane how events such as this seem to get multiplied. It’s not just one. It’s global pandemic and oil shock, both unexpected. Today, this combination is exposing our economy’s Achilles’ heel: too much fucking debt. That’s our soft underbelly, our weakest link. We’ve been running this scam for fifty fucking years. We built a world based on a debt bubble of epic proportions. It has tried to pop lots of times, but every time, we just shuffle the deck.

Deadly Quiet City: True Stories From Wuhan
by Murong Xuecun
Published 7 Mar 2023

While this Kafkaesque story reveals how the Chinese government works, Communist Party propaganda will boast about ‘the superiority of our system’ and how this superior system helps China to defeat the virus. But that patient almost died from their superior system. This superior system allowed a controllable epidemic to become a calamitous once-in-one-hundred-years global pandemic. Lin’s isolation station is a dull grey building – a hastily repurposed hotel. All the windows are sealed and several security officers guard the tightly locked main entrance. In a car outside the station, a senior leader sits nonchalantly, and in the command centre further on, the big boss looks like he’s on holiday.

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But in China countless people, including Xi Jinping, believe in this ‘wisdom of our ancestors’. Mr Xi frequently praises TCM, at home and abroad. In the eight years of his reign, this medical mysticism has been promoted as never before. In May 2020, Beijing publishes a draft law for public comment that virtually criminalises ‘vilification or slandering TCM’. During the global pandemic, the Chinese government continues to promote TCM. According to its White Paper published on 7 June, ‘In Hubei province, more than 90 per cent of confirmed cases received TCM treatment that proved effective.’ Such statistics put Lin Qingchuan in a quandary. ‘You can’t say these numbers are incorrect.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis
Published 16 Mar 2021

“They may be doing quite a bit,” she said, but the company “is also profiting every step along the way on the backs of their employees, who are not being protected, and neither are their families being protected.” She couldn’t help but feel some regret for having goaded Hector there in the first place. “They call themselves a technology company, but it’s really a sweatshop,” she said. “They have such a hold on our economy and our country.” * * * Like all great crises, the global pandemic of 2020 revealed the weaknesses of nations it attacked. In the case of the United States, that weakness was the extraordinary inequality across different places and communities. When it reached the country, the coronavirus first struck its upper echelons, the highly prosperous precincts that had tighter connections with their global peers than with scruffier places in their own backyard: Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, Manhattan.

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By late 2019, it had more than 750,000 employees worldwide and 400,000 employees in the United States, the overwhelming majority of them in the company’s more than two hundred fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and other delivery facilities. In 2017 alone, the company grew by 130,000 worldwide; in the summer of 2019, it hired 97,000, nearly the entire workforce of Google. And this was before the hiring spree that would arrive with the global pandemic of the spring of 2020. Warehousing and distribution used to be considered somewhat higher-skilled jobs: one could make over $20 per hour and stay years at a time. At Amazon, it was a more fleeting existence. Workers tended to be younger. Turnover was exceedingly high. And the seasonal workforce was often literally transient, in the form of the CamperForce of retirees traveling the country in RVs that Amazon deployed for its holiday rush.

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And the trend was self-reinforcing—the fewer opportunities one had to meet one’s needs in a physical space, buying goods face-to-face from another person in one’s own town or city, the more likely one was to turn to the other option: shopping, often alone, from the comfort of home. Even before a global pandemic forced Americans to shop from home, they had increasing reason to do so: online shopping was appealing because it was more convenient than the competition. And it became even more relatively convenient as the competition vanished, leaving one with no other options in close proximity. * * * Jared’s death left Taylor stunned and engulfed in self-reproach.

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism
by Grace Blakeley
Published 14 Oct 2020

Aside from helping to cause the 2008 financial crisis, capital mobility has sucked money out of the Global South and into financial vortexes such as Wall Street and the City of London. Now it is threatening the solvency of governments responsible for providing healthcare for billions of people in the midst of a global pandemic. The first and most pressing priority must be a debt write-off for the Global South. Longer-term, the kind of state intervention required to tackle climate change – democratic public ownership over most of the economy, dramatic increases in state spending and the controls on capital mobility required to achieve this – are not merely frowned upon by the World Bank and the IMF, they are actively prohibited.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord
Published 24 Mar 2020

We can’t rule out the loss of more than 90 percent of the population of the Americas during that century, though the number could also be much lower.12 And it is very difficult to tease out how much of this should be attributed to war and occupation, rather than disease. As a rough upper bound, the Columbian exchange may have killed as many as 10 percent of the world’s people.13 Centuries later, the world had become so interconnected that a truly global pandemic was possible. Near the end of the First World War, a devastating strain of influenza (known as the 1918 flu or Spanish Flu) spread to six continents, and even remote Pacific islands. At least a third of the world’s population were infected and 3 to 6 percent were killed.14 This death toll outstripped that of the First World War, and possibly both World Wars combined.

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Yet the virus escaped from a badly maintained pipe, leaking into the groundwater at the facility. After an investigation, the lab’s license was renewed—only for another leak to occur two weeks later.30 In my view, this track record of escapes shows that even BSL-4 is insufficient for working on pathogens that pose a risk of global pandemics on the scale of the 1918 flu or worse—especially if that research involves gain-of-function (and the extremely dangerous H5N1 gain-of-function research wasn’t even performed at BSL-4).31 Thirteen years since the last publicly acknowledged outbreak from a BSL-4 facility is not good enough. It doesn’t matter whether this is from insufficient standards, inspections, operations or penalties.

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They attracted several thousand members, including people with advanced skills in chemistry and biology. And they demonstrated that it was not mere misanthropic ideation. They launched multiple lethal attacks using VX gas and sarin gas, killing 22 people and injuring thousands.50 They attempted to weaponize anthrax, but did not succeed. What happens when the circle of people able to create a global pandemic becomes wide enough to include members of such a group? Or members of a terrorist organization or rogue state that could try to build an omnicidal weapon for the purposes of extortion or deterrence? The main candidate for biological risk over the coming decades thus stems from our technology—particularly the risk of misuse by states or small groups.

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age
by Matthew Cobb
Published 15 Nov 2022

Ebright even claimed that because of the sudden, massive expansion in US research in the area, ‘the NIH was funding a research and development arm of al-Qaeda’.60 The underlying political context of this research changed over time as the face of the enemy perpetually shifted – from Iraq and its non-existent links to al-Qaeda in 2001–2003, through the fear of Islamist terrorist groups flourishing in the ashes of Iraq, Afghanistan and then Syria, to ever-present and legitimate concerns about the near-inevitability of a natural global pandemic. The only thing that was constant was the research itself and the growing likelihood that something might go terribly wrong, either deliberately or by accident. A whole generation of researchers matured and flourished in this atmosphere, using their brilliance and mastery of genetic engineering to carry out experiments that would have horrified the delegates at Asilomar, but which were now an accepted part of the scientific landscape.

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The sequencing work, which involved extracting viral DNA from body parts kept in formalin and from an Alaskan victim who had been buried in the permafrost in November 1918, was carried out at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Scientific and public awareness of the possibility of a natural global pandemic was high, given that the world had dodged a bullet in 2002–2003 when a SARS coronavirus epidemic emerged in southern China. The origin of this coronavirus was a spillover event from bats (it took fifteen years to identify the source) – the outbreak resulted in over 8,000 infections with an alarming 10 per cent mortality rate before being stifled by basic public health measures.64 Whereas sequencing the influenza virus was dangerous but could be justified, resurrecting it seemed dangerous but pointless.

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The data point to a natural spillover event such as we have seen in the past and will almost certainly see again.112 The long, painstaking research that was required before the bat origin of SARS was identified explains why there was no immediate agreement on which animal species was the original host of SARS-CoV-2 – such things take a long time even in the absence of a global pandemic.113 One possible solution to concerns about identifying manipulated pathogens, and indeed a potential resolution to some of the more outlandish speculation about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, may lie in the use of genetic engineering forensics – complex bioinformatic analyses – to determine whether an organism involved in a disease outbreak has been genetically modified and, if so, to infer its likely origin.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now
by Sergey Young
Published 23 Aug 2021

Then COVID-19 happened. During the first month of the outbreak in China, the smartphone telemedicine app Ping An Good Doctor increased its virtual visits by more than one billion.12 It was much the same with other tech players in China, like Tencent’s WeDoctor, Ali Health, and JD Health. When the virus became a global pandemic, Western telemedicine providers like Teladoc, iClinic, and Doctor on Demand were also swamped with new patients. Medicare approved telemedicine, and US laws were quickly relaxed to allow doctors to practice across state lines. Each of these remote diagnosis companies provides services like consultations, high-definition video examinations, and pharmaceutical prescriptions through apps, websites, and special videoconference links.

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Your mechanical organs will constantly transmit their working status to external monitoring devices and AI algorithms that keep them in perfect repair. Software updates and maintenance notifications will be issued as reliably as you would expect for the most advanced of twenty-first-century automobiles. When a new infectious disease emerges, there will be no global pandemic. Quantum computer–powered AGI will identify the correct response required to eliminate the invader and download instructions to pharmacies-on-chip in your embedded immune system the way that software patches for new computer viruses are automatically installed today. Data from your nanorobots and microchip checkpoints will be compared against the most current medical and epidemiological knowledge.

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020

But questioning how poor people will spend money is effectively the same as asking if we should try to raise their incomes in the first place. And the answer to that question is undoubtedly yes. As we emerge from the crisis of coronavirus, the way we rebuild the world has to be green and sustainable, but it also has to be inclusive and levelling. Even with the huge economic challenges of the global pandemic, we’re living in the richest society the world has ever known. Our resources, and here I mean ours as a society not ours with the trillion bucks in our back pocket, are far greater than those of the richest of emperors, queens and chieftains of the past, and far beyond the imagination of most of the billions of people who have ever lived.

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In many areas, in fact, that we’ve spent money on in earlier chapters of this book. If we had AGI, many people think it would unlock unprecedented economic growth and wealth creation, even as it disrupts our society in ways that would be unthinkable if we hadn’t just experienced a disruption wrought by a devastating global pandemic. This is why there is a headlong dash to develop it. The reason we should invest is that our cash can make sure the fruits of the innovation are shared, and benefit everyone. We’re also interested in the biggest questions in science, and they don’t get bigger than this. We should first address the Skynet (Terminator) scenario: the idea that a superintelligence will end up wiping out human civilisation.

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It
by Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan
Published 15 Mar 2014

Complex system researchers Dirk Brockmann, Lars Hufnagel, and Theo Geisel simulated the effects of a single individual infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) placed anywhere in the world using data that accounted for 95 percent of the entire global civil aviation traffic and assuming virulence equivalent to that of SARS.32 Whereas in previous centuries the insular nature of parochial communities would contain such an infection and give the authorities time to consider their options, now two plane journeys on average would require the vaccination of 75 percent of the world’s population to avoid a global pandemic. After three flights, global vaccination would be required. This simulation illustrates an inevitable consequence of increased integration, but its message is not simply theoretical. SARS reached 30 countries and affected 8,400 people within only nine months of its detection in November 2002.

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Scientific studies indicate that migratory wildfowl have the potential to carry H5N1 but suggest that “the likelihood of … virus dispersal over long distances … is low” and “estimate that for an individual migratory bird there are, on average, only 5–15 days per year when infection could result in the dispersal of H5N1 virus over 500 km.”52 The transfer of live birds and animals by airfreight and ships, however, means that these pathogens can now travel faster and farther than before and do not have to rely on the long-distance migration of birds. In short, modern technologies significantly heighten the risk of global pandemics. Figure 6.3. Destination cities and corresponding volumes of international passengers arriving from Mexico, 1 March–30 April 2008. Kamran Khan et al., 2009, “Spread of a Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus via Global Airline Transportation,” New England Journal of Medicine 361 (2): 212–214. © 2009 Massachusetts Medical Society.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

A collapse in one small European nation also takes down the many overseas banks that have leveraged its debt. There’s nowhere to invest that’s insulated from any other market’s problems. Likewise, thanks to the interconnectedness of our food supply and transportation networks, the outbreak of a disease on the poultry farms of China necessarily threatens to become a global pandemic. A connected world is like a table covered with loaded mousetraps. If one trap snaps, the rest of the table will follow in rapid, catastrophic succession. Like a fight between siblings in the back of the car on a family trip, it doesn’t matter who started it. Everybody is in it, now. Along with most technology hopefuls of the twentieth century, I was one of the many pushing for more connectivity and openness as the millennium approached.

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“I don’t mean apocalypse in the religious way,” Dan explains as he escorts me down the single spiral metal staircase leading to the living quarters. (Hard to get out in a fire, I suppose, but easier to defend if attacked.) “I’m thinking Contagion, Asteroid, even China Syndrome,” he explains, using movie-title shorthand for global pandemic, collision with an asteroid, or nuclear meltdown. He is used to being interviewed. “What about The Day After Tomorrow?” I suggest, bringing climate change into the mix. “Not likely,” Dan says. “That’s been debunked.” Dan is a former real estate assessor who now makes his living selling information online to “preppers” like himself, who have assumed that catastrophe is imminent and that the best way through is to prepare for the inevitable collapse of civilization as we know it.

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
by Laura Spinney
Published 31 May 2017

Among the Igbo of Nigeria, for example, those born between 1919 and 1921 were known as ogbo ifelunza, the influenza age group. ‘Ifelunza’, an obvious corruption of ‘influenza’, became incorporated into the Igbo lexicon for the first time that autumn. Before that, they had had no word for the disease. As time went on, and it transpired that there were not many local epidemics, but one global pandemic–it became necessary to agree on a single name. The one that was adopted was the one that was already being used by the most powerful nations on earth–the victors in the Great War. The pandemic became known as the Spanish flu–ispanka, espanhola, la grippe espagnole, die Spanische Grippe–and a historical wrong became set in stone. 6 The doctors’ dilemma The flu had been named; the foe had a face.

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Individual social class, household wealth and mortality from Spanish influenza in two socially contrasting parishes in Kristiania 1918–19’, Social Science & Medicine, February 2006; 62(4):923–40. 2. C. E. A. Winslow and J. F. Rogers, ‘Statistics of the 1918 epidemic of influenza in Connecticut’, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 1920; 26:185–216. 3. C. J. L. Murray et al., ‘Estimation of potential global pandemic influenza mortality on the basis of vital registry data from the 1918–20 pandemic: a quantitative analysis’, Lancet, 2006; 368:2211–18. 4. C. Lim, ‘The pandemic of the Spanish influenza in colonial Korea’, Korea Journal, Winter 2011:59–88. 5. D. Hardiman, ‘The influenza epidemic of 1918 and the Adivasis of Western India’, Social History of Medicine, 2012; 25(3):644–64. 6.

Sleepyhead: Narcolepsy, Neuroscience and the Search for a Good Night
by Henry Nicholls
Published 1 Mar 2018

By then, geneticists had identified the strain of the virus as H1N1, the very same as the Spanish influenza responsible for the global flu pandemic in 1918, estimated to have killed somewhere between 50 to 100 million people. With cases of swine flu being confirmed across the world, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic in June. In short, in the middle of 2009 there was intense institutional fear that the swine flu could bring about a repeat of the Spanish flu. Pharmaceutical companies were soon bidding for multimillion-dollar contracts to rush out a vaccine before the flu season really got under way in the winter months of the northern hemisphere.

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p. 145 every November there’s a trough Fang Han and others, ‘Narcolepsy Onset Is Seasonal and Increased Following the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic in China’, Annals of Neurology 70.3 (2011), 410–17. p. 147 84 deaths ‘Outbreak of Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infection – Mexico, March–April 2009’, Press Release from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 April 2009 <http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm58d0430a2.htm> [accessed 24 October 2017]. p. 147 global pandemic Declan Butler, ‘Flu Pandemic Underway’, Nature News, 11 June 2009 <https://doi.org/10.1038/news.2009.564>. p. 148 that was really the key Markku Partinen, Interview with author, 5 January 2016. p. 150 near-permanent somnolence Josh Hadfield and Caroline Hadfield, Interview with author, 14 August 2015.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

At four degrees of warming, the fire season would be four times worse still. The California fire captain believes the term is already outdated: “We don’t even call it fire season anymore,” he said in 2017. “Take the ‘season’ out—it’s year-round.” But wildfires are not an American affliction; they are a global pandemic. In icy Greenland, fires in 2017 appeared to burn ten times more area than in 2014; and in Sweden, in 2018, forests in the Arctic Circle went up in flames. Fires that far north may seem innocuous, relatively speaking, since there are not so many people up there. But they are increasing more rapidly than fires in lower latitudes, and they concern climate scientists greatly: the soot and ash they give off can land on and blacken ice sheets, which then absorb more of the sun’s rays and melt more quickly.

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For Rushkoff, these are all facets of the same impulse, broadly shared by the class of visionaries and power brokers and venture capitalists whose dreams for the future are received as blueprints, especially by the armies of engineers they command like impetuous fiefdoms—investing in new forms of space travel, life extension, and technology-aided life after death. “They were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion,” he writes. “For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.” “An Account of My Hut”: Christina Nichol, “An Account of My Hut,” n+1, Spring 2018. Nichol explains the title this way: I once read a story called “An Account of My Hut,” by Kamo no Chōmei, a 12th-century Japanese hermit.

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal
by Duncan Mavin
Published 20 Jul 2022

Solo’s link to Degen proved critical in getting Credit Suisse’s backing for Greensill. (Systematic Investment Management, known as SIMAG, was supposed to conjure up investment ideas that could survive any market crisis, using physics, complex self-organizing systems, and behavioural science. Instead, it struggled to cope with the turmoil of the global pandemic. In October 2020, Solo left the business and Credit Suisse folded it into another fund.) There were Greensill sceptics at Credit Suisse, for sure. Bankers who worked with insurance companies who had dealt with Lex had heard of his reputation for pushing the boundaries and for lending to borrowers who defaulted all too often.

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He texted the top civil servant there, Sir Tom Scholar, saying he was ‘genuinely baffled’ that Greensill wasn’t given access to CCFF, and that he would call Sunak, and ‘everyone’. Minutes later, he went straight to Sunak, though the details of their conversation have never been made public. Pretty soon, Cameron was back at Cunliffe, asking for him to speak with Lex in person. Lex’s belief in his own abilities as a salesman was unshaken, even by a global pandemic. Eventually, in late April, Cunliffe finally relented and agreed to hear him out. Greensill delivered his pitch, but Cunliffe was unmoved. The lobbying effort went on, through April, May and into June. During that period, Cameron blitzed his former government colleagues with messages. In one early April dialogue, Sunak had told Cameron he was ‘stuck back to back on calls’ and promised to talk later.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
by Jamie K. McCallum
Published 15 Nov 2022

Most workers I met and interviewed derived a sense of pride from being a frontline worker. They saw how public sentiment favored them, probably for the first time, and got a renewed sense of satisfaction and purpose from their roles. Many remarked on the ways they were treated with greater levels of respect on the job yet regretted that it took a global pandemic for customers and policymakers and the general public to see service workers as deserving of appreciation. Early in the pandemic, this positive change in the public’s perception of them led many essential workers to feel a stronger sense of solidarity and community with each other. In March 2020, Bailey Delaplaine was relieved to learn that her job as a welder would be declared a nonessential service.

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29 What if our workfare programs push millions of poor people into the labor market just so they can collect benefits, even when they have competing obligations to children or elders in their home? What if we pay home care workers such shoddy wages that they leave their industry for fast-food jobs that pay slightly more, creating a massive care worker deficit just when we need them more than ever? What if—stick with me here—a deadly global pandemic throws the economy into free fall and costs us our healthcare and our job, and we’re sick with a virus that no one knows how to cure? The pandemic put us face-to-face with these impossible questions. It profoundly disrupted our ability to work for a wage while performing the usual amount of home-based labor.

Copenhagen Like a Local
by DK

A few drinks down, the intimate dance floor is hard to resist. Keep an eye on Vela’s events calendar – it often hosts live music, speed dating and poetry readings. g LGBTQ+ Scene g Contents Google Map G*A*Y COPENHAGEN Map 1; Vester Voldegade 10, Indre By; ///restricts.ranks.avoiding; 33 14 13 30 Not even a global pandemic could dampen this bar’s love of drag: performances moved online during the city’s lockdown. Aside from G*A*Y’s constant stream of drag shows, expect a fun-loving crowd of LGBTQ+ folk and their friends letting loose on the busy (and sweaty) dance floor. Throwback disco tunes and mainstream chart-toppers are the go-to here, as is shameless, hands-in-the-air boogying.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

Unless and until we evolve into creatures that have no such needs, and have erased the desires to hunt and gather from our nature, there will be a Clapham omnibus, or its latter-day equivalent, ferrying people between their places of labour and rest. Unless, of course, we won’t have to work in the future, or companionship goes out of fashion after, say, a deadly global pandemic. Would we then commute for nostalgia, or even pleasure? Has commuting worked its way so deep into our culture that we’d find it hard to give up absolutely? Or would we frown on it, as we do slavery and burning witches, as belonging to an ignorant, violent and primitive past? People have been predicting both the imminent demise and the perpetual rise of commuting almost since it started.

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But there’s no need to fear 9 billion, or indeed 9,000 billion. In a 1964 essay, ‘How Many People Can the World Support?’, John Heaver Fremlin, an English physicist, argued that limitations on human population growth were determined by physics rather than biology. Barring catastrophes such as a meteorite strike, an apocalyptic war or a deadly global pandemic; and assuming that the entire surface of the planet, ‘land and sea alike’, was covered with 2,000-storey buildings; that people ate their dead and their sewage; that both the north and south poles had been melted on purpose; and there was absolute and eternal world peace; then mother earth could carry up to 60,000,000,000,000,000 (sixty thousand trillion) people by around the year 2964.

Risk: A User's Guide
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico
Published 4 Oct 2021

Finally, we saw how a counterintuitive strategy to stop more often during a Formula 1 race proved to be the right use of our most precious commodity: time. While timing is, in all cases, important, the political courage to act coupled with effective levers of management is essential. In the case of COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina, HHS and FEMA conducted two separate exercises that predicted the risks of an imminent global pandemic on the one hand (Crimson Contagion) and a hurricane that would hit and devastate New Orleans on the other (Hurricane Pam). Both exercises were conducted before the respective crises occurred—and eerily predicted the circumstances that would later arise when COVID-19 droplets dispersed across the globe, and when Hurricane Katrina’s winds whipped on New Orleans’s famous Bourbon Street.

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And rather than gathering the leaders and stakeholders in city hall to hash out the details, almost everything had to be done virtually—in many cases, by people who required the help of their teenage kids to coax home videoconferencing systems into working. Simply put, Mayor Walsh and his team had to govern faster and more collaboratively than ever before—and do it under the challenges of COVID-19. “Let’s Kick Some Ass Today” Kathryn Burton hadn’t expected to start her job in the middle of a global pandemic. Burton, born in Canada but experienced in Massachusetts government, began her role as Mayor Walsh’s chief of staff on March 9, 2020. She’d jumped into the whirlwind of a new position in a city government about to undergo some dramatic changes. Just over two weeks later, she was tasked to lead Boston’s daily Crisis Response Forum meeting.

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future
by Ian Goldin , Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan
Published 20 Dec 2010

Similarly, the British government sent convicts to Australia rather than Gemane Island on the Gambia River, because of the high risk of disease in the Gambia.26 The inhospitality of West Africa provided opportunities for the relatives of African slaves to later move to Sierra Leone and Liberia.27 Ending the biological isolation of parts of the world would eventually make it possible for people to travel easily between countries and climates—and it would also enable the rapid spread of global pandemics—but during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the devastation wrought by disease had wide-ranging consequences. The traumatic depopulation of the Americas opened the way for the gradual European settlement and domination of the continent. In Africa, the lower indigenous susceptibility to European diseases (because of historical contact) and the inhibiting presence of yellow fever and malaria meant that African populations and culture retained their integrity in the absence of overwhelming European domination.28 However, it also meant that African slaves were preferred to European convict and indentured labor in the Caribbean, because of their resistance to tropical diseases.29 Until the 1830s, forced African migrants outnumbered both free and indentured Europeans in the Americas.30 Between 500 BCE and 1200 CE, Eurasia experienced a process of what epidemiologists term “viral reservoir integration” as contact between civilizations intensified; most of the “historically significant biological exchange” in Afro-Eurasia had occurred by 1400 CE.31 The “pathocenosis” (or the codevelopment of disease and populations, including their immunity) in Eurasia was quite separate from that which occurred in the Americas centuries later.

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In the early nineteenth century, Britain banned the emigration of skilled workers as it was industrializing, but many left anyway—recruited by employers in France, Germany, Russia, and America.2 More recently, some academics have argued for severe limitations on immigration to avoid unsustainable population growth (although most have stopped short of advocating zero immigration).3In the UK, David Cameron, the Conservative Party prime minister, has indicated his support for limiting the population to below 70 million to contain the “very great pressures on public services.”4 There is also a growing chorus calling for limits on immigration for environmental reasons.5 Stephen Nickell highlights the need for more research into how the environmental and other costs associated with more migration may be offset by the longer term benefits and suggests that a case may be made for limiting migration on environmental grounds particularly where space is limited.6 A country may close its borders temporarily to prevent the spread of disease, as some analysts have speculated would occur in the case of a global pandemic.7 In our globalized world, it would be unusual for border closure to be more than a short-term response to particular threats or political pressures. Globalization has knit countries together in a dynamic network of cross-border exchange, of which migration is a constituent element. Most countries rely on global networks for a significant share of their GDP.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

The day we all hear of reliable human-to-human airborne transmission of H5N1, the world will come to a sharp stop. Would you get on a plane, knowing that a highly infectious virus with a 60 percent kill rate might be on board with you? In reality, you won’t face this choice: protocols already in place will shut borders and halt air traffic globally. Pandemic models show that a human H5N1 virus could easily surpass the Black Death of 1348–1350 as humanity’s deadliest known extinction event. Depending on how early the pandemic is detected and how quickly a vaccine can be deployed, epidemiologists estimate that an H5N1 outbreak could infect up to one billion people and directly cause up to 150 million deaths.*** Panic, riots, looting—in general, a fear-fueled breakdown of social order—could push the death toll even higher.

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Recent simulations have shown that a contagious airborne pathogen (like H5N1) carried into any major airport, on any continent, would be global within three days at most.41 If the infected individual took just two plane journeys prior to a public health quarantine, more than 5 billion people (75 percent of humanity) would need to be vaccinated to prevent a global pandemic. After three flights, global vaccination would be required.42 The concentration dilemmas are getting thornier. It is not a question of if, but when, a pandemic will strike a major political, financial or industrial center and force its complete (albeit temporary) isolation from all physical flows in the global system—with hard-to-predict consequences for infrastructure services like energy and IT.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

We don't need to go full Spengler to wonder whether there is something of Vienna about the entire Western world, a Viennaification of our ideational environment; not so much the fall of Rome as a mix of self-satisfied embourgeoisement, timidity, complacency and pointless rancour – even in the face of, say, a global pandemic. Like Bell Labs, blessed with a glorious legacy, a great foundation and much forward momentum; like Bell Labs, like Vienna, slouching past its most revolutionary phase into something altogether more ‘decadent’, more comfortable, more indulgent. It's still probably better to do almost anything today than in the great age of Bell Labs or the Viennese heyday, let alone the seventeenth century.

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Across the Atlantic, the message, and the impact, was the same: ‘The experts are terrible,’ said then presidential candidate Donald Trump. Just as we had reached new peaks of complexity and difficulty and required expertise more than ever, the very notion had become toxic, the emblem of a self-interested and pompous elite; the problem, not the solution.74 This was hardly the best preparation for a global pandemic. A barrage of populisms means that ideas are adversely re-politicised. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the exploration of new ideas had never felt less controversial. This now looks like a chimerical interlude. While populism is typically taken to be the wave of broadly nationalist sentiments that has surged since the 2010s, I take it here in the widest sense, as shorthand for a spectrum of intersecting social pressures.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
by Lawrence Wright
Published 7 Jun 2021

not to be SARS: www.who.int/​docs/​default-source/​coronaviruse/​transcripts/​who-audio-emergencies-coronavirus-press-conference-20apr2020.pdf. strikingly low rate: Yu-Jie Chen and Jerome A. Cohen, “Why Does the WHO Exclude Taiwan? Council on Foreign Relations, April 9, 2020. Chinese technology companies: “The Origins of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic Including the roles of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff Interim Report, June 12, 2020. “damage stability”: Kristin Huang, “Coronavirus: Wuhan doctor says officials muzzled her for sharing report on WeChat,” South China Morning Post, March 11, 2020.

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Translated by Mollie Saltskog. “If I had known:” Lily Kuo, “Coronavirus: Wuhan doctor speaks out against the authorities,” Guardian, Mar. 11, 2020. “severely disturbed”: Congressional Research Service, “COVID-19 and China,” May 13, 2020. His punishment: “The Origins of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic, Including the Roles of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff Report, Sept. 21, 2020. “How can the bulletins”: Congressional Research Service: COVID-19 and China, May 13, 2020. forced reporters into detention: Vivian Wang, “They Documented the Coronavirus Crises in Wuhan.

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce
by Amanda Kirby and Theo Smith
Published 2 Aug 2021

There is no such thing as a “degree in Neurodiversity” for HR and D&I professionals, but for anyone looking to expand their knowledge in this field, this book is as close as you are going to get to it!’ Aidan Healy, Chief Executive Officer, Lexxic Neurodiversity at Work Drive innovation, performance and productivity with a neurodiverse workforce Theo Smith Amanda Kirby We have written this book through a global pandemic, for our families, children, and all those who each and every day get up and swim against the tide. This book is for you. May you no longer have to swim so hard so often, with so little support and recognition for how truly brilliant you are. Together, we shall overcome... Contents About the authors Preface Introduction 01 Why neurodiversity is important Introduction Why do we exclude some people from the conversation?

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Partly inspired by Shelley’s journey after seeing her present at a SmartRecruiters Hiring Success conference, and with an interest in employability in prisons, he went on his own journey to help others in need. During the entire lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, from his home in Northampton, he, his wife and family cooked well over 6,000 meals for rough sleepers. Not the plan, but a response to a global pandemic in his local area. What started out as a small volunteer programme supporting a homeless charity, Project 16:15, turned into their own mission, TRUFeeds, where Bill and Fran Boorman tirelessly worked to raise funds from the recruitment community and beyond to feed those in need. This journey has gone from feeding and supporting 100 rough sleepers on the streets, to helping them connect to the key support services that can give them access to work and housing.

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure
by Yascha Mounk
Published 19 Apr 2022

And while black boys experience less social mobility than white boys, black girls have a higher chance of moving up the socioeconomic ranks to lower middle class or middle class than white girls. Data on absolute income paints a similar picture. According to the United States Census Bureau, the inflation-adjusted income of African Americans has, with brief interruptions during recessions, increased for every quintile of the income distribution. Despite the Great Recession and the global pandemic, this progress has continued over the past two decades. The income of an African American household at the twentieth percentile of the distribution has increased from about $11,000 to $17,000 since 2002; that of the fortieth percentile from $22,000 to $35,000; that of the sixtieth percentile from $36,000 to $60,000; and that of the eightieth percentile from $60,000 to $100,000.

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Of late, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the songs of Manu Chao. There is something compellingly joyous about his music. His is the sort of beat that helps get you out of bed in the morning, the sort of sound you want to have playing on a road trip. During the isolated months of the global pandemic—months during which the compelled loneliness of the shutdowns was, in my case, deepened by the self-imposed discipline required to write a book—I found myself comforted by its promise of adventure to come in the near future. But there is, I now realize, also a deeper reason why I have found myself drawn to albums like Próxima Estación: Esperanza (Next Station: Hope).

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

There were 70 million combatants in World War II—70 million individuals, almost all unrelated, who were willing to stake their lives to defend an abstract notion like “country.” And we get together with huge numbers of strangers even when we don’t want to kill each other. We send spaceships out into the cosmos; create economies and link them together via trade; invent and distribute vaccines in response to a global pandemic; and create smartphones, worldwide communications networks, and translation software that get us close to the point of finally all being able to talk to each other. All of these cultural accomplishments require a lot of learning and knowledge accumulation. We humans alone achieve them, and we achieve them with remarkable speed.

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Evolution has programmed us to want to be members in good standing of our tribe, which sometimes means shutting our ears to opposing tribes’ arguments, even if they’re sound. American society has become so polarized and tribal that solid, evidence-backed scientific arguments for getting vaccinated against the virus responsible for a deadly global pandemic are not being accepted by large numbers of people. This polarization is a worrying trend. 10 Schmidt was on the board of Apple from 2006 to 2009. 11 Strong evidence that Collison is in fact an instrumentation freak came on a Sunday in June of 2019 when he tweeted a photo of himself with his brand-new fiancée and announced, “Hit our engagement metrics this weekend!”

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

The distribution center or warehouse job has become synonymous with misery these days: stories abound of workers having to urinate into bottles because they’re not allowed enough restroom breaks, being tracked around the facility via GPS, or popping Advil like candy to deal with the aches and pains. Yet even Amazon, in denying the reports of hellish conditions written up by journalist Emily Guendelsberger, touts its “passionate employees, whose pride and commitment are what make the Amazon customer experience great.” 9 The global pandemic in 2020 just made the brutality of the workplace more visible. The amount of people employed in manufacturing worldwide has shrunk, but still the work is done, and more and more of it for pennies and without union protections. Women and children labor in deadly conditions in factories in places like Bangladesh, where the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in 2013 killed 1,132 workers and injured more than 2,000 more.

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It was shuttered in April 2018, and the company was liquidated shortly thereafter. Private equity buys up firms that are wobbly through leveraged buyouts that put the debt used to buy them back on the company’s balance sheets; if any more trouble hits a company, whether it be increased competition, in the case of Toys “R” Us, or, more recently, the global pandemic, things can unravel quickly. Once iconic brands like J. Crew and Neiman Marcus have fallen into bankruptcy in this way. 1 What that meant for Reinhart was the loss of a job she’d had for twenty-nine years, with no severance. “It was almost my entire adult life,” she said, shaking her head. “What was I thinking?”

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

Other countries are wrestling with the choice to allow Huawei to build their 5G networks, torn between the sticker price (low) and security risk (high). Many European countries already use Huawei technology in their 4G networks, making it expensive to switch—especially as they grapple with the fallout from a global pandemic. And then there are the strategic calculations. Reflecting on a visit with high-level European defense officials, one Silicon Valley venture capitalist told me he was shocked by their attitude toward China. “Mainland Europe doesn’t feel like the U.S. is anything near the hegemon we once were,” he said.

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But why wouldn’t he read an email that appeared to come from his spouse, referenced an inside joke, and asked him to click a link to put their three-year-old daughter on a pre-K waiting list? It’s bad enough that so many Americans get their news from distinct media ecosystems, with major consequences for everything from our political discourse to undermining our ability to combat a global pandemic. In the future, we could see news personalized far beyond the Fox/MSNBC divide. A conspiracy theorist who believes that windmills cause cancer might see nothing but article after article reinforcing that idea. An aunt who implicitly trusts what Barack Obama says might be presented with a deepfake calling a Republican president’s election illegitimate and urging supporters to protest.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 27 Oct 2020

But feeling pity for America? That one is new.”95 The loss of American economic power and the lack of U.S. leadership could create an opening for China to exert more influence, particularly in the developing world, where many countries desperately need help to cope with the virus and where American responses to the global pandemic have not been up to prior standards (though there will also be a backlash against China as the country of origin of the virus and especially given its initial lack of transparency). A lot of power will also flow to those countries that successfully develop a good vaccine or effective medicine.

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Abaluck et al., “The Case for Universal Cloth Mask Adoption and Policies to Increase the Supply of Medical Masks for Health Workers,” Covid Economics, April 6, 2020. 35 J. Howard et al., “Face Masks Against COVID-19: An Evidence Review,” preprint July 10, 2020. 36 Anonymous, “Czech Video Inspires the World to Wear Face Masks during the Global Pandemic,” Czech Universities, April 6, 2020; R. Tait, “Czechs Get to Work Making Masks after Government Decree,” The Guardian, March 30, 2020. 37 D. Greene, “Police in Czech Republic Tell Nudists to Wear Face Masks,” NPR, April 9, 2020. 38 L. Hensley, “Why Some People Still Refuse to Wear Masks,” Global News, July 9, 2020. 39J.

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
Published 3 Nov 2020

Even if the explanation they offer turns out to be inadequate, the automation theorists have at least focused the world’s attention on the real problem of a consistently low demand for labor. They have also excelled in efforts to imagine solutions to this problem that are broadly emancipatory in character. The automation theorists are our late-capitalist utopians.30 In a world reeling from a global pandemic, rising inequality, recalcitrant neoliberalism, resurgent ethnonationalism, and the looming threat of climate change, automation theorists have tried to push through the catastrophe with a vision of an emancipated future, one in which humanity advances to the next stage in our history—whatever we might take that to mean—and technology helps to free us all to discover and follow our passions.

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
by Jane McGonigal
Published 22 Mar 2022

Southwick, “Association of Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder with Posttraumatic Psychological Growth among US Veterans During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” JAMA Network Open 4, no. 4 (April 2021): e214972, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.4972. 6 Leah Zaidi, “Building Brave New Worlds: Science Fiction and Transition Design” (master’s thesis, Ontario College of Art and Design, 2017), 2, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321886159_Building_Brave_New_Worlds_Science_Fiction_and_Transition_Design. 7 Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 194. 8 Marina Gorbis and Kathi Vian, “Post-COVID-19 Futures: What Can We Build after the Global Pandemic?,” Urgent Futures, Institute for the Future, May 6, 2020, https://medium.com/institute-for-the-future/post-COVID-19-futures-what-can-we-build-after-the-global-pandemic-3cac9515ef20. 9 “After the Pandemic: A Deeper Disease,” Institute for the Future, September 15, 2020, https://www.iftf.org/whathappensnext/. 10 Molly Kinder and Martha Ross, “Reopening America: Low-Wage Workers Have Suffered Badly from COVID-19 so Policymakers Should Focus on Equity,” Brookings Institute, June 23, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/research/reopening-america-low-wage-workers-have-suffered-badly-from-COVID-19-so-policymakers-should-focus-on-equity/; Alyssa Fowers, “Concerns about Missing Work May Be a Barrier to Coronavirus Vaccination,” Washington Post, May 27, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/05/27/time-off-vaccine-workers/. 11 Oxfam International, The Inequality Virus: Bringing Together a World Torn Apart by Coronavirus through a Fair, Just and Sustainable Economy (Cowley, Oxford: Oxfam GB, January 2021), https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621149/bp-the-inequality-virus-250121-en.pdf. 12 International Labor Organization, ILO Monitor: COVID-19 and the World of Work, 5th ed., June 30, 2020, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/briefingnote/wcms_749399.pdf; Courtney Connley, “Women’s Labor Force Participation Rate Hit a 33-Year Low in January, According to New Analysis,” CNBC Make It, February 8, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/womens-labor-force-participation-rate-hit-33-year-low-in-january-2021.html; Catarina Saraiva, “Women Leaving Workforce Again Shows Uneven U.S.

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

We hope that you will embark on this journey with curiosity, an open mind—and an open heart, too. One last thing: For me, the greatest value of science fiction is not providing answers, but rather raising questions. After you close the book, our hope is that lots of new questions will enliven your mind: For instance, can AI help humans prevent the next global pandemic by eliminating it at the very root? How can we deal with future job challenges? How can we maintain cultural diversity in a world dominated by machines? How can we teach our children to live in a society where humans and machines coexist? We hope our readers’ questions will help take us further down the path as we shape a happier and brighter future.

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Jennifer forced herself to refocus on the task at hand. Floating in midair, Michael was still talking, while gracefully waving his hands, like a conductor. The video window obeyed his gestures and fluctuated, growing, shrinking, and tilting in concert with Saviour’s movements. “As you have seen, signs of change were already manifest before the global pandemic. The virus merely accelerated things. A large amount of previously offline economic activity went online as people maintained social distancing. The traditional service and manufacturing industries suffered heavy losses. Both were spheres where machines had an advantage.” As Michael gestured, an array of people from different professions appeared and vanished in the midair scroll: cashiers, truck drivers, seamstresses, factory workers, fruit pickers, telemarketers, well-dressed office workers, even doctors.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

Tribalism, then, can endanger the citizens’ national security. During the pandemic itself, Americans were apparently either to agree with the Chinese charge or to cede leverage to Beijing in terror of being called racist again. A Chinese daily newspaper adroitly attacked legitimate American complaints that Chinese laxity had led to a deadly global pandemic with boilerplate charges of racism: “The U.S. and other Western countries’ overreactions to the outbreak in China smack of a ‘segregation’ policy laced with extreme racism.” At a time when African students and visitors were being systematically barred from entering some Chinese stores and restaurants, the China Daily was urging their home governments “to reject the triple Western diseases of xenophobia, ideological bias and the fear of China’s rise.”

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Not much later, congressional Democrats and the media advanced the argument that Trump’s presidency indeed should be terminated due to his mental incapacity. As a result, Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee organized a conference at Yale where she met with members of Congress and diagnosed Trump as dangerously unfit. Indeed, Lee deemed the president an existential threat to the planet comparable to some sort of global pandemic. “Our survival as a species,” she insisted, “may be at stake.” When during the primary campaign of 2020 Democratic front-runner Joe Biden seemed to exhibit confusion at times about names, dates, and places, Dr. Lee was asked whether she might offer another in absentia analysis but refused. Nonetheless, her idea of removing a president by claiming he was non compos mentis without a physical or mental examination persisted—and took on even stranger manifestations.45 In 2019, fired former deputy and acting director of the FBI Andrew McCabe admitted that he and then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein had earlier discussed the possibility of removing the president from office.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

When the viral respiratory disease SARS appeared in southern China in November 2002, the government kept it secret for months, delaying both its own and the world’s response. You would think it had learned the lesson. But history repeated itself with the new coronavirus. Chinese authorities could have stopped it from becoming a global pandemic if they had acted the moment the first cases were discovered, but instead they instinctively silenced whistle-blowers and denied human-to-human transmission. Medical professionals who sounded the alarm about the outbreak were detained by the police. State-run media did not mention the risks for weeks, but warned netizens not to spread rumours about it.

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London, Granta Books, 1992, p. 394. 4 ‘ASHG denounces attempts to link genetics and racial supremacy’, The American Journal of Human Genetics, 103, 2018, https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(18)30363-X (accessed 9 March 2020). 5 R. N. Thompson, C.P. Thompson, O. Pelerman, S. Gupta and U. Obolski, ‘Increased frequency of travel may act to decrease the chance of a global pandemic’, Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society of London, 374 (1775), 2019. C. Wilson, ‘Why air travel makes deadly disease pandemics less likely’, New Scientist, 2018, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2184266-why-airtravel-makes-deadly-diseasepandemics-less-likely/(accessed 9 March 2020). 6 M.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

When the interview ended, one YouTube staffer in attendance privately felt relieved that the Wired editor didn’t pull up searches on YouTube like “flu vaccine,” which were rife with conspiracies. Another person on YouTube’s policy team later said that Wojcicki argued against limiting such videos, citing friends of hers who subscribed to alternative health beliefs that shunned vaccines—a stance she changed once a global pandemic struck. Still, Wojcicki ended the interview on high notes. YouTube had implemented a series of updates she said would purge bad actors abusing its systems. Videos like the Parkland Trending clip were removed for breaking rules against harassment. With new ad filters and controls in place, Wojcicki had persuaded nearly all boycotting brands to spend again.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT said it had not been informed: Megan Farokhmanesh, “YouTube Didn’t Tell Wikipedia About Its Plans for Wikipedia,” The Verge, March 14, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/14/17120918/youtube-wikipedia-conspiracy-theory-partnerships-sxsw. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT global pandemic struck: A YouTube spokesperson said the company “took a strong supportive stance on vaccines from the very beginning” of the COVID-19 pandemic “and was one of the first companies to implement a COVID-vaccine misinfo policy.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 29: 901 Cherry Avenue or Green Nasim: Daisuke Wakabayashi, Thomas Erdbrink, and Matthew Haag, “ ‘Vegan Bodybuilder’: How YouTube Attacker, Nasim Aghdamn, Went Viral in Iran,” The New York Times, April 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter.html.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published 3 Oct 2022

A case can be made that oil companies like Chevron need the smart cadre of McKinsey consultants to guide them through an existential threat to their business model: the global push to move away from fossil fuels. BP and Shell, for example, are scrambling to expand their clean energy businesses. So with an army of McKinsey consultants advising them on strategy, what approach did Chevron choose? Drill, baby, drill. In July 2020, just as the global pandemic was decimating demand for Chevron’s gasoline, the company’s CEO, Mike Wirth, speaking to the Texas Oil & Gas Association, said that the global push for clean energy “doesn’t mean the end of oil and gas,” Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Wirth said that Chevron would “find ways to make oil and gas more efficient, more environmentally benign.”

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Other top McKinsey fossil fuel clients: List of companies from McKinsey internal records. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT If McKinsey was advising: Details on McKinsey’s work with Chevron from McKinsey internal records. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In July 2020, just as the global pandemic: Kevin Crowley and Bryan Gruley, “Chevron’s Answer to Climate Change Is to Keep Drilling for Oil,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Aug. 13, 2020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Teck, one of the world’s biggest exporters: For the size of Teck compared with other steelmaking coal exporters, see “Teck: Fact Sheet: Steelmaking Coal.”

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

In this guise we were witness to a further series of remarkable and traumatic events that stand to have enduring consequences. This was the era of Trump, populism and post-truth politics; the age of Brexit; and the period in which the fabric of UK society was stretched almost to breaking point. It also coincided with a global pandemic that, in the UK, brought along the deepest economic downturn in more than 300 years in its wake. It was an epoch in which central bank balance sheets and public sector deficits and debt swelled to unprecedented peacetime levels, and yet interest rates had never been lower – in some important instances plumbing depths lower even than those I had witnessed in Japan.

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The performance of the UK economy from the early 1970s onwards, however, was generally less impressive, and the period was punctuated by a series of more challenging setbacks and conundrums. This began with the stagflation that followed the first oil price shock and the bust that followed the ‘Barber boom’ and it ended with Brexit, the damaging economic fallout from which was exacerbated by the worst global pandemic in a century and by the eruption of a major war on the European continent. Some of the problems the UK encountered reflected the unavoidable consequences of global events that were beyond the control of a medium-sized open economy and its policymaking community. But others had origins that were more firmly rooted in domestic considerations, and in particular policy errors on various levels.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

But the merger went ahead anyway, and McDonnell’s corporate culture—based on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and corner-cutting—became deeply embedded in the company.56 There is a strong argument to be made that it was this cultural transition that created the environment within which the 737 MAX disasters took place—and it was a transition engineered by the US federal state.57 In the wake of the 737 MAX disasters and in the context of a global pandemic that severely damaged the airline industry, Boeing might have come close to collapse in 2020. But this outcome was, once again, forestalled by the American state. The CARES Act included $17 billion in loans “for businesses deemed critical to maintaining national security,” of which Boeing was one.

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Such associations “facilitate the systematic collaboration between state and corporate institutions that is essential for developing and implementing policy.”100 In other words, the state has an important role to play in allowing capitalists to form and promote their general interest as a class, as opposed to their specific interests as individual capitalists. And it is often only through the state that the general interest of capital can be protected. Why? Because, as we saw in chapter 3, state institutions allow capitalists to overcome their individual interests and mount joint responses to collective action problems, from banking crises to global pandemics. While bosses and financiers find it quite easy to organize themselves, within and outside state institutions, it is harder for the working classes to do so. The working class is larger, more diverse, and less powerful—and it therefore takes a lot more effort to consolidate working people into a coherent bloc capable of speaking with one voice and wielding power.

Becoming Data Literate: Building a great business, culture and leadership through data and analytics
by David Reed
Published 31 Aug 2021

Some of these are internal, such as political resistance, reorganisation, transformation projects (which may succeed or fail), technology projects that are launched without any involvement of the data department, but which have a significant impact. Similarly, there are external factors that can push back against the adoption of data, ranging from acquisition and merger activity that can undermine a data literate position by bringing a radically different focus to bear, through to market disruption or global pandemic. Those who bring their organisation to the level of data literacy – or beyond – are to be duly recognised for their significant achievement. Those who maintain this level even more so. And for those who face starting over or running a recovery programme, remember this – once you have learned the language of data, you can always use it to write a new story.

Quality Investing: Owning the Best Companies for the Long Term
by Torkell T. Eide , Lawrence A. Cunningham and Patrick Hargreaves
Published 5 Jan 2016

Both companies grew significantly and at the time of the reunification, which brought an end to over 60 years of competition, they were the second and third ranked players in the diabetes space, behind Eli Lilly. Diabetes treatment now accounts for around three-quarters of Novo Nordisk’s profit. The incidence of diabetes globally has increased rapidly in the last decade, driven by the global pandemic of obesity – now numbering more than 600 million people and forecast to continue rising. Demand for diabetes treatment will, we believe, increase more rapidly due to rising diagnosis rates; as will the continued need for better treatments and broader reach of care (fewer than 10% of afflicted people receive effective care).

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference
by Alice Ross
Published 19 Nov 2020

The average retail investor cannot just load up their portfolio with bonds and ignore equities. The traditional advice when investing is to spread risk across various asset classes as well as sectors, on the assumption that they won’t all fall in value at once – except in exceptional circumstances, such as the global pandemic experienced in 2020. Private equity Private equity investors take a stake in an unlisted company: one that is still private and hasn’t floated on the stock market. While equities and bond funds form part of a normal portfolio for an average retail investor, private equity is often only advised for those with more money to invest.

How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (And Knowing When to Trust Them)
by Tom Chivers and David Chivers
Published 18 Mar 2021

For instance, in March 2019 the Guardian reported (accurately) that the OBR was predicting 1.2 per cent growth that year.1 That was a relatively pessimistic estimate, but, the story said, the longer-term picture was more rosy. Of course, the longer-term picture was not more rosy: almost exactly a year later, the UK went into lockdown to deal with Covid-19, and the economy shrank by 25 per cent in less than two months. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect the OBR, or the Guardian, to have predicted a global pandemic. But when you see forecasts like that – 1.2 per cent growth forecast this financial year, unemployment to fall by 2 per cent this quarter, global temperatures to rise by 2.6° by 2100 – how are they being made? Should we trust them? Let’s forget about the economy for a moment, and start thinking about the weather in north London.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

Ensuring the next big outbreak never happens could be the greatest gift of the biotracking revolution. Individually, of course, real-time monitoring of vitals and body chemicals offers incredible benefits for optimizing health and preventing emergencies. Collectively, though, it could help us get ahead of a global pandemic. CHANGE IN LIFE EXPECTANCY DURING THE 1918 FLU EPIDEMIC. Source: S. L. Knobler, A. Mack, A. Mahmoud, and S. M. Lemon, eds., The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready? Workshop Summary, Institute of Medicine (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005), https://doi.org/10.17226/11150, PMID: 20669448.

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And today, with each new human life, our planet becomes more crowded, hurtling us toward, or perhaps further beyond, what it can sustain. How many is too many? One report, which examined sixty-five different scientific projections, concluded that the most common estimated “carrying capacity” of our planet is 8 billion.7 That’s just about where we’re at right now. And barring a nuclear holocaust or a global pandemic of historically deadly proportions—nothing anyone in his or her right mind would ever wish for—that’s not where our population is going to peak. When the Pew Research Center polled members of the largest association of scientists in the world, 82 percent said that there isn’t enough food and other resources on this planet for its fast-growing human population.8 Among those who held that opinion was Frank Fenner, an eminent Australian scientist who helped bring an end to one of the world’s deadliest diseases as the chairman of the Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

It tends to attract engineering students looking for a humanities elective, despite—or because of—the disturbing subject matter. When I designed the course, I knew that it would be a major draw because, even if a person might not wish for bad things to happen, when bad things do happen, it’s often difficult to look away. I never imagined that I would be teaching the course in the middle of a global pandemic. As we shifted our class online in March 2020 in order to safeguard our health, our lives, and the lives of those around us, and to try to slow a deadly and highly transmissible virus, I found myself thinking about other types of destructive virality, and about October 2019, when I watched Mark Zuckerberg testify before Congress.

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The larger lesson, however, is that regulatory agencies that should have prevented disasters like the 737 Max tragedy had been stripped of their ability to do so, and whole sectors that require regulation, like web technologies and online communication platforms, effectively have no external oversight bodies. In the US since 2016, instead of more regulatory safeguards put into place by a democratically elected government, we have seen runaway centralization and the destruction of regulatory and safety agencies under an increasingly authoritarian federal government. During a global pandemic this has meant that even healthcare supplies and vital public information have been withheld from citizens and state governments. Scientists and epidemiologists at the CDC and NIH have been increasingly forced out or muzzled, and many of the teams dedicated to pandemic response had been dissolved prior to the COVID-19 crisis, leaving a gaping hole of expertise where our disaster response should have been.

Global Catastrophic Risks
by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic
Published 2 Jul 2008

Since 1 976, when Ebola first appeared in Zaire, there have been intermittent outbreaks of the disease, often along Sub-Saharan African rainforests where the virus is transmitted from other primates to humans. The remoteness of these regions, and the rapid pace by which these viruses kill their human host, have thus far precluded a global pandemic. H owever, if these pathogens were procured, aerosolized, and released in busy urban centres or hubs, a catastrophic pandemic might ensue - particularly because attempts to generate vaccines to Ebola have, thus far, proven unsuccessful. In 1992, the Aum Shinrikyo sent a medical team to Zaire in what is believed to have been an attempt to procure Ebola virus ( Kaplan, 2000) .

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(January 2003). Enhanced: Moore's law forever? Science, 299(5604), 2 1 0-2 1 1 . Moore, G . ( 1 9 April 1965). Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Electronics Magazine, 1 14-1 17. Murray, C.)., Lopez, A.D., Chin, B., Feehan, D., and Hill, K. H . (23 December 2006). Estimation of potential global pandemic influenza mortality on the basis of vital registry data from the 1918-20 pandemic: a quantitative analysis. The Lancet, 368(9554) , 2 2 1 1-22 18. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. (2004). The 9/1 1 Commission Report (New York: W.W. Norton). National Research Council. (2003a).

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103 Gilovich, T. 99 GIRO 1 74, 182 GISP2 ice core, effect ofToba eruption 207 glaciation cycles 268, 358 effects on biodiversity 256 Milankovitch theory 240-1 relationship to cosmic ray flux 2 5 1 -2 Global Brain scenario 80 global catastrophic risk study as a single field 1-2 taxonomy 2-6 global cooling after asteroid impact 2 3 1 nuclear winter 208, 381, 390-2 as result of dust shower 2 3 3 volcanic eruptions 2 0 5 , 207-9, 2 10, 2 1 3 , 269-71 globalization, pandemic risk 1 7 global nuclear war 388-9 nuclear winter 390-2 Global Outbreak and Response Network (GOARN), WHO 471 Global Public Health Information Network ( G P H I N ) , WHO 470, 471 global totalitarianism 26, 67, 509-10 probability 5 16-17 risk factors politics 5 1 2-14 molecular manufacturing 492-4, 498 technology 5 1 1-12 risk management politics 5 1 5-16 technology 5 14-1 5 global war, risk from molecular manufacturing 489-92, 496-7, 498-9 global warming viii-ix, 5, 1 5 , 185, 243-4, 258 after asteroid impact 2 3 1 agricultural consequences 6 5 cost-benefit analysis 192-200 due to brightening of Sun 34 historical 1 91-2 public policy 191-200 Kyoto Protocol 190-1 relationship to solar activity 250-1 sea level rise, evolutionary consequences 5 5 gluons 350 Index 540 God, anthropomorphic bias 3 1 0 Goiania radiological incident (1987), psychological consequences 430 Goleman, D. 62 good cause dump 106 Good, I .

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

The more our elites call for ‘thought leadership’ and ‘disruptive thinking’, the less they seem to mean it. Buzz terms, such as resiliency, global governance, multi-stakeholder collaboration and digital public square, are the answer to every problem, regardless of its nature. Too many wars happening? We need more collaboration. High risk of another global pandemic? More stakeholder participation. Populist revolts convulsing the Western world? We must rebuild trust in global governance. For every risk, Davos offers an identikit fix. Most of its Latinate prose sounds innocuous. But the lexicon betrays a worldview that is inherently wary of public opinion.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
by Justin E. H. Smith
Published 22 Mar 2022

In our own day we have witnessed the extension of the concept of natural selection from the genetic level of analysis, of interest in the study of biological evolution, to the “memetic” level, of interest in the study of communication networks. The fact that the idea of the meme has caught on so succesfully is itself an instance of memetic selection. Viruses are another example of the cross-fertility between information science and life science. The current global pandemic is in the course of revolutionizing our language in profound ways. One of the most significant changes however is not so much a revolution as a restoration: at just the moment in history when a derived and secondary sense of “virus” (as in “computer virus,” “viral meme,” “viral celebrity,” “to go viral”) was poised to move into first place, a real virus, a harmful biological agent, came roaring into history to remind us of its enduring primacy.

Half Empty
by David Rakoff
Published 20 Sep 2010

Eventually it would be taken off the market when it came to light that the bacon bits were nothing more than highly salted, air-puffed balsa wood, but before all that there would be television commercials showing happy couples sprinkling their Seasons of Love® over salads, or laughingly feeding one another bites of baked potato festively speckled with the stuff, like someone had just celebrated New Year’s all over your food. In Rent, the characters live out their Seasons of Love in huge Manhattan lofts. Some of them have AIDS, which, coincidentally, is also the name of a dreaded global pandemic that is still raging and has killed millions of people worldwide. In Rent, AIDS seems only to render one cuter and cuter. The characters are artists. Creative types. Some of them are homosexual, and the ones who aren’t don’t seem to mind. They screen their calls and when it is their parents they roll their eyes.

In defense of food: an eater's manifesto
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Dec 2008

An American born in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes in his lifetime; the risk is even greater for a Hispanic American or African American. A diagnosis of diabetes subtracts roughly twelve years from one’s life and living with the condition incurs medical costs of $13,000 a year (compared with $2,500 for someone without diabetes). This is a global pandemic in the making, but a most unusual one, because it involves no virus or bacteria, no microbe of any kind—just a way of eating. It remains to be seen whether we’ll respond by changing our diet or our culture and economy. Although an estimated 80 percent of cases of type 2 diabetes could be prevented by a change of diet and exercise, it looks like the smart money is instead on the creation of a vast new diabetes industry.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

Moreover, the USA has a track record of successfully assimilating immigrants. As a result it’s likely to see a rise in the size of its working-age population and to witness strong economic growth over the longer term. Of course, all these estimates could be wildly off the mark. Perhaps another great famine, global pandemic or a world war could kill off billions of people, or maybe people will suddenly start having much larger families for reasons of economic survival or for status. In theory, demographic forecasting is a relatively scientific field, but in reality it can be subject to the vagaries of the future just like anything else.

No One Succeeds Alone
by Robert Reffkin
Published 4 May 2021

Discovering electricity—then bringing it to every home in America in the twentieth century Ending slavery in America Engineering a flying vehicle that weighs hundreds of tons and can soar through the air at hundreds of miles an hour while carrying hundreds of people Measuring the size of the universe using only math and telescopes Eradicating diseases that had killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide Climbing Mount Everest and skiing to both the South Pole and the North Pole in a single lifetime Walking on the moon and returning to Earth Taking a heart from one person and putting it into the body of another person to save a life Discovering DNA, sequencing it, then figuring out how to modify it letter by letter Creating a supercomputer that fits in your pocket Turning an online bookstore into a trillion-dollar company Searching all of the world’s information in less than a second Building a map of the entire world that knows where you are and how to get anywhere you want to go Creating “meat” without animals Lifting a billion people out of abject poverty in the last twenty-five years Battling a global pandemic Look back at your to-do list now. Do you see anything that still looks impossible? Spend your time with people who give you energy Why I love young people who are the first in their family to go to college There’s no way I’d be where I am today if it hadn’t been for the mentorship, professional development, summer internships, and support I received in high school and college.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
by Xiaowei Wang
Published 12 Oct 2020

And thank you, Helen Mirra, for your wisdom and walks, which teach me to “let go, let go, let go.” This book would not be possible without my aunt and uncle, Victor Wang and Jacqueline Chen, who gave me their unwavering support and a home in Guangzhou. Thank you to my mother, who continues to diligently feed people in the middle of a global pandemic, and to my grandmother, who remains ever present in my life. And Ian Pearce: I am always grateful for your patience, support, and endless good humor. The intellectual and spiritual influences of this book are many. Yet it all began with the cookbooks and food writings of Buwei Chao, M.F.K. Fisher, Jessica B.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
by Rachel Clarke
Published 26 Jan 2021

The added stresses of winter and seasonal flu are enough to tip us annually into full-blown crisis. Patients on trolleys lining hospital corridors are now grimly iconic of an NHS pared to the bone. And this is categorically not a sign of NHS robustness. Quite the opposite. How can a health service so stripped of spare capacity cope with the demands of a once-ina-lifetime global pandemic? I bite my lip and think longingly of Germany’s twenty-nine intensive care beds per 100,000 people – four times the number of ICU beds in Britain. It gets worse. The Channel 4 News health and social care editor, Victoria Macdonald, asks the Prime Minister if he has yet to develop his own personal policy on shaking hands.

A Short History of Humanity: How Migration Made Us Who We Are
by Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe
Published 8 Apr 2021

In return, they probably gifted the Europeans with syphilis, which was then brought back home, creating immense suffering and countless victims well into the twentieth century. When Ebola broke out a few years ago in West Africa, there was worldwide fear that the virus might travel to other regions. When COVID-19 spread throughout the world in 2020, fears of a global pandemic were realized. There is increasing evidence that early waves of migrants globally were connected to the spread of infectious disease around the world. We know that plague bacteria existed in the south of what is now Russia at least 5,000 years ago, a region that later saw a mass exodus to Central Europe, where around the same time there was a sharp decline in the size of the local population.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonizing Mars , Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the aging process , or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us. These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 14 Sep 2020

The truth is that according to the Federal Aviation Administration there are only three capacity-constrained airports in the whole country—it just happens that two of them are in New York and the other is the one members of Congress use to fly home to their districts. These are important cities, and their airport-crowding issues underscore the fact that investing in high-speed rail, specifically in the Northeast corridor, could be very useful. But for most Americans the more relevant problem—at least when air service isn’t interrupted by a global pandemic—is that the airport they live closest to has only so many direct flights. That means there’s little competition on routes, limited flexibility in schedules, and simple logistical difficulties in getting from one place to another. In a day-to-day sense this won’t manifest itself as a serious problem because most people rarely fly.

Little Hands Clapping
by Dan Rhodes
Published 4 Feb 2010

Designed to help visitors put their problems into perspective, it had told various tales of human misfortune. Along with the accounts of sinking ships was a series of photographs of a village lost to a mudslide, only its skewed rooftops visible above the new ground level, then there had been a short video presentation about a city decimated by a cloud of toxic gas, and an interactive timeline of global pandemics. Pavarotti’s wife had been pleased with this room, but as time went by she started to worry that it might not lift everybody’s spirits in the way she had intended, that some people might think it just a little on the negative side. After many sleepless nights she had decided to dismantle it and approach the same territory from a more positive angle, one that was in no way open to misinterpretation.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

The crisis ushered in by coronavirus has accelerated the need to find this common ground between the defenders of institutional norms and those who agitate for economic justice. Long-standing liberal–socialist ideals, such as universal basic income, have acquired unprecedented plausibility in the context of the global pandemic. If this moment is to be seized by something other than nationalism or a type of privatised platform technocracy, a coalition of legal and economic rebuilders will be needed. Acknowledgements The pieces in this book were originally published in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, openDemocracy and the blog of the Political Economy Research Centre.

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America
by Angie Schmitt
Published 26 Aug 2020

It was a bad analogy in a lot of ways, but it helped emphasize the strange tolerance we have in our culture for traffic deaths and how they can desensitize us to other forms of cruelty and injustice. It is also worth noting that while a bad economy may hide them, it won’t fix the problems addressed in the book. Before the global pandemic, we had settled into a “new normal” where pedestrian deaths were consistently about 50% higher than they had been a generation before. So without a change in some of the contributing factors (vehicle styles and weights, engineering conventions, demographic trends), when the economy rebounds, I would expect to see the same pattern emerge.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
by M. Nolan Gray
Published 20 Jun 2022

While newer deed restrictions don’t often disappear in this way, reapproval votes still offer an opportunity to periodically audit the rules. This can result in deed restrictions being incrementally liberalized—say, to allow accessory dwelling units in the face of rising rents, or home-based businesses in response to a global pandemic. More commonly, unwanted deed restrictions will simply wither away by neglect. Unlike zoning, deed restrictions only survive to the extent that they are actively enforced—if certain rules are persistently ignored, or areas of the neighborhood are given a free pass, a court may eventually consider the deed restriction unenforceable.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 9 May 2022

How many unsuccessful companies didn’t pivot to a new idea when they realized their current one wasn’t working? Airbnb didn’t necessarily get unusually lucky. They capitalized on the luck that anybody who works hard can expect. And, as lucky as Airbnb had historically been or seemed to be, they got an unusually bad luck draw when a global pandemic stopped people from traveling. Shortly after the pandemic started, Airbnb’s bookings dropped 72 percent; its estimated valuation fell from $31 billion to $18 billion; and the company was forced to put their IPO on hold. But, like all extremely successful businesses, Airbnb was good at working around their unlucky breaks.

Working Identity, Updated Edition, With a New Preface: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
by Herminia Ibarra
Published 17 Oct 2023

Brainwashing tends to fail when subjects are allowed to return at night to their fellow prisoners (who knew them before) after a day of indoctrination.4 We are all more malleable when separated from people who know us well. The same dynamic explains why young adults seem to change when they go away to college and interaction with family members and prior friends is necessarily reduced. As many of us discovered during the global pandemic lockdowns, we are all more malleable when separated from the people and places that trigger old habits and old selves.5 Of course, we don’t need to subject ourselves to brainwashing in order to change careers. But we need to realize that our intimates—spouses, bosses, close friends, parents—expect us to remain the same, and they may pressure us to be consistent.6 Most people who have made big career changes have heard loved ones tell them, “You’re out of your mind.”

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
Published 9 Feb 2021

For years, intelligence agencies rationalized the concealment of digital vulnerabilities as critical to monitoring America’s adversaries, to war-planning, to our national security. But those rationalizations are buckling. They ignore the fact that the internet, like so much we are now witnessing in a global pandemic, has left us inextricably connected. Digital vulnerabilities that affect one affect us all. The barrier between the physical and digital worlds is wearing thin. “Everything can be intercepted” is right, and most everything important already has—our personal data, our intellectual property, our chemical factories, our nuclear plants, even our own cyberweapons.

…

These are the critical assignments of our time. Many will say they are impossible, but we have summoned the best of our scientific community, government, industry, and everyday people to overcome existential challenges before. Why can’t we do it again? As I write these final words, I am sheltering-in-place from a global pandemic. I am watching the world ask the same questions—Why weren’t we better prepared? Why didn’t we have enough testing? Enough protective gear? Better warning systems? A recovery plan?—knowing full well these questions apply to the cyber domain too. I’m crossing my fingers that the next big cyberattack waits until this pandemic has passed.

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland
by Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham
Published 10 Jan 2023

Corruption, brutality, secrecy, and racism have always shaped policing. Because of the inordinate power bestowed on law enforcement, these abuses cause immense damage to society. This is why tens of millions of Americans, and people around the world, marched in the streets in the summer of 2020—amidst a global pandemic—to call for an end to police killings of Black people, and a reimagining of public safety. The street demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man whose neck was knelt on by a Minneapolis police officer for over eight minutes because he was suspected of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, were estimated to be the largest in the nation’s history.

…

Much of the chapters on the 2000s and the 2010s would not be possible in their current state without the documents and dozens of video and audio recordings Sam was able to force the city to turn over. Our editor at Atria Books, Amar Deol, understood our vision for Riders from our first conversation. He was a steady hand during two years of intensive writing in the midst of a global pandemic. David Patterson, our agent, helped mold a sprawling jumble of chapters into a tight, coherent proposal that served as a reliable structure for the final draft. Thanks also to Elizabeth Hitti, Phillip Bashe, and the entire team at Atria and Simon & Schuster, and to John Pelosi for his astute legal read.

Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 27 Aug 2007

Whether or not they come true in exactly the ways outlined here, the world’s business and government leaders will be immeasurably better off if they carefully consider how these scenarios could come to pass and act today to create maneuvering room for the radically different world that these game-changing events could create. 2990-7 ch10 lempert 7/23/07 12:13 PM Page 109 10 Can Scenarios Help Policymakers Be Both Bold and Careful? Robert Lempert S urprise, of both good and bad varieties, has become a ubiquitous feature of the world facing American policymakers. Leaders have come to expect adverse surprises, from terrorist attacks to global pandemics to signs that global warming is emerging faster than previously imagined. But many of the most serious, festering problems facing the United States—from encouraging a free, just, and stable global order to ensuring that the American middle class can thrive in a globalized world—also require leaders who can transform some of what seem like today’s inexorable trends.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life
by J. Craig Venter
Published 16 Oct 2013

Another critical step toward advanced synthetic-based influenza vaccines is the integration and scale-up of synthetic vaccine seeds with full-scale manufacturing to enable commercial vaccine production. Novartis is starting to make this a reality—a reality that has enormous implications for the global pandemic response. The speed, ease, and accuracy with which higher-yielding influenza vaccine seeds can be produced using synthetic techniques promises not only more rapid future pandemic responses but a more reliable supply of pandemic influenza vaccines. While vaccines are the best means of prevention against pandemics, and synthetic biology has helped us to make them more effective, we are now facing another major threat from infection, as one of humankind’s most important weapons in the fight against disease, antibiotics, are rapidly becoming compromised.

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Sep 2021

If the “retards” and “apes” continued to be right, held their diamond hands, the stock could go much, much higher. And even if Wall Street did figure out a way to fire back, if the government stepped in, even if Sara lost—at least she could say she had been part of something great, of the little guys sticking it to the elite. Sticking it to the fat cats who were making fortunes off a global pandemic, while people died and even more lost their jobs. She really and truly wanted to be involved. And this would be her thing, hers alone. She could continue to keep it a secret, until maybe one day, when her son or daughter grew up, she could tell him or her about it. They could laugh together about the ridiculous memes, and maybe Sara would be able to show her child how once, just once, the little guys had stuck together and won.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
by Bill Gates
Published 16 Feb 2021

Because we want to compare events that happen at different points in time—the pandemic in 2020 and climate change in, say, 2030—and the global population will change in that time, we can’t compare the absolute numbers of deaths. Instead we will use the death rate: that is, the number of deaths per 100,000 people. Using data from the Spanish flu of 1918 and the COVID-19 pandemic and averaging it out over the course of a century, we can estimate the amount by which a global pandemic increases the global mortality rate. It’s about 14 deaths per 100,000 people each year. How does that compare to climate change? By mid-century, increases in global temperatures are projected to raise global mortality rates by the same amount—14 deaths per 100,000. By the end of the century, if emissions growth stays high, climate change could be responsible for 75 extra deaths per 100,000 people.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell
Published 28 Feb 2017

One of the more remarkable phenomena in this area was the existence of a number of research institutes and think tanks substantially devoted to raising awareness about what was known as “existential risk”—the risk of absolute annihilation of the species, as distinct from mere catastrophes like climate change or nuclear war or global pandemics—and to running the algorithms on how we might avoid this particular fate. There was the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, and the Centre for Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, and the Future of Life Institute in Boston, which latter outfit featured on its board of scientific advisors not just prominent figures from science and technology like Musk and Hawking and the pioneering geneticist George Church, but also, for some reason, the beloved film actors Alan Alda and Morgan Freeman.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
by Mary L. Trump
Published 13 Jul 2020

My best guess at the time was that that would occur through a disaster of his own making, such as an avoidable war he either provoked or stumbled into. I couldn’t have anticipated how many people would willingly enable his worst instincts, which have resulted in government-sanctioned kidnapping of children, detaining of refugees at the border, and betrayal of our allies, among other atrocities. And I couldn’t have foreseen that a global pandemic would present itself, allowing him to display his grotesque indifference to the lives of other people. Donald’s initial response to COVID-19 underscores his need to minimize negativity at all costs. Fear—the equivalent of weakness in our family—is as unacceptable to him now as it was when he was three years old.

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism
by Hubert Joly
Published 14 Jun 2021

And I am especially grateful to my parents, who have taught me the importance of hard work and decency, to my children for their love, their ideas, and their encouragement, and to Hortense for her miraculous support and partnership. Caroline Lambert Working on this book has been a joy and an inspiration. Thank you, Hubert Joly, for inviting me to share your book adventure. And what an adventure it was! We made it through several relocations, major life changes, a global pandemic, Wi-Fi breakdowns, and countless hours over Zoom. Thank you for trusting me with your ideas and stories, for responding to my questions and prodding with such grace, and for offering an inspiring vision of business—so very different from the corporate world I fled many years ago. Thank you also for your patience, kindness, generosity, and positivity.

Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic
by Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin
Published 14 Jul 2022

On March 18, the company ordered 6,000 surgical masks, 600 surgical gowns, and 4,800 pairs of protective gloves for the Zaandam from a marine medical supplier on Staten Island, an internal invoice shows. Getting the supplies on board could take many days because no country was allowing the ship to dock. But beyond the medical center and the cabins where the sick languished, the cruise had to continue. The global pandemic shutdown was advancing on land—universities, offices, restaurants, and schools were closing across the world. Towns, cities, and entire nations were imposing curfews and the mandatory use of face masks. On the Zaandam, the opposite was occurring. The crew, following corporate’s mandate, tempted passengers with group activities.

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It
by Erica Thompson
Published 6 Dec 2022

Could this be it? In the alert that followed the discovery in New Jersey, the CDC found no other swine flu traceable to pigs: the Fort Dix outbreak was the only established instance of person-to-person transmission, and the Northern Hemisphere flu season was at an end. But the possibility of a new global pandemic emerging from these beginnings could not be discounted. Scientists nervous about the prospect of the winter season to come were unable to rule out the worst-case scenarios. Manufacturers of vaccines would need the whole summer to produce enough doses to vaccinate most of the population, so some kind of decision had to be taken very quickly.

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 4 Sep 2023

That conversation just happened to exemplify my sense that American progressive movements are forever wandering from the righteous to the ridiculous. In 2020, a year that was sold at the time as a moment of unique political foment—as a “reckoning”—we saw the American progressive movement drift from the essential to the inconsequential, from the material to the illusory, in much the same way. Early that year, an unprecedented global pandemic bloomed in front of our eyes. The novel coronavirus Covid-19 exploded out from China and across the face of the globe in the span of a few months. There have been deadlier diseases, and there have been diseases that have wrought more havoc, but there had never before been a disease that so took advantage of a globalized and interconnected Earth, of our now-small world.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

An application on your smartphone to monitor your sleep cycles makes sleeping a digital action; the same applies to praying once you download a meditation from any of the online spiritual communities out there; an ISIS solider waging war in Syria also exists in the digital world, as the US stores the geolocation of his mobile phone as part of its ‘Gallant Phoenix’ project aimed at turning data into justice; and even playing with your cat becomes a digital action once you post clips of its adorable antics on social media.3 In short, our every move in the real world is now duplicated in the virtual realm — a process of digitalisation that Covid-19 has accelerated. The global pandemic irrefutably made us more reliant on digital tools for working from home, buying books online, or having a virtual get-together with friends. In fact, the online world is expanding so fast that its players sometimes struggle to keep up: in 2020, several operators were forced to downgrade the quality of their online video services to keep the networks from saturating; PlayStation and personal computer sales skyrocketed; and connected-car manufacturers are still contending with a computer chip shortage.4 This virtualisation of the perceptible world is only in its infancy.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

Yet by making a mere four genetic mutations, the Dutch-American team was able to engineer a much more virulent strain capable of going airborne, vastly increasing its transmissibility to human beings and effectively weaponizing it. The original goal of the research was to study how quickly H5N1 might evolve in order to better prevent its spread, but the genetically altered strain, if released, could readily lead to a global pandemic. In the name of science, the researchers wanted to publish their findings, including the genetic code of the more virulent strain they had created, in the journals Science and Nature, but many contended doing so would be akin to providing a recipe book to terrorists to build bioweapons. In the end, for the first time ever, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity stepped in and asked the journals to limit the details published, to which they temporarily agreed.

…

Who knows what kid in Jaipur or what grandmother in Milwaukee while hacking away at synbio will make that game-changing cancer-fighting breakthrough we’ve all been hoping for? But it is also just as likely that among the masses will be those few bad actors who can use the same technologies to create a global pandemic. This should give us pause. We should be thinking more deeply and seriously about our use of exponential technologies, their downsides, and the potential for harm they may bring. Although space attacks, evil AI, and gray goo may be low on our list of personal priorities, far below the rush to pick up the kids at school, there are a mass of threats that demand our immediate attention.

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
by Richard Haass
Published 10 Jan 2017

The problem with such thinking is that history suggests that crises do not automatically generate the impetus for necessary change on the scale that is required. There is as well the problem that crisis by definition can be extremely costly. Conflict between two or more powers, a nuclear event brought about by a state or terrorists, significant climate change, a global pandemic, the collapse of the world trade system—it would be hard to exaggerate the costs if any of these were to happen. Surely a better way would be to start moving toward an international order without waiting for a crisis. The case and the potential for doing so could hardly be more compelling.

When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 4 May 2015

Dianne Feinstein”: See “Senator Feinstein Urges Californians to Be Aware That Generic Drug Prices Vary Greatly From Pharmacy to Pharmacy,” May 8, 2006. / 53 “A comprehensive Wall Street Journal article”: Sarah Rubenstein, “Why Generic Doesn’t Always Mean Cheap,” The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2007. 57 “FOR $25 MILLION, NO WAY . . .”: “The virtues of offering big prizes to encourage . . . curing disease”: See Levitt, “Fight Global Pandemics (or at Least Find a Good Excuse When You’re Playing Hooky),” Freakonomics.com, May 18, 2007; “or improving Netflix’s algorithms”: See Levitt, “Netflix $ Million Prize,” Freakonomics.com, October 6, 2006. / 59 “As reported by ABC News”: See Matthew Cole, “U.S. Will Not Pay $25 Million Osama Bin Laden Reward, Officials Say,” ABCNews.com, May 19, 2011. 61 “CAN WE PLEASE GET RID OF THE PENNY ALREADY?”

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History
by Alex von Tunzelmann
Published 7 Jul 2021

Thanks, as always, to my terrific agent, Natasha Fairweather, and her assistant, Matthew Marland, at RCW. Many thanks to Jonathan Teplitzky, who put the germ of this idea into my head; to Paul Lay at History Today, who first commissioned me to write about statues; and to the London Library, whose excellent book delivery service made it possible to keep reading and researching even during a global pandemic and repeated lockdowns. Many scholars and friends were extremely generous in sharing their thoughts and ideas with me. Thanks to David Andress, Kabund Arqabound, Manuel Barcia, Sara Barker, Alice Bell, Jill Burke, Simukai Chigudu, William Dalrymple, Lauren (Robin) Derby, Jean-Pierre Dikaka, Vicky Donnellan, Madge Dresser, Sasha Dugdale, Beata Fricke, Ian Garner, Adom Getachew, Madeleine Gray, Hannah Greig, Chris Hill, Huma Imtiaz, Greg Jenner, Faiza S.

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's
by Joseph Jebelli
Published 30 Oct 2017

This is astounding considering that an additional 7.7 million cases (that we know of) are reported every year. It seems a more horrifying kind of forgetting is taking place in our world. We are forgetting them. If things continue this way, epidemiologists estimate that the total number of Alzheimer’s cases will double every twenty years, making dementia the next global pandemic. In that event, the current 46 million patients would represent no more than the tip of a vast, society-crippling iceberg. So after a century of Alzheimer’s research, a journey that’s spanned the globe and brought with it a kaleidoscope of blind alleys, high hopes and stark tragedy, the final question is one that’s been with us from the very beginning.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

On the other hand, there are technologies emerging from blitzscaling companies that could pose real, systemic problems (yet get far less media attention). Synthetic biology, driven by CRISPR-Cas9 targeted genome editing, has the potential to produce huge benefits in medicine and agribusiness, but brings with it the systemic risk of bad actors engineering a deadly global pandemic. Changes and developments in this field have occurred so quickly that it is difficult for governments to create intelligent regulatory regimes to manage these risks. Responsible blitzscalers should give serious considerations to systemic risks and seek structural dialogue that involves a broad set of stakeholders rather than defying or stonewalling regulators.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
by Jeff Lawson
Published 12 Jan 2021

The coronavirus pandemic that struck in early 2020 forced the world to reconfigure itself in real time as cities shut down, children learned at home, companies sent workers home, hospitals were overwhelmed with patients, and more. Suddenly digital transformation projects slated to take place over several years were happening in days or weeks. It was the great digital acceleration, not by choice but by existential necessity driven by the largest global pandemic in a century. As economic activity slowed to a crawl, it was literally Build vs. Die for companies across many industries. The good news is, developers stepped up and delivered. In the course of a few weeks during March and April 2020 alone, many industries saw faster digital transformation than the entire previous decade.

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help
by New Scientist and Helen Thomson
Published 7 Jan 2021

Again, it’s based on the best recent scientific research that I and my New Scientist colleagues have unearthed. This time, the aim is to provide you with a comprehensive and evidence-based guide to a smarter, happier and less stressful life. When I agreed to write this book, I couldn’t know that I would end up writing most of it during a global pandemic lockdown. At the time of writing, the future still looks increasingly uncertain. There’s never been a better time to understand exactly how your brain works and how to use it to maximise the best aspects of your life, or help you cope when things go wrong. And there are life fixes that do work.

Know Thyself
by Stephen M Fleming
Published 27 Apr 2021

Throughout these moves, the ever-present support of our parents and friends has been central to keeping us emotionally, if not always physically, tied to home. Writing this book has been an acutely metacognitive experience—accompanied by self-doubt, self-questioning, and second-guessing of whether things are on the right or wrong track. The onset of a global pandemic in the closing stages only heightened this introspective anxiety, and I am very grateful to those at the other end of an email for prompt advice and words of encouragement. I am particularly indebted to Chris Frith and Nicholas Shea, who read the final draft and provided incisive and timely comments that helped minimize some of my more egregious errors and omissions.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

The hex isn’t that the individual sees something that others do not. It is that others lack the cognitive dexterity to entertain many different models. It’s not that some can’t communicate; it’s that those around them don’t listen. Public-health experts warned for years about the threat of a global pandemic from coronaviruses that jump from animal to human, but few took note since the frame seemed so dramatic and alien. Both Eunice Foote in 1856 and Inez Fung in 1988 warned of carbon in the atmosphere leading to global warming, but the public wasn’t willing to accept it until later. To overcome the curse, institutions need to carve out a dedicated space to bring different frames to situations, and thereby expose people in organizations to diverse mental models.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

Those reach out to us via digital finance infrastructures, and increasingly tie us in via the collaboration of technology corporations. Big Tech and Big Finance are becoming like two hemispheres of a global mind, fusing through their natural synergies. As I write this in mid-2021, this fusion is more apparent than ever. A global pandemic has raged for a year now, and the fintech sector has weaponised it to demonise cash even further, presenting it as slow and dirty. This has led to large parts of the retail sector urging shoppers to drop cash in favour of digital payments. In the UK this has worked, with cash usage plummeting by over 50 per cent in 2020.

Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-And What We Can Do About It
by Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Published 21 Aug 2023

To the students, parents, teachers, administrators, and coaches who spoke with me so openly: Thank you for entrusting me to tell your stories. Your honesty and wisdom will undoubtedly impact lives for the better. It’s already impacted mine. When the ideas come together, when it all flows, writing really is a dream. But, other times, when the ideas won’t gel, when you’re in the middle of a global pandemic, that dream can feel more like a nightmare. Forever I will be grateful to the editors Kate Rodemann and Gareth Cook, who entered my life in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, as I was sifting through mountains of research and interviews, homeschooling my kids, and wearing hazmat suits to the grocery store.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Published 7 Feb 2023

We need society’s rules and laws to be as patchable as your computers and phones. Unless we can hack the process of hacking itself, keeping its benefits and mitigating its costs and inequities, we may struggle to survive this technological future. Acknowledgments This book was born during a global pandemic and a personal life upheaval, and suffered from the effects of both. After writing 86,000 words in 2020, I largely ignored the manuscript in 2021—missing a deadline—and didn’t pick it up again until the spring of 2022. Then, with the help of Evelyn Duffy at Open Boat Editing, I trimmed 20,000 words and reorganized the book into the sixty-plus small chapters you’ve (hopefully) just read.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

As Horan explained, about 85 percent of the cost of an urban car service comes from drivers, vehicles, and fuel, and they are not costs that fall as a company grows, especially when Uber requires each driver to maintain their own vehicle instead of managing a vehicle fleet.24 The shocking thing about Uber is that, despite the narrative of the efficiency offered by its ride-matching algorithms, it actually provides a less efficient service than a traditional taxi company. That helps to explain how, after a decade, it is still losing money hand over fist. In 2020, Uber lost $6.77 billion on its global operations—that, however, is not an anomaly caused by the global pandemic; it was actually an improvement on its 2019 loss of $8.5 billion. In fact, given that Uber continues to lose money on most of its rides, the fewer it delivers, the better it may be for its financials. The persistence of these significant losses, even after going public, tells us something about the company’s business model and the potential motivation of those who keep stringing it along.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
Published 13 Sep 2021

Within a month of its publication, Elon Musk was declaring that “with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon” and that AI “could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons.”29 A year later, Musk would co-found OpenAI and give it the specific mission of building “friendly” artificial intelligence. Among those most deeply influenced by Bostrom’s arguments, the idea that AI will someday pose an existential threat began to be perceived as a near certainly—and a danger ultimately far more terrifying and consequential than more mundane concerns like climate change or global pandemics. In a Ted Talk with more than five million views, the neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris argues that “it’s very difficult to see how [the gains we make in artificial intelligence] won’t destroy us or inspire us to destroy ourselves” and suggests that “we need something like a Manhattan Project” focused on avoiding that outcome by figuring out how to build friendly, controllable AI.30 None of this will be a concern, of course, until we manage to build a true thinking machine with cognitive capability at least equivalent to our own.

Badvertising
by Andrew Simms

They did so in the most incredibly compelling way … when I talk about the Turbine Hall as a civic space now – I mean not only showing commissions of artists that we have brought into the space but also the equally extraordinary activist works that were just placed there.74 THE CASE FOR ENDING HIGH-CARBON SPONSORSHIP OF SPORT Awareness of the scale of the climate crisis has struck the world of global sports more recently. For example, a group of 300 Olympic and Paralympic athletes wrote a letter to the UK government pressing it to consider a specifically green recovery from the global pandemic.75 The letter was released through the Champions for Earth initiative. Among its founding members, environmental lawyer and Team GB rower Melissa Wilson said: Each of the Champions For Earth athletes have experienced what can be achieved by individuals coming together in a team – creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

One of these, intubation, when a tube is inserted into the airways of very sick patients, helping them to keep breathing, was routine. And to keep the medical staff safe, normal masks were not enough. Instead, thicker, technically complex face coverings called respirators were needed. It is an accident of history that the epicentre of the global pandemic, the city of Wuhan in Hubei Province, China, was also the global centre for the manufacture of the non-woven fabrics used to make respirators. In 2020, this coincidence caused mayhem – and nowhere more so than in the UK. To start with, at least, the UK government insisted that it had remedies in hand.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks.
by Steven Johnson
Published 18 Oct 2006

This, in itself, was a telling phenomenon. Conventional flu vaccines are effective against only the type A and type B strains of influenza—the kind that sidelines you for a week with a fever and a stuffy head, but that is rarely fatal in anyone except the very young or the very old. The risk of a global pandemic emerging from these viruses is slim at best, which is why, historically, public-health officials in the West have not concerned themselves with the question of whether poultry workers on the other side of the world have received their flu shots. The virus that the public-health officials were worried about—H5N1, also known as the avian flu—is entirely unfazed by conventional flu shots.

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists
by Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman
Published 1 Nov 2014

In fact, we are personally becoming more and more enmeshed in systems whose emergent behavior can be very nontrivial and hard to predict, with sometimes far-reaching consequences for well-being and survival (think financial systems and climate change). Significant scientific efforts are underway to more accurately model how the dynamics of sociotechnological systems can impact economic stability, influence the spread of global pandemics, or trigger the onset of revolution or war. These efforts are fueled by an ever-increasing ability to record, store, and mine digital data on social and economic behavior. The advance of what is currently fashionably called “big data” appears unstoppable. Neuroscience, it turns out, is on the brink of its own “big data” revolution.

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts
by Mark Mahaney
Published 9 Nov 2021

During the Covid-19 pandemic, it was a discounting mechanism on steroids. In February and March of 2020, the market crashed 34% in just 23 trading days. It then gapped back up 52% to recover to that February high in 103 trading days. The recovery time was longer than the crash time, but three months is still a very short time given a global pandemic and recession. What happened? The market aggressively anticipated and discounted the crisis and then the recovery. The WFH/LFH basket of stocks contained some great outperformers in 2020, but the most dramatic part of the outperformance for most of the stocks occurred in a tight three-to-six-month period.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
by Jeff Goodell
Published 23 Oct 2017

During high tide, I waded knee-deep through dark ocean water in several Miami Beach neighborhoods; I saw high water backing up into working-class neighborhoods far to the west, near the border of the Everglades. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see that I was standing in a modern-day Atlantis-in-the-making. It became clear to me just how poorly our world is prepared to deal with the rising waters. Unlike, say, a global pandemic, sea-level rise is not a direct threat to human survival. Early humans had no problem adapting to rising seas—they just moved to higher ground. But in the modern world, that’s not so easy. There’s a terrible irony in the fact that it’s the very infrastructure of the Fossil Fuel Age—the housing and office developments on the coasts, the roads, the railroads, the tunnels, the airports—that makes us most vulnerable.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!
by Joseph N. Pelton
Published 5 Nov 2016

This is followed by concern and caution as to whether the world is ready to change so rapidly. With a world filled with tension and jihadist extremism and political leadership that sometimes has difficulty recognizing global challenges such as climate change, over generation of greenhouse gases, and the threat of global pandemics, it does at times seem doubtful that human are fit to colonize the world—let alone the universe. This is why we must look to innovation that produces more than neat new products. Rather, we need inventions that can usher in a sustainable world that can: (1) survive over the long term; (2) curb population growth ; (3) figure out the twenty first century human employment conundrum; and (4) create new economic systems that usher in a better and more productive future.

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies
by Barry Meier
Published 17 May 2021

Acknowledgments Writing is a solitary pursuit. Turning an idea into a published book is anything but solitary. It happens because a large number of people generously share their talents and time. This was particularly true for books like this one which took shape amid the hardships and horrors of a global pandemic. My agent, Farley Chase, worked from the start to help shape the proposal for this book and found a wonderful editor in Jonathan Jao at HarperCollins. From there, Jonathan’s good humor and enthusiasm for this project took over and propelled it forward. Farley’s co-agent in London, Caspian Dennis, connected with Juliet Brooke of Sceptre Books, who was eager to bring out a UK edition of Spooked.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything
by Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha de Teran
Published 14 Jul 2021

Eggers) 177 Cirrus/Maestro 58 Citibank 56, 64, 133, 158, 220–1, 222, 248, 260 Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) 240 clearing systems 117–19, 122, 239–40 Clearpay 175 Clifford, Clark 264 Clinton, Hillary 267 closed vs open payment systems 220–6 cloud computing 270 ClubMed 170 ‘code as law’ 195–6 Collison, Patrick and John 163, 165 Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure (CPMI) 120–1 commodity money 8 Competition and Consumer Commission, Australian 224 Competition and Markets Authority, UK 180 competition authorities 223–4, 225–6 compound interest 90 ‘Confirmation of Payee’ systems 66 Connally, John 248 Consumer Reports 89 contactless payments 11, 173 conventions, payment 15, 17–19, 121–2, 215–16, 230 Corporate Transaction Banking 95 correspondent banking 138–42, 143, 144–5, 146–8, 223, 248, 267–8 Cotten, Gerald 200 counterfeiting and piracy 108, 112, 258 Covid-19 global pandemic 6, 8, 34, 37, 111, 134, 151, 159, 224, 245 credit cards business payments 95 cardboard 40, 41, 46–7, 108 debt 45, 100, 101 fraud 46, 51, 108–10 ‘honour all cards’ rule 56–7 interchange fees 42–4, 100 interest 90, 94, 173 introduction of 19, 39–44, 45–6, 70 online payments 50–1 overspending 173 paying to pay 101 real-time authorisation 47–8, 143–4 Union Pay, China 59 use in Europe 58, 101 see also Mastercard; Visa credit checks 175 credit default swaps 132 credit derivatives 131–3 Credit Suisse 65 Crelan bank 111 crime rates 33, 67 critical mass and payment systems 69–70, 79 cross-border payments 93, 133 card networks 143–4 clearing 240 correspondent banking 138–42, 143, 144–5, 146–8 debit cards 58–9 domestic instant payment systems 144 fees 137, 238–9 G20 agenda 148–9 global payments innovation (gpi) 147–8 Hawala system 142–3 interest made by banks 145–6 Letters of Credit 149–51 money remitters 144, 146 regulations 144, 145, 148, 239 TransferWise 146–7 Crossan, Doug 172 cryptocurrencies 16, 37, 63, 84, 187–209, 252, 269, 270 see also Central Bank Digital Currencies CryptoHQ 187 Cuba 149–50, 211 Cunliffe, John 11 currency controls 144 Currency Education Program (CEP), US 25 current account bank charges 91–2, 100–1 customer-loyalty programmes 219–20 CVV and CVV2 (Card Verification Value) codes 109, 171 cybercrime 107–8, 110–14, 232–3, 270 D Danske Bank 256–7 dark net 199 data privacy regulations 179, 233–4 dating-app fraud 111–12 de-risking 267–8 debit cards 19, 49, 50, 56–9, 91, 98 debts 8–10, 13–14, 45, 170, 173–4 Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) 196 Deliveroo 82–3 Deloitte 264 Denmark 172, 256, 257 derivatives market 131–3, 208 Deutsche Bank 64, 133, 166, 260 devaluation 203 DG Comp 224, 225–6 Diem/Libra 63 digital wallets 224 Dimon, Jamie 206 Diners Club 40 direct debits 67, 119 disgorgement 198 distributed computing platform 194–6 Dodd-Frank legislation 98 dollar bills, circulation overseas 24–5, 213 dollars, global power of US 246–54 domestic securities market, US 247 Dorsey, Jack 155 drugs economy 27, 255, 258, 263 Dubai First Royal Mastercard 52 Durbin Amendment 57, 98 Dutch Data Protection Authority 234 Dutch Golden Age 5 Dutch parliament 266 Dutch resistance 7–8 E EBA Clearing 239–40 eBanking 36, 181 eBay 19, 51, 52, 70, 161, 163, 165 The Economist 55, 184 email fraud 110–11 embassies, diplomatic 266–7 embedded payments 169 E.On 119 Epic Games 225 Eriksson, Björn 35 errors, payment 64–6 Escobar, Pablo 255 escrow account systems 52 Estonia, Danske Bank 256–7 Ethereum/Ether 194–6, 198–9 euro E500 bills 24, 25, 28 see also Europe; European Central Bank; European Commission; European Union; Eurozone Europaisch-Iranische Handelsbank (EIH) 248 Europay 59, 90–1 Europe bank fines and financial crime 259–60 bank revenue 98, 99, 100–1, 102–3, 237–9, 241, 242 credit card use 58, 101 current accounts 100–1 Eastern 78, 213 financial literacy 172 instant payment systems 86 own payment network 59–60 paying to pay 98, 100–1 protection of personal data 179 regulatory authorities 224, 225–6, 231, 232, 237–42, 244 use of debit cards 58–9 European Banking Authority 256 European Banking Federation 239 European Central Bank 34, 86, 205–6, 233, 237, 240–1, 271 European Commission 60, 83, 85–6, 224, 225, 237, 238, 239, 240, 271 European Payments Council (EPC) 240 European Payments Initiative 60, 271 European Union (EU) 79, 148, 180–1, 237, 238–9, 243, 244–5, 265–6 Eurozone 102–3, 119, 183, 240 eWallets 36, 52, 216, 217 executive-whaling 110–11 F FACC AG 111 Facebook 63, 70, 110, 147, 158, 165, 179, 184, 201–2, 204–6, 209, 220, 222, 224, 269 facilitators, payment 162 Fantástico 234 far-right groups 4 Faster Payments Service (FPS) 82, 83, 84, 86 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) 113 federal debt 9 Federal Reserve Bank 12, 36, 37, 113–14, 131, 232, 259 Fedwire 126–7 Financial Action Task Force (FATF) 262 Financial Conduct Authority, UK 37–8 financial crime 255–64 see also counterfeiting; fraud; money laundering; robbery financial literacy 172 Financial Stability Board (FSB) 135, 268, 269 Financial Times 103, 128, 129, 166–7 FinCEN 253, 255 FinTech 38, 147, 151, 155–9, 162–7, 240 lack of regulation 156, 235–6 First American Bankshare 264 foreign ATM fees 90 foreign exchange 56, 89, 90, 93, 131, 133, 140, 144, 205, 208, 246 Foreign Funds Control (FFC), US 249 foreign reserves, dollars and 247 Fortnite 225 four-corner payment model 41–2, 174, 220 France 63, 67, 119, 243, 245, 259, 260 Frankfurt Stock Exchange 166 fraud bank 261–5 card payment 46, 51, 52, 108–9 dating-app 111 cryptocurrency 199–200 detection services 56, 162 emails 110–11 and frictionless payments 170, 171–2 social media 110 free-banking era, US 208 free speech 184 Freis, Jim 167 French foreign ministry 234 frictionless payments 170–5 Friedlein, Joe 127 G G20 148–9 geographic payment preferences 67–8, 72 George, Edward 126 Germany 28, 67, 78–9, 111, 123, 158, 166–7, 183, 243, 245, 247, 248–9 Giannini, A.

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To)
by Chris Grey
Published 22 Jun 2021

So this was the situation on the eve of commencing the future terms negotiations in March 2020. But just as they were about to begin, something entirely unexpected and unprecedented was emerging which was to push Brexit from the headlines and to colour the entire negotiating proceedings: the global pandemic of a new and deadly virus. THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC AND BREXIT There is no doubt a book to be written just on the way that the coronavirus – or Covid-19 – pandemic and Brexit intersected. For one thing, it meant that the future terms negotiations often took place by video conference, rather than face to face, which may have inflected them differently.

How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal From Your Past, and Create Your Self
by Nicole Lepera
Published 9 Mar 2021

At the same time this personal turmoil was occurring, the Holistic Psychology message was spreading like wildfire around the world with more than two million people following my posts on social media and engaging with the work on levels that my mind just could not grasp. I felt elated—vindicated, really—and also overwhelmed. My inner child, so desperate to be seen and loved, began to quake under the pressure of so many eyes. I feared being misunderstood, and when I inevitably was misunderstood, I felt like a failure. Then a global pandemic hit, and everything was thrown into stark relief. There was so much pain, suffering, and trauma. We were all in it together, locked up, energetically and physically struggling in a new world that made no sense. Stress raged. Like so many, I felt deeply uncommitted to my journey for the first time in years.

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
by Michael Lewis
Published 2 Oct 2023

He’s doing all of this by himself. And he doesn’t seem particularly interested in our opinion on anything. Which is fine. But we were like, He’s an unusual person. We have to spend time with him in person.” But they couldn’t spend time with Sam in person. The Hong Kong government had responded to the global pandemic by requiring anyone who entered the country to quarantine in a hotel for fourteen days. Sam was understood and interpreted by his original investors mostly via Zoom, and in the middle of one of the great venture capital booms in history. 7 The Org Chart It didn’t take a psychiatrist to see a pattern in Sam’s relationship with Caroline, but there happened to be one sitting in the middle of it.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Published 22 Aug 2022

The coming upheaval gives us an opportunity to disrupt this inequity by recognizing and protecting the rights of all migrants as global citizens. It’s a chance to acknowledge that we have more in common than we have differences. And if this seems unrealistic or impossible, consider the enormous social change that we all willingly undertook, and achieved, in a matter of weeks during the 2020 global pandemic. Much of that cooperation occurred in the absence of conflict or authoritarian leadership. Consider, also, the cooperation that nations undertook to develop drugs and vaccines, to share scientific data and health interventions. Consider that populations everywhere, along with big corporations such as Astra-Zeneca, and NGOs such as the Gates Foundation, insisted that any vaccine be also made available to the poorest of our global society and not be sequestered or locked away behind patents by any one company or rich state.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

Brokers like Robinhood and E*Trade and wholesalers such as Citadel and Virtu were like taxis, hotels, and restaurants that were loving the rush of drunk tourists leaving fat tips. The role of “the House,” which involves outsize risk and reward, was played by the part of the business that embraces “good volatility.” A glance at the results put up by the two largest investment banks amid a sharp recession and a global pandemic tells the story: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley made nearly $23 billion in combined revenue in their markets divisions for the first six months of 2020 alone, which was 54 percent more than a very healthy first half of 2019. The hedge fund manager William Ackman’s Pershing Square Holdings made a multibillion-dollar bet on the plunge and had its best year ever, gaining 70 percent.[8] Melvin Capital Management’s Gabe Plotkin, who would later become the main victim of the GameStop Revolution, practically printed money in 2020, personally taking home $846 million in compensation.

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
by Madhumita Murgia
Published 20 Mar 2024

They operate at more than 600 sites in sixty countries across the world, from slums in the Philippines, to cities in Malawi, Peru and Mexico.3 In Mumbai’s state hospitals, the diagnosis of tuberculosis went up 35 per cent because of the AI screen.4 The company has raised more than $60m in funding from foreign investors like blue-chip Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital and pharmaceutical giant Merck.5 In the spring of 2021, Chinchpada was hit by a fresh tsunami of cases of a new variant of Covid-19. This second wave of the pandemic in India killed 100,000 people in weeks, bringing the healthcare system to its knees and forcing people to dispose of their dead in the streets.6 Having escaped the first wave relatively unscathed, the country – my country – became the epicentre of the global pandemic. For Ashita, life quickly became overwhelming and in our subsequent exchange of messages, I could see how traumatic this time was for her. ‘We have increased the bed capacity of our fifty-bed little rural hospital to eighty-four beds . . . all full the whole time,’ she WhatsApped me. ‘Forty to fifty patients on oxygen, four on a ventilator and two to five deaths daily.

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

The rules of the road were worked out rather quickly and almost entirely in favor of the automobile: more people became motorists, and fewer were pedestrians. Soon after World War II, flying and driving became elements of daily life for most of the developed world. Yet the externalities of both these transport systems—from global climate change to global terrorism to global pandemics—have left us wondering how we made so many bad decisions about both of them. We did not acknowledge all the hazards created by our rush to move and connect goods and people, and so we did not plan. We did not limit. We did not deliberate. We did not deploy wisdom and caution in the face of the new and powerful.

The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy
by Brian Klaas
Published 15 Mar 2017

Democracy, by its very nature, would have allowed the Turkmen people the opportunity to replace their dictator (and perhaps openly lip-sync a farewell song while doing so). â•… But sometimes, authoritarianism shines beyond the glimmering statues. In May 2003, the SARS outbreak in China threatened to spread into a global pandemic. The crisis was largely averted because authoritarianism allowed China to act without consulting society or abiding by “pesky” labor laws. The government built a 1,000-bed hospital facility dedicated to SARS patients in eight days.12 They broke ground on a 25 THE DESPOT’S ACCOMPLICE Tuesday and patients were ready to move in by the following Wednesday. 7,000 people worked day and night until it was done.

Beautiful Visualization
by Julie Steele
Published 20 Apr 2010

Autopsy protocols and photographs used as evidence in criminal cases can be difficult for jurors to understand. VA visualizations are typically clearer (Figures 18-4 and 18-9). Storage of VA data poses few problems, whereas autopsy records such as tissue sections are difficult to store indefinitely (Figure 18-16). With potential global pandemics such as bird flu (avian influenza A) and swine flu (the H1N1 virus) posing an increasing threat, the practice of eviscerating the victims can pose serious health risks to coroners, pathologists, and medical examiners. With a VA, these risks are minimized. However, virtual autopsies also have several shortcomings: For MDCT, soft tissue discrimination is low.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

Bryson points out, “We already have calculators that can do math better than us, and they don’t even take over the pockets they live in, let alone the world.”1 As we’ve described earlier, there are passionate prophesiers of “superintelligence” like Nick Bostrom of Oxford. Bostrom’s colleague Stuart Armstrong published a report calling for a whole new category of risks to be recognized: risks of potentially infinite impact. Among a number of global challenges “threatening the very basis of our civilization” (including nuclear war, climate change, and global pandemics) they included artificial intelligence, because of what is known as “the control problem.”2 Once machines can outthink humans, their ability to decide and make things happen might be beyond our power to rein in. Bostrom and Armstrong paint apocalyptic scenarios, but you don’t have to buy into a future of robot overlords to believe we need society-level decision-making in the face of advancing AI.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy
by Andrew Yang
Published 15 Nov 2021

When I ran for president actually proposing universal basic income, I was dismissed as a fringe, unserious candidate by many until my campaign was embraced by hundreds of thousands of Americans, we raised $40 million, and we outcompeted half a dozen political brand names on the way to contention. I learned a lot. I used to think that the problem was that Americans did not know about universal basic income. Today, in large part thanks to a coronavirus-induced recession and a global pandemic, 55 percent of Americans support universal basic income, and more than 80 percent of Americans support cash relief during the pandemic. Still, despite building a popular consensus, our halting relief efforts centered on plowing money into various institutional pipes and bailing out big companies.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

“There’s a general understanding of how the world works that lies behind those kinds of initiatives, which I think is false,” he said. “And that understanding is that what the world suffers from is a lack of true international cooperation.” This understanding is right on some issues, such as global pandemics and climate change, he said. “But in most other areas, when you think about them, whether it’s international finance, whether it’s economic development, whether it’s business and financial stability, whether it’s international trade—the problem, it seems to me, is not that we don’t have sufficient global governance, that we don’t have sufficient global cooperation, that we’re not getting together enough.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

Fear, more than any other emotion, lowers people’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction, making lies easier to sell. Audiences were reminded, relentlessly, of impending calamities that could bring the end of humankind. Nuclear standoffs with the West were amplified by Kremlin outlets at home and abroad. Global pandemics poised to destroy local communities offered a particularly effective line of attack on America, and this area of effort, more than any other, represents what may have been the greatest success of active measures to date. The AIDS virus ravaged communities around the world, growing from a handful of cases in 1980 to more than 4.5 million in 1995.2 The United States led much of the world’s effort to counter the spread of HIV across impoverished regions.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Published 12 Jul 2021

Tom Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Joe DeRisi, co-president of the Biohub funded by CZI, reported that the Chinese government and Trump were downplaying the risk and that the virus had spread to half a dozen countries. Facebook had the potential to play a critical role in what appeared to be the first global pandemic of the internet age. On January 26, Zuckerberg ordered his department heads to drop all nonessential work to prepare.1 The civic engagement team, which had been developing a number of new features ahead of the presidential election, including a centralized hub for sharing voting information, shifted its efforts to create a center for information from the CDC and the World Health Organization.

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following
by Gabrielle Bluestone
Published 5 Apr 2021

It’s something I thought about again on March 13, 2020 as fears over the Coronavirus peaked. The virus had spread around the world, wreaking particular havoc in China and Italy, and after a month of stalling, New York City was itself just two days away from shutting down all its schools, bars, and restaurants. But just off the Bowery in SoHo, in the face of a global pandemic, dozens of people had crammed together, collectively risking their lives for something even more viral than COVID-19: a Supreme drop. As it was, the news of the virus made it a great day to score the elusive skateboarding gear. Justin Marchesani and Roland Carlor, two New York City fans of the brand who I caught leaving the store, said that for an 11 a.m. drop on a Thursday, the line was short and fast-moving.

Fire and Ice: The Volcanoes of the Solar System
by Natalie Starkey
Published 29 Sep 2021

Yet this book has kept me company, moving countries with me and my family from California, USA, to the UK, and putting up with three house moves. It got put on the back burner for a year while I flew off to write a planetarium space show in New York, but was there waiting for me when I returned. It has even dealt with a global pandemic. Nevertheless, this book eventually got written and the breaks from writing I’ve had to take over the two and a half years working on it helped to give me some perspective. I absolutely love the process of writing, shutting myself away in the office for hours on end to research and write about these fascinating Solar System worlds.

Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It
by John Abramson
Published 15 Dec 2022

impending negative consequences: Kristalina Georgieva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, David Malpass, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, “Here’s Our Plan to Increase Vaccine Access and End the Pandemic Faster,” Washington Post, May 31, 2021. in developing countries: Chelsea Clinton and Achal Prabhala, “The Vaccine Donations Aren’t Enough: The Pandemic Won’t Be Over Until It’s Under Control Around the World,” Atlantic, June 20, 2021. “deadly variants to emerge”: World Health Organization, “A Global Pandemic Requires a World Effort to End It — None of Us Will Be Safe Until Everyone Is Safe,” September 30, 2020. “at least 60 percent”: Georgieva et al., “Here’s Our Plan.” vaccines for developing countries: Ruchir Agarwal and Gita Gopinath, “A Proposal to End the COVID-19 Pandemic,” IMF, May 19, 2021.

Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers
by Paulina Rowinska
Published 5 Jun 2024

Science matters if we know about it and can act on it – and by ‘we’, I mean ‘you and I’, and not a handful of scientists in a lab. We should all raise a glass to the imperfect but fascinating John Snow and his map! Beyond cholera Today, maps and mathematics are indispensable tools for fighting and preventing diseases, from local outbreaks to global pandemics. Scientists combine modern technologies from GPS to machine learning to gene sequencing with old-fashioned patient interviews to gather spatial information about the disease. In early 2020, many of us developed a daily habit of checking maps of COVID-19 cases, updated as the virus terrorized Wuhan, then other regions of China, Italy, and, finally, the whole world.

Not the End of the World
by Hannah Ritchie
Published 9 Jan 2024

(2) The fact that our environmental issues aren’t humanity’s largest existential risk doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work on them I don’t think climate change – or any other environmental problem – is going to wipe us out as a species. Risks that are much more likely to be existential are nuclear war, a global pandemic or artificial intelligence. Some have used this as an argument to focus less on climate change: ‘Why are people working on that when they should be focused on dangerous pathogens or the threats of nuclear war?’ That’s an odd way to think about it. There are eight billion of us – we can work on more than one or two problems at the same time.

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
by Edward Slingerland
Published 31 May 2021

It is also worth noting that the few countries that used Covid-19 as an excuse to attempt prohibition, like Sri Lanka, ended up spawning enormous underground networks of home brewers, cooking up barely palatable—but definitely intoxicating—concoctions out of everything from beets to pineapples.11 People want to drink, and even a global pandemic will not stop them from doing so. Understanding why is profoundly important. This question cannot be coherently asked or answered without understanding the function that alcohol has played in human civilizations. As we have seen, besides its immediate hedonic value, the cognitive and behavioral effects of alcohol intoxication represent, from a cultural evolutionary perspective, a robust and elegant response to the challenges of getting a selfish, suspicious, narrowly goal-oriented primate to loosen up and connect with strangers.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2019 The downward kink seen in Figure 1.1 around 2008 reflects the financial crisis of that year and its chilling effect on the global economy manifested in energy use. But, as you can see from later years, this turned out to be a short-run downturn in the longer upward trend. As this book is going to press, the global pandemic caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 virus seems certain to cause another and probably larger downward spike. Collapsing demand for fossil fuels arising from the pandemic has caused an economic crisis in the oil and gas industry that’s prompted some analysts to question whether it can survive. But what’s clear from Figure 1.1 is that the modern global economy is utterly dependent on fossil fuels, whatever short-run price fluctuations the sector experiences in crisis conditions.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

If Zenz is right, the Chinese government is committing cultural genocide against the Uighurs in a very literal sense—instead of killing them or controlling them, it’s decided it’s easier to prevent more from being born. While the Uighurs suffer the worst of China’s atrocities, they are far from alone. The Chinese Communist Party has taken advantage of the free rein given to it by the global pandemic to extend its brutal hand outward. Its soldiers attacked Indian ones on the supposedly demilitarized border in Ladakh, killing dozens in hand-to-hand fighting and executing the wounded by pushing them over a cliff.14 China’s also rapidly building amphibious assault ships and aiming them squarely at Taiwan.15 It takes the US years to build one of these powerful, expensive assault carriers, loaded with helicopters and marines.

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
by Matt Alt
Published 14 Apr 2020

A surge in demand at streaming services such as Netflix and PlayStation Network forced the companies to throttle back server speeds as the sheer volume of entertainment data began to overwhelm European telecom networks. And then there is the curious case of the Nintendo Switch title Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It was released on March 20, seemingly terrible timing amid a global pandemic. It sold 11.77 million copies in just twelve days. In this customizable simulation of outdoor life, populated by bobbleheaded kawaii animal characters, millions escaped the tedium of societal lockdowns by taking online trips to virtual islands built by their friends. I don’t think the future will be made in Japan.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

During the Covid-19 pandemic Trump frequently referenced the ‘foreign virus’ and ‘China virus’, which CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta said ‘smacked of xenophobia’. The justice correspondent for the Nation, Elie Mystal, pointed to the connection between Trump’s rhetoric and a rise in hate crimes against Asians, writing, ‘If the media were doing their job, this would be the story: The president of the United States is putting lives at risk during a global pandemic by inciting violence against fellow Americans.’ Before Trump, though, xenophobic language, especially against Muslims, was prevalent in cable news. The British journalist Mehdi Hasan said, ‘In many ways anti-Muslim hysteria is worse in the United States’, particularly because of birther conspiracy theories against Barack Obama.

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy
by Adam Jentleson
Published 12 Jan 2021

Wyn Kelley and Dale Peterson have been beloved family long before it was official. My sons give me joy beyond measure. Danny, I am so proud of you and the mature, thoughtful, and kind person you have always been and always will be. Your poise, intelligence and humor helped us all get through the challenge of writing a book during a global pandemic in ways you may never know (“keep calm and write on”), but which your mom and I will never forget. Felix, hearing your irrepressibly cheery little voice every morning as I toiled in the basement—and your footsteps above as you ran around upstairs in your Batman costume—kept me smiling. Most of all, it is hard to know what to say about someone who has been a part of you for more than half your life, but here goes.

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
by Jeff Goodell
Published 10 Jul 2023

More methane means more warming, which will release still more methane—when scientists talk about a looming climate catastrophe, this is one of the scenarios that worries them most. And it’s not just methane and woolly mammoth bones that are locked up in the Arctic permafrost—there are also viruses and pathogens from an earlier time, which, as I mentioned in a previous chapter, when thawed and released into our world, could unleash a global pandemic (Bill Gates, an incurable optimist on many public health issues, once told me that pathogens released from thawed permafrost represent the one climate change impact that keeps him awake at night). As the ice disappears, so will the polar bears. They have evolved to survive in a very particular ecological niche, one that is populated mostly by ice and seals.

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster
by Nick Timiraos
Published 1 Mar 2022

Locking down Before the afternoon Cabinet Room meeting with the banking executives, Mnuchin found himself on the losing side of a debate in front of the president in the Oval Office over whether to halt European travel to the United States. Earlier that day, the World Health Organization had declared a global pandemic. Deborah Birx—an Army doctor and former US global AIDS coordinator who had recently been tapped as the coronavirus task-force coordinator—argued that every case stopped from entering the US would prevent new clusters of hundreds of cases. Mnuchin argued strenuously against such a ban. “This will create a depression,” he warned.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

But such graphics can also backfire. People who opposed the idea of requiring better masks—or any masks at all—could point to the silly numbers to undermine the credibility of an otherwise well-supported position. The virtuous end of persuading more people to use higher-quality masks to slow a global pandemic does not justify using erroneous means to reach it.11 EXPECTATION-BASED REASONING It’s common for business leaders to profess their faith in numbers with bromides like “We are a data-driven organization” or “Numbers don’t lie.” Paying attention to data is better than ignoring them, but we should remember that our preconceptions color our interpretations.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World
by Tim Marshall
Published 14 Oct 2021

Space ‘45 Years Ago: Historic Handshake in Space’, NASA, 17 July 2020 https://www.nasa.gov/feature/45-years-ago-historic-handshake-in-space ‘Challenges to Security in Space’, Defense Intelligence Agency: United States of America (2019) https://www.dia.mil/Portals/27/Documents/News/Military%20Power%20Publications/Space_Threat_V14_020119_sm.pdf Havercroft, Jonathan and Duvall, Raymond, ‘3 – Critical Astropolitics: The Geopolitics of Space Control and the Transformation of State Sovereignty’, in Securing Outer Space: International Relations Theory and the Politics of Space, edited by Natalie Bormann and Michael Sheehan (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 42–58 ‘International Space Station Facts and Figures’, NASA, 16 July 2020 https://www.nasa.gov/feature/facts-and-figures Pappalardo, Joe, ‘A 10-Year Odyssey: What Space Stations Will Look Like in 2030’, Popular Mechanics, 10 June 2019 https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a27886809/future-of-iss-space-station/ Rader, Andrew, Beyond the Known: How Exploration Created the Modern World and Will Take Us to the Stars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019) Sagan, Carl, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011) Slann, Phillip A., ‘The Security of the European Union’s Critical Outer Space Infrastructures’ (thesis), Keele University (2015) https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/43759498.pdf ‘Space Fence: How to Keep Space Safe’, Lockheed Martin https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/space-fence.html ‘The Artemis Accords: Principles for Cooperation in the Civil Exploration and Use of the Moon, Mars, Comets, and Asteroids for Peaceful Purposes’, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/926741/Artemis_Accords_signed_13Oct2020__002_.pdf INDEX A Abdoulahi, Alpha 213 Abdullah, Prince Miteb bin 96–7 Abdullah, Turki ibn 80 Abe, Shinzo 32–3 Aboriginal Australians 6–7, 10, 11–14 Achaemenid Persian Empire 45 Acropolis, Athens 146 Acts of Union (1707) 109, 117–18, 133 Aegean Sea 142, 143, 148, 159, 160, 172, 189 Afghanistan 48, 62, 64, 68, 87, 89, 151, 222 Africa xiv–xv, 28, 29, 121, 131, 173, 231 see also Ethiopia; Sahel, the; individual countries by name African Development Bank 219 African Union 225, 250 Afwerki, Isaias 253 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 54, 55–6 Ahmed, Abiy 253 Ahmed, Munir 256 Aksum Empire 247 al-Hariri, Saad 93–4 Al Jazeera TV 92 Al-Mourabitoun 215 Al-Oraibi, Mina 102 Al-Otaybi, Juhayman 86 Al-Qaeda xv, 88–90, 204, 212, 213, 214 Al-Rasheed, Professor Madawi 82 Al-Shabab 242, 244 Alabaster, Rear Admiral Martin 135 Albania 143, 154 Alexander II, Pope 274 Alexander the Great 40, 46, 144, 148, 174 Alexander VI, Pope 277 Algeria 209, 212, 218–19 Allied forces 23–4, 83, 123, 152 Anangu people 13 Anatolia 172, 173, 174, 175, 191–3, 197 Andalusian Umayyad dynasty 274 Anders, William 305 Ángel Blanco, Miguel 291 Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP) 48 Anglo-Saxons 110, 114 Ansar Dine 212 anti-Semitism 52, 59–60, 153, 186, 276 Apollo space missions 303, 305–6 Arab-Israeli War (1967) 85 Arab League 85 Arab Uprisings (2011) 91, 185–6 Arabs, Iranian 42, 64 Areva 227, 228 Argus newspaper, Melbourne 12 Aristotle 147 Ark of the Covenant 246 Arlit, Niger 227–8 Armenia 42, 185, 191 Armenian genocide 164, 180, 188 arms deals 86, 91, 102, 164, 191, 198, 262 Armstrong, Neil 304, 305 Artemis Accords 302–3, 309 Ashura festival 47 Assad, Bashar al xii, 58, 61, 91–2, 187–8, 196 asateroid 3554 Amun 324 astropolitical theory 311–14 Atatürk Dam 192 Atatürk, General Kemal 152–3, 179–80, 196, 199 Auld Alliance 117, 118 Auschwitz concentration camp 154 Australia xvi Aboriginals 6–7, 10, 11–13 armed forces 5, 18, 22, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32 blockade repercussions 21–2, 31 Botany Bay 10–11 British settlement 4–5 climate change 19–20 climate 6 defence 21, 22–5, 27 first recorded landing 9–10 fossil fuels 19, 20, 31 Frontier Wars 11–12 geography of 4, 5–6, 14 gold rush 14 growth of colonies 15 independence 15 influence in South Pacific 27–8 intelligence network 30–1, 129 migrants and refugees 16–19 multicultural population 17–18 Murray-Darling River Basin 8–9 Outback 6–7, 14 penal colony 4–5, 10–11 politics 5, 15, 16, 18–19, 23, 28 population distribution 6–7 population size 8, 14, 15–16, 19 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue 32 relationship with China 25–6, 27–30, 31, 33 relationship with Japan 31, 32 relationship with United Kingdom 22, 23 relationship with USA 23, 24–5, 30–1, 33 rivers 8–9, 15, 20 Second World War 23–4 trade 5, 9, 11, 15, 19, 21, 26, 29–30, 31 transport system 15 water scarcity 20 wildfires 19 wildlife 6 Ayers Rock/Uluru 13 Azawad state 212, 219 Azerbaijan 42, 191 Azeris, Iranian 41 B Baghdad xiv, 58 Baha’i faith 52 Bahrain 69, 76, 77, 80, 91, 102 Balearic Islands 270 Balkans 145, 149, 151–2, 154, 175, 186 Baltic States 131 Baluchistan province, Iran 64 Bambara people 211 Bandler, Faith 13 Banks, Sir Joseph 10 Basij militia 55, 65, 66, 67 Basque Country 269, 279, 284, 289–91 Basque Nationalist Party 291 Battle of Britain (1940) 123 Battle of Gallipoli (1915–16) 178 Battle of Karbala (680) 47 Battle of Manzikert (1071) 158 Battle of Marathon (490 BCE) 45 Battle of the Coral Sea (1942) 25 Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE) 146 Battle of Tours (732) 273–4 Battle of Trafalgar (1805) 280 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 89–90, 133 Persian Service 51 Belmokhtar, Mokhtar 215 Bezos, Jeff 308 Biden, Joe 25, 69, 103, 164, 199 Bin Laden, Osama 75, 87, 88, 89, 104 Black Sea 143, 165, 166, 182, 189, 190 Blue Homeland concept 189–90 Blue Mountains, Australia 14 Blue Nile 242, 244, 260 Blue Origin 308 Boko Haram 216–17, 221 Bolívar, Simón 281 Bosnia 185 Boudicca, Queen 113 BP (British Petroleum) 48 Brexit xv, 108, 127, 136 British Empire 118–22, 123–4, 148, 150–1, 161, 210, 308 see also United Kingdom Bulgaria 143, 151–2, 153, 178 Burkina Faso 211, 215, 216, 222, 224, 226, 228–9, 231 Bush, George W. 39, 57, 60 Byzantine Empire 46, 148–9, 150, 152, 158, 172, 173–5, 196 Byzantium 148–9 C Caesar, Julius 112 Calvo Sotelo, José 282 camels 206–7 Cameron, David 130 Canada 30, 129, 130 Canary Islands 270–1, 297 Carter, Jimmy 61 Castillo, José 282 Castro Veiga, José 285 Catalonia xv, 269, 270, 279–80, 282, 284, 287, 289, 291–6 Catholic Church 53, 116, 275–6, 281 Celtic Britain 112–13 Chad 216–17, 222, 225, 226, 230 Chanoine, Julien 209–10 Charlemagne, Emperor 274 Charles I, King 116 China x, xii, xv African Belt and Road Initiative 231 ‘area of denial’ 27 armed forces 25, 26–7, 29, 30, 231 control of the West Pacific/South China Sea 24–5, 26, 31–2 Djibouti naval base 231, 258 militarization of space 314, 315, 317–18 potential interest in Catalonia 293–4 presence in the Sahel 231 rare-earth supplies 230–1 relationship with Australia 26, 27–30, 31 relationship with Ethiopia 259, 262 relationship with Iran 64 relationship with Saudi Arabia 96, 102 relationship with Serbia 293–4 relationship with South Pacific 27–9 relationship with UK 128, 130, 134 space exploration 302–3, 309, 314 Chinese People’s Liberation Army 26–7, 30, 231 Christianity 47, 52, 116, 247, 248, 256, 273, 274 see also Catholic Church Church of England 47, 116 Church of our Lady Mary of Zion 246 Churchill, Winston 48 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 30–1, 49 Clarke, Arthur C. 325 Claudius, Emperor 112 climate change 19–20, 204, 211, 224, 306 coal industry 20 Cold War 25, 31, 49, 124, 128, 161, 181–2, 248, 250, 252, 285–6, 319 Columbus, Christopher 276–7 Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) 310 Common Security and Defence Policy 131 Commonwealth 132 Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (1900) 15 communism x, 49–50, 67, 153, 154, 286 Confluence of the Two Seas, The (Dara Shikoh) 33 Cook, Captain James 9, 119 Cook Islands 29 Coral Sea Cable System 28 Corfu 143, 148, 150, 159, 160 Coulport Naval Base 134–5 Council of Guardians, Iranian 54, 56–7 Covid-19 global pandemic 28, 29, 30, 63, 99, 133, 293–4 Crassus, General 46 Crete 143, 159, 160 Crimea 190 Cromwell, Oliver 116 Cuban forces 251, 252 Cumbers, Simon 89–90 Curtin, John 23 cyberattacks 29, 30, 67 Cyprus 143, 160–2, 163, 164, 165, 198 Cyrus II 45 Czech government 218 D Daily Mail 133 Dalai Lama 130 Danakil Depression 242 Darius I 45 Daru Island 25 Darug people 11 Darwin naval base, Australia 24 Dasht-e Kavir 38 Dasht-e Lut 38 Davutoğlu, Professor Ahmet 184 de Gaulle, Charles 125 deGrasse Tyson, Neil 322–3 Denmark 126, 131, 218 Derg (Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police and Territorial Army) 250–1, 252 Djibouti 231, 242–3, 248, 257–8 Dolman, Professor Everett 311–12 Drake, Francis 278 Drake, Frank 323 Duyfken 10 E Earth Space/low Earth orbit 312–14 ‘Earthrise’ photograph 305 East African Rift system 241 East India Company 308 East Mediterranean Gas Forum 163 Economist 133 Egypt xii, xiv, 45, 85, 92, 94, 103, 143, 162, 163, 186, 198, 248, 258, 259, 260–3 Egyptian-Ethiopian War (1874-76) 248, 261 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 286 Elburz Mountains 40, 42, 43 Elizabeth I, Queen 116 Empty Quarter (Rub’ al-Khali), Saudi Arabia 76 Endeavour, HMS 10, 119 English Civil War (1642–1651) 116 Eora people 11 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 92, 158–9, 183–9, 191, 194, 195–7, 198–9, 258 Eritrea 210, 242, 249, 250, 251–2, 253, 259 Estonia 218 ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna) 290–1 Ethiopia xiv, 210 Abiy Ahmed 253–4 Aksum Empire 247 athletics 255 Christianity 247, 248, 256 conflict with Eritrea 250, 251–2, 253 earliest hominids 240 East African Rift system 241 emergence of the country 246–8 Emperor Haile Selassie I 246, 248–51 Emperor Tewodros II 248 ‘Ethiopiawinet’ policy 255 famine (1980s) 225, 251 folklore and religion 246 geography 241–2 Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam 244, 259–63 hydroelectric power 244, 259–61, 263 internal tensions 244, 245–6, 250, 251–2, 253–7 Islam 247–8, 256 languages 245–6, 250 Major Mengistu and Derg 250–1, 252 Makeda/Queen of Sheba 246 Meles Zenawi 252 military coup (1974) 250–1 military forces 242, 247, 248, 249, 251–2, 262 murder of Hachalu Hundessa 255–6 population size 242 relationship with China 259 relationship with Egypt 248, 259, 260–2 relationship with Italy 248, 249 relationship with Saudi Arabia and UAE 259, 262 relationship with Soviet Union 251, 252 relationship with USA 249, 251 sea access 249, 257 trade 241, 257–8 water supplies 240–1, 244, 260–3 Euphrates River 192 Europe xii, xv, 61, 64, 119, 120, 121, 127, 128, 150, 152, 173 migrants and refugees 144, 156–8, 204, 217–18, 220, 234 see also European Union (EU); United Kingdom; individual countries by name European Economic Community (EEC) 125 European Free Trade Association 294–5 European Union (EU) x, xii, xv, 60, 126–7, 130, 131–2, 136, 144, 145, 162, 164, 183, 188, 219, 225, 270, 289, 293–4, 297 euros, introduction of 126, 156 Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) 143, 162–3, 164 extraterrestrial life forms 322–3 F Fahd of Saudi Arabia 87–8 Faisal I of Saudi Arabia 84–5 Faslane Naval Base 134–5 Fatah 185 fatwas 52, 84, 86, 88 Fédération Aéronautique Internationale 310 Feith, David 231 Ferdinand of Aragon 275 Fiji 28, 29 financial crash (2008) 127 Financial Times 291 Finland 131 First Balkan War 151, 178 First World War 23, 48, 108, 122, 152, 178–9, 180, 281 5G network 29, 102 Five Eyes intelligence network 30, 129, 135 Food and Agricultural Organization, UN 225 Fortson, Danny 227 fossil fuels 19, 20, 43, 75, 98 see also oil and gas supplies Fraga, Manuel 288 France 94, 119 Auld Alliance 117 La Guerra dels Segadors 279 Napoleonic wars 119–20 Normans and Plantagenets 114–15 relationship with Saudi Arabia 86 relationship with Spain 279–80 relationship with the UK 125, 130–1, 133 relationship with Turkey 164, 198 Sahel, the 209–10, 214–20, 227–8, 232–3, 234, 235 Franco, Francisco 282–7 Free Syrian Army 91 Frontier Wars, Australia 11–12 Fulani 205, 221–2, 223–4 G G5 Sahel 216, 219, 221 G7 132 G20 summits 95 Gaddafi, Muammar xii, 213 Gagarin, Yuri 304–5 Galilei, Galileo 322 Galileo satellite navigation system 132 Gardner, Frank 90 gas fields xv, 161–3 General Headquarters Line 123 General Motors 101 George I of Hellenes 150, 151 Georgia xi, 173 Germany 48, 84, 122, 131, 133, 136, 153, 164, 181, 218, 219, 303 Gibbon, Edward 273 Gibraltar 273, 274, 285, 286, 296 GIGN 86 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 86, 164 GIUK gap 135 Global Times 29 global warming see climate change gold mining the Sahel 228–9 Australia 14–15 Gorbachev, Mikhail 252 Government of National Accord (GNA) 92 Grand Ethiopian Resistance Dam 244, 259–63 Grand Mosque, Mecca 86 Great Green Wall tree-planting operation 225–6 Greece xv, 45, 142, 181–2 Aegean Sea 142, 143, 159, 160 Ancient 142, 144, 145–9 Athens 142, 145–8, 150 British Empire 150–1 Byzantium 148–9 civil war 154–5 defence 145, 159–60, 163, 165, 166 EEC and EU membership 155–7 financial crisis (2008) and fall-out 155–7, 159 First Balkan War 151 First World War 152 geography 142–5 George I of Hellenes 150, 151 historical invasions 146–8 maritime power 142, 143, 145 Mediterranean gas fields 142, 161–3, 166, 190 migrant/refugee crisis 156–8, 166 military coup (1967) 155 Olympic Games 150, 155 Orthodox refugees 153 Ottoman Empire 149 Peloponnesian Wars 147 Pindos mountain range 144 population distribution 159–60 relationship with Cyprus 143, 160–2, 190 relationship with North Macedonia 160 relationship with the USA 154, 165–6 relationship with Turkey 142, 143, 147, 152–3, 158–60, 161–3, 172, 179, 190, 198 Roman Empire 148 Second Balkan War 151–2 Second World War 153–4 Smyrna port city 152–3 Sparta 142, 146, 147 Thessalonika 151, 153, 154 trade 142, 144–5 Turkish War of Independence 152–3 unification and independence 149–51 Greek Resistance 153, 154 Greenpeace 227 Guantanamo Bay 89 Guardian 133 Gulf Cooperation Council 103 Gulf Coast 39, 42, 62, 74–5, 76, 81 Gulf States 44, 92, 93, 103, 233–4, 259 Gulf Stream 111 Gulf War, first 24 Gürdeniz, Rear Admiral Cem 190 Guterres, António 204 H Habsburg Empire 177 Hadrian’s Wall 109 Hagia Sophia 196–7 Haile Selassie, Emperor 246, 248–51 Hamas 92, 185 Hashem Bathaei-Golpaygani, Ayatollah 63 Hashemites 81, 84 Hejaz, the 81, 84 Henry VIII, King 47, 115–16 Herodotus 263 Hezbollah 58, 91–2, 94 Hippocrates 147 Hippodamus 147 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) 142 Hitler, Adolf 123, 282–3, 285 Holocaust 154 Hong Kong 30 Hope, Dennis 311 Horn of Africa 216, 232, 241, 243, 247, 258, 259, 263, 297 Houthi forces 44, 58, 61, 93 Huawei 29, 102 Hundessa, Hachalu 255 Hungarian revolution 17 Hussein ibn Ali 47 Hussein, Saddam xi, 53–4, 87–8, 182 hydroelectric power xiv, 20, 192–3, 244, 259–63 Hypatia 147 hypersonic missiles 316 I Iberia 274–5 Ibn Saud 80–4, 104 Iceland 131 Iceni 113 Igbo people 211 Ikhwan army 81 illegal gold mines 228–9 Immigration Restriction Act, Australia 16–17 India xii, 32, 120, 151, 317–18 Industrial Revolution 111, 281 Inmarsat 306 Intelsat 306 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 60 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 156 international sea lanes 5, 24, 32 International Space Station (ISS) 303, 306, 307–8, 319–20 Ionian islands 150 Ionian Sea 143, 160 Iran xi, xii, xiv, 38 2009 election riots 55–6 2019 protests 62–3 2020 election 56–7 American Embassy siege 60–1 Anglo-Persian Oil Company 48, 49 armed forces 44, 52, 57, 62, 63, 65–7 Ayatollah Khomeini 50–4, 86 Azeris 41, 42 Basij militia 55, 65, 66, 67 Council of Guardians 54, 56–7 Covid-19 63 ethnic groups 41–2, 64 geography 38–40, 41 government/regime 41, 42, 44–5, 48, 51, 54–69 historical invasions 40 influence in other Arab countries 58–9, 68, 69, 92 intelligentsia and the arts 64–5 Iraqi Shia militias 91 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps 52, 57, 62, 63, 65–7 Kurds 41–2, 64 languages 41 Majlis 48, 54, 56, 66 military coup (1953) 49–50 mountains 38, 39, 40, 41, 44–5, 53 nuclear programme 60, 61, 68, 69, 92, 131, 136 oil and gas supplies 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 60, 64 Persian history 44–8, 146 relationship with Israel/anti-Semitism 59–60, 68 relationship with Saudi Arabia 91–2, 93, 94, 103, 219 relationship with the US and the West 44, 48, 49, 50, 57, 60–2, 63, 68–9 repercussions of invading 38–9, 40 Revolution (1979) 42, 47, 50–1 Reza Shah Pahlavi 48–9 Shatt al-Arab waterway 39–40 trade and sanctions against 43, 60, 61, 64 water supplies 42–3 Yemen civil war 57–8 Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) 43, 44, 53–4 Iraq xi, 24, 42, 44, 50, 53, 57, 61, 62, 63, 68, 76, 84, 87, 89, 91, 182, 192, 195 Ireland 109–10, 114, 119 see also Northern Ireland; Republic of Ireland Iron Dome missile defence system 103 Isabella I of Castile, Queen 275 ISIS xv, 61, 104, 195, 204, 214 Islam see Shia Islam; Sunni Islam Islam, early 46–7, 208–9 Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) 212, 213, 214, 215, 223, 233, 234 Islamic Revolution (1979) 42, 47, 50–1 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) 52, 57, 62, 63, 65–7 Islamist Welfare Party 184–5 Ismail, King 47 Israel 45, 52, 59–60, 85, 102–3, 143, 162, 163, 185–6, 317–18 Israel–Gaza conflict (2008) 185–6 Italy 143, 153, 156, 163, 210, 219, 234, 248, 249, 297 J James I and James VI of Scotland, King 116 Janszoon, Willem 9–10 Japan 129 missile defence system 31 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue 32 relationship with Australia 31 Second World War 23–4, 27, 84, 181 SKY Perfect Corporation 318 Jews 41, 45, 59–60, 153, 154, 275 jihad/jihadists 51, 85, 87, 90, 211, 214–15, 216, 222, 223, 228–9, 234–5 Johanson, Donald 240 John, King 115 Johnson, Boris 218 Johnson, Paul 89 Jordan 76, 81, 84, 85, 163 Juan Carlos of Spain, King 287–9 Justice and Development Party 185 K Kebra Nagast 246 Kennedy, John F. 305 Kennedy Space Centre 303 Kenya 242, 243 Kepler, Johannes 322 Khalid of Saudi Arabia 85–7 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali 54, 59 Khan, Reza 48 Khashoggi, Jamal 94–5 Khatam al-Anbia 66 Khatami, Mohammad 54 Khomeini, Ayatollah 50–4, 59, 86 Khuzestan Province, Iran 64 Kiribati 28 Korean War 24 Kosmos 2542 military satellite 316–17 Kosovo x–xi Koufa, Amadou 222–4 Kurdi, Alan 156 Kurdistan Regional Government 195 Kurds 41–2, 64, 175, 181, 182, 187, 192, 193–4 Kuwait 44, 57, 76, 80, 87–8 L Latin America x, 277, 280–1 Lausanne Treaty (1923) 189–90 League of Nations 137, 249 Lebanon xi, 47, 57, 58, 68, 93–5, 143, 162 Leichhardt, Ludwig 6 Leonidas, King 146 Leonov, Alexei 306 Lesbos 143 Libya xii, 45, 86, 131, 143, 162–3, 173, 187, 198, 297 Libyan civil war 92, 163, 164, 177, 212, 213 Libyan National Army 92 Lithuania 188 Louis, Spyridon 150 Lucky Country, The (D.

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
by Rachel Slade
Published 9 Jan 2024

Some began to ask the question: Could unions put their prodigious capital behind private unionized companies and help build them up, similar to how private equity operated? Maybe Ben and Whitney were hitting their stride. They’d kept their factory running through good times and lean. They had an impressive customer base and a trained workforce. They’d weathered astronomical growth and moments when it looked like they’d lose the factory. Plus a global pandemic. Other powerbrokers were watching American Roots with great interest. The former president of Amalgamated Bank, Keith Mestrich, a dedicated union man, had just moved to Maine and was looking for ways to support local manufacturers. That he’d come from Amalgamated Bank was significant. The bank was founded by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in New York City in 1923 to provide men’s clothing workers (many of them immigrants), as well as unions, a trustworthy place to deposit their money.

Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy
by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin
Published 7 Nov 2023

Prices of surgical masks skyrocketed. Latex gloves were nowhere to be found. Lam had made her name as a civil servant with political savvy at the height of the SARS crisis. After precipitating months of political unrest, her reputation was tanking further and trust in her government cratered as this new global pandemic swept through her city. As one Bloomberg columnist put it, the semiautonomous financial hub, once known as a bastion of global trade and capitalism, was showing signs of a failed state.3 BY FEBRUARY 2020, GWYNETH NO LONGER LIVED ALONE IN AMSTERDAM. The scarcity of student lodging had forced her Belgian friend Sarah Van Meel to move in the previous November.

Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined--And Redefined--Nature
by Beth Shapiro
Published 15 Dec 2021

The first SARS outbreak happened when a coronavirus jumped into humans from civet cats, which probably got the virus themselves from bats. That outbreak lasted from November 2002 until July 2003, an eight-month window during which 8,098 people in 26 countries were infected and 774 people died. The first SARS outbreak did not become a global pandemic, thanks to quick efforts by international teams of doctors and epidemiologists. It was spread mostly by sick people in health care settings, which made finding and quarantining infected or potentially infected people relatively simple. SARS-CoV-2 was harder to stop because COVID-19 spreads between people who aren’t sick enough to know that they are infected.

Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms and the Corruption of Justice
by David Enrich
Published 5 Oct 2022

I believe the question is whether this firm should lend its prestige and credibility to the project of an administration bent on undermining our democracy and our rule of law. Make no mistake. From the outset, this petition [the Pennsylvania litigation] was designed to suppress the vote, to ensure that fewer of our fellow Americans’ voices would be heard, in the midst of a global pandemic like we have never seen in our lifetimes. And now, it is being weaponized to threaten our generations-long tradition in this country of peaceful and democratic transition of power. I believe that our society should strive to become a more just and inclusive representative democracy. And this petition, and the project to which it lends our collective prestige, stands firmly in the way of that ideal.

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization
by Vaclav Smil
Published 16 Dec 2013

Perhaps the best way to imagine this is to see the global economy behaving for an extended period of time much like Japan's economy has been behaving since 1990: weak or nonexistent growth accompanied by deflation and endless budget deficits. And there are yet other crises and catastrophes that could end the rising consumption of materials, or at least set it back for generations (Smil, 2010). Two of those ever-present risks – a global pandemic and Earth's collision with an asteroid – have been, finally, given closer attention in recent years because of the epidemics of SARS, H1N1, and because of a few relatively close approaches of several asteroids and the spectacular atmospheric disintegration of the Chelyabinsk meteor in February 2013.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet
Published 10 Nov 2015

The development of antibiotics has decreased steadily since the 1960s, with fewer companies bringing forth ever fewer compounds.13 The threats don’t end there. The spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the appearance of the H1N1 virus, and similar outbreaks have stoked concerns that the world could soon face a global pandemic similar to the 1918 influenza outbreak. Any kind of major pandemic, or spread of antimicrobial resistance, is sure to have an enormous effect on developing countries, where the resources and expertise to fight new threats are limited. Finally, an additional emerging health challenge facing developing countries is the increased prevalence of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
by Alanna Collen
Published 4 May 2015

The word ‘irritable’ belies the impact that IBS has on the lives of its sufferers; the disease is consistently ranked as reducing quality of life even more than for patients on kidney dialysis and diabetics reliant on insulin injections. Perhaps it’s the hopelessness that comes with not knowing what’s wrong, nor how to fix it. The spread of IBS is an unremarked global pandemic. One in ten visits to the doctor relate to the condition, and gastroenterologists are kept in a job by the steady flow of sufferers who make up half of their patients. In the United States, IBS leads to 3 million visits to the doctor, 2.2 million prescriptions, and 100,000 hospital visits each year.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Its economy will increasingly depend on high-tech and emerging sectors, and the benefits large agglomerations bring for economic development. That same logic holds true in much of Africa: by 2100, Lagos will be home to more than 88 million people, Dar es Salaam to more than 70 million and Khartoum to almost 60 million.34 Even a global pandemic seemed unable to stop the rise of urban life. The early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic saw a flight from the cities – The Economist reported that 17 per cent of Parisians left the French capital as the country went into lockdown in March 2020.35 Yet cities bounced back with remarkable rapidity.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk
Published 15 Mar 2022

At a moment when it can seem as if this country will never put its pieces together, Adrian Shirk gives us so many instances, historical and present-day, of Americans finding ways to live in real community, to carve out places of freedom, to be brave enough to stare our unhappinesses in the face and ask What more could there be? In a voice electric with possibility, Shirk reminds us of the great risk and great possibility contained in the act of reimagining home.” —Alex Mar, author of Witches of America “What kind of world will we create in the wake of a global pandemic and armed insurrection, in the midst of climate chaos, systemic racism, and inequity? In Heaven Is a Place on Earth, the brilliant Adrian Shirk is looking for an existence that is more than just mere existence, more than ‘waged labor,’ a life that is less extractive, capitalistic, and crushing.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

The last of these inspired the organization’s fourth and fifth initiatives: improving public services in developing countries by providing much better information about service quality to those who run them and those who use them; and, a longtime personal interest of Brilliant, developing an early-warning and rapid-response infrastructure for global pandemics and other catastrophes. Google.org has seeded Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters (InSTEDD), a nonprofit that is working to better connect the best brains in the technology industry with those responsible for monitoring and responding to such crises. Brilliant stresses that doing good is not limited within the company to Google.org.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made
by Ben Rhodes
Published 1 Jun 2021

Existing structures and inexhaustible grievances will present their own barriers, but there remains the opportunity afforded by each cycle of history: to carefully watch the windup of a pitcher slowed by complacency and a sense of supremacy; to pause for a moment and feel the sum total of experience and brazen belief that propels the underdog’s dash toward home. For my family, and for people battling authoritarianism everywhere Acknowledgments This book took me to several continents over the course of four years and was completed during a global pandemic. It evolved substantially from when I started interviewing people who became its leading characters, as the world continued to change at an accelerating pace. Suffice to say, I could not have finished After the Fall without support and advice from many people in my life. First, I am filled with gratitude for my family.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

So the strange intellectual half-world of pessimism aversion rumbles on. I should know, I was stuck in it for too long. In the years since we founded DeepMind and since those presentations, the discourse has changed—to some extent. The job automation debate has been rehearsed countless times. A global pandemic showcased both the risks and the potency of synthetic biology. A “techlash” of sorts emerged, with critics railing against tech and tech companies in op-eds and books, in the regulatory capitals of Washington, Brussels, and Beijing. Previously niche fears around technology exploded into the mainstream, public skepticism of technology increased, and criticisms from academia, civil society, and politics sharpened.

Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide
by Hawon Jung
Published 21 Mar 2023

In the end—and partly drawn by Bul’s pleas to fight the open misogyny shown by the right-wing party’s campaign—young women overwhelmingly voted for the DP. But their efforts were not enough to reverse the wider rightward shift of the country’s political landscape. In the midst of a contentious presidential race and a global pandemic, women’s activism in South Korea was also grappling with growing pains of its own: after years of heady growth, many were feeling exhausted or disillusioned amid questions over whether the movement had lost some of its steam and unity. Mainstream women’s-rights groups faced the daunting task of winning back public trust after several scandals involving prominent figures were revealed.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

This is not to merely engage in naive optimism or self-help-style positive psychology, but rather to remember that, as Zinn pointed out, the stories we tell ourselves about the past determine the possibilities for our future. Radical hope is the most powerful weapon we have. It’s time we use it. Acknowledgments Writing a book that surveys over two millennia of utopian history and its contemporary resonances is no easy feat in normal times, but it proved especially challenging during a global pandemic when libraries and archives were closed, travel was often difficult, and many communities understandably closed their doors to outsiders. Given the limitations, I relied heavily on many colleagues and friends around the world to help me do the research necessary for this book. While I have been teaching about utopian socialists, communists, and anarchists for over twenty years, I really pushed myself out of my comfort zone to explore a diversity of utopian visions for rearranging our private lives, inspired initially by the history of the Bogomils, the Oneida Community, and the religion that grew out of the Saint-Simonian movement.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey Sachs
Published 1 Jan 2008

In the United States, the face of the UN is mainly in its first role, as a debating shop in the UN Security Council. In fact, the UN’s most powerful contributions probably fall into the second and third categories. The UN remains the world’s repository of shared commitments on global objectives, whether in the environmental treaties, the Millennium Development Goals, or the protection against global pandemic diseases. Its agencies are the indispensable providers of public services in the poorest and most vulnerable places on the planet, a role that is almost invisible in the rich countries but nearly omnipresent in the poorest. Beyond the specific acts of peacekeeping and the countless individual development initiatives of UN agencies, the deepest measure of UN success will be whether the Millennium Promises are sustained over time as shared active global goals and whether these goals are achieved in practice.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

Some new parts are saving humanity from the mistakes of the traditional programmers: Land-use space satellites alerted us to global warming, deforestation, and other environmental problems and gave us the facts to address those harms. Similarly, statistical analyses of health care, transportation, and work patterns have given us a worldwide network that can track global pandemics and guide public health efforts. On the other hand, some of the new parts—such as the Great Firewall, the NSA, and the U.S. political parties—are scary, because of the possibility that a small group of people can potentially control the thoughts and behavior of very large groups of people, perhaps without those people even knowing they’re being manipulated.

The Abandonment of the West
by Michael Kimmage
Published 21 Apr 2020

For American foreign policy, the ascent of non-European powers calls for a recalibration of the Cold War formulas that Truman and others had devised. As the Obama administration realized, Asia is likely to be the locus of twenty-first-century international affairs. In addition, many of the policy challenges of the twenty-first century, from terrorism to climate change to global pandemics, will be transnational. If they are to be solved at all, it will be only through collective and cooperative action that is global in scope. In 2012, the international relations scholar Charles Kupchan published No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. He was charting the new foreign-policy realities, and Kupchan would go on to serve as the National Security Council’s senior director for Western Europe from 2014 to 2017.

Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity
by Claudia Goldin
Published 11 Oct 2021

Prescott for the University of Michigan Law School Alumni Research Survey Dataset, and Stephanie Hurder for helping me make sense of the data; Bryce Ward for helping create and produce the Harvard and Beyond survey instrument, and Naomi Hausman for making the data usable. The journey that women have taken across the past century and more has been mine as well, and at the end of my journey, I met Domenica Alioto, who made my work more relevant and taught me to appreciate poetry. We each went through difficult times over the past nine months—the anxiety of a global pandemic, the death of my mother, the mental illness of a good friend, the toxic soot-filled air that greeted Domenica in California after she fled the virus in Brooklyn, and the 2020 election. That spring, summer, and fall, I soldiered on, wrote, taught, gardened, and read Domenica’s edits and e-mails: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it” (Seamus Heaney, “Digging”).

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It
by Matthew Williams
Published 23 Mar 2021

This is absolutely crucial when tackling the question, ‘Why do people commit hate crimes?’ You cannot begin to understand hateful behaviour without looking at the whole picture, from how biology and early socialisation predispose humans to favour the ingroup, right through to how financial meltdowns, global pandemics and artificial intelligence (AI) can create the ideal conditions for hate to flourish. Taking this wide-angle picture is key to understanding hate crime now. The current rate of the breakdown in social relations across the world is arresting. It is no coincidence that soaring hate crime figures are found in countries where the extreme right is rising.

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World
by Paul Morland
Published 10 Jan 2019

A Londoner of a hundred years ago would be astonished at the global face of his once more or less exclusively British city and astonished that the British Empire was no more. A Parisian would be similarly surprised to know that the Algerian experiment is over, having left no demographic trace at all in North Africa, while his own city is heavily North African. The demographic trends of the future are to some extent already in process: short of global pandemic or mass movement, we know how many fifty-year-olds there will be in Nigeria or Norway in 2050. However, there may still be surprises in store, and these may be driven by science and technology. It was technology which doubly broke the old Malthusian equation: the earth, it turned out, could provide exponentially for human beings, with the opening up of vast new territories using new ways of moving people and things, and using new ways of growing food; population growth, by contrast, could be cheaply and easily tamed by people’s choices without their having to restrain their natural appetites.

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

NOTES 1 Sadly, they themselves both disappeared in January 2021 and May 2020 from cancer and Covid respectively. 2 http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2013/10/10-places-brits-love-to-live-in-america 3 https://www.businessinsider.com/british-expats-most-population-destinations-2015-9#4-spain--381025-expats-spain-is-still-high-on-the-list-where-brits-go-for-the-cheap-booze-sunny-weather-and-relatively-easy-integration-into-the-culture-14 INTRODUCTION Three great storms engulfed Britain in the ten years between 2010 and 2020: the financial crisis, the Brexit referendum and the global pandemic. They were similar in the following respects: they were unlike anything in living memory; they derailed longer-term government plans; they required unprecedented, profound and prolonged intervention; they were all eclipsed by each other; they exposed vulnerable communities; they revealed the British character; and they happened because Britain was more connected to the world than ever before.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters
by Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Published 21 Jun 2023

Thank you to Rob Fearn and the team at what is now the Guardian Saturday magazine for saying yes when few would have. I did not expect then that that email would be the start of a four-year odyssey. In the time since, my eldest daughter has gone from a baby to starting school; we’ve lived through a global pandemic; I developed a chronic health condition; and we’ve had another new addition to the family. Throughout I’ve been lucky to have the support of many people, without whom this book would not be in your hands. My deepest thanks to my agent, Chris Wellbelove, who believed in me and my little rubbish book since the beginning.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

Some of the skills you could focus on include the following:29 • Running organisations • Using political and bureaucratic influence to change the priorities of an organisation • Doing conceptual and empirical research on core longtermist topics • Communicating (for example, you might be a great writer or podcast host) • Building new projects from scratch • Building community; bringing together people with different interests and goals Investing in yourself can pay off in unanticipated ways. For example, based on 80,000 Hours’s advice, Sophie decided not to apply to medical school and instead shifted her focus to global pandemics. She found funding for a master’s degree in epidemiology to build career capital in the area. When COVID-19 broke out, she found a neglected solution: challenge trials, which can greatly speed up the development of vaccines by deliberately infecting healthy and willing volunteers with the novel coronavirus in order to test vaccine efficacy.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari
Published 25 Jan 2022

Some people think it’s because Zoom meetings take so damn long; others reckon it’s because, given all the economic insecurity, people were even more keen to show they were working so they didn’t get laid off. What this shows is that no big outside force is going to come along and free us from the ratchet to work more and more hours—not even a global pandemic. We will only get it through a collective struggle to change the rules. But Covid also showed us something else that is relevant to a four-day week. It demonstrated that businesses can change their working practices radically, in a very short period of time, and continue to function well.

Cosmos
by Carl Sagan
Published 1 Jan 1980

But we are not sure, and the stakes are high. If we wish to return unsterilized Martian samples to Earth, we must have a containment procedure that is stupefyingly reliable. There are nations that develop and stockpile bacteriological weapons. They seem to have an occasional accident, but they have not yet, so far as I know, produced global pandemics. Perhaps Martian samples can be safely returned to Earth. But I would want to be very sure before considering a returned-sample mission. There is another way to investigate Mars and the full range of delights and discoveries this heterogeneous planet holds for us. My most persistent emotion in working with the Viking lander pictures was frustration at our immobility.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
by Shawn Lawrence Otto
Published 10 Oct 2011

What is your view of how science and technology can best be used to ensure national security, and where should we put our focus? 6. Pandemics and Biosecurity. Some estimates suggest that an emerging pandemic could kill more than three hundred million people. In an era of constant and rapid international travel, what steps should the United States take to protect our population from global pandemics and deliberate biological attacks? 7. Genetics Research. The field of genetics has the potential to improve human health and nutrition, but many people are concerned about the effects of genetic modification both in humans and in agriculture. What is the right policy balance between the benefits of genetic advances and their potential risks?

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
by Johann Hari
Published 20 Jan 2015

(I have been asked not to name the city, to protect her safety, since she had to flee Mexican cartels); Richard Newton in El Paso, Texas; and Charlie Mandigo from Washington State. 2 This passage describing Ed Toatley is also informed by my conversation with his colleague Neill Franklin. 3 Timothy Noah, ed., After Prohibition, 94-7. 4 Miron, Drug War Crimes, 50. 5 The Global Commission on Drug Policy, led by former U.S. secretaries of state and other governmental leaders, looked at the evidence and concluded: “Virtually all studies on the subject have concluded that increased levels of enforcement activity have been associated with increased drug market violence.” See The War on Drugs and HIV/AIDS: How the Criminalization of Drug Use Fuels the Global Pandemic, 14. See also http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2010/RAND_OP325.pdf, accessed January 14, 2014. 6 Anslinger, Protectors, ix. Anslinger, Murderers, 15. 7 Del Quentin Wilbur, “Drug Dealer Gets Life for Killing State Trooper,” Baltimore Sun, December 15, 2001, “Telegraph,” 1A. 8 Leigh said this in her speech to the Cato Institute in the fall of 2011.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
Published 14 Sep 2020

Over the years, I have been continually inspired by my ongoing conversations with historian and dear friend Taylor Branch, whose work and perspective often intersect with mine. I am also ever grateful to Sharon Malone and Eric Holder for the grace and thoughtfulness they have shown me. The nature and timetable for a book under production in an era of global pandemic required collaboration and commitment on an epic level. Working remotely in a time of uncertainty, the following people at Penguin Random House, in addition to my editor, Kate Medina, made this book possible: Gina Centrello, whose support I have treasured, and publisher Andy Ward and deputy publisher Avideh Bashirrad.

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom
by Katherine Eban
Published 13 May 2019

According to the article, Cipla was offering to sell the AIDS cocktail for $350 a year per patient, or roughly $1 a day, as compared to Western prices of between $10,000 and $15,000 a year, but was being blocked by the multinational drug makers that held the patents, who were being backed by the Bush administration. McNeil’s story “completely broke the dikes,” Jamie Love recalled. Papers all over the world picked it up. News of Big Pharma’s patent protection efforts in the face of the global pandemic and the Bush administration’s support of them sparked international outrage and stoked street protests from Philadelphia to Pretoria, even accusations of genocide. The result was a PR debacle for Big Pharma. Even among the industry’s lowest moments—the illegal marketing of drugs for off-label uses; the payoffs to doctors who acted as promotional mouthpieces; the concealment of negative safety data for high-profile drugs—its stance in South Africa seemed uniquely horrible.

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood
by Rose George
Published 22 Oct 2018

BPL did not act upon Dr. Allen’s warnings. Hemophiliacs had no intention of giving up Factor and going back to endless hospital stays. They wanted it for three reasons: It gave them a life. They didn’t know about hepatitis C. And no one had told them about HIV, insidiously making its way to being a global pandemic. * * * After his TV interview, Julian Miller starred in a documentary.25 It opens with a shot of him shaving, a sly reference to most people’s ignorant belief that hemophiliacs can bleed to death from a nick. There are scenes of Julian walking around his parents’ beautiful home in a beautiful Welsh valley, his stiff walk the mark of a hemophiliac, to those who know the sign language, revealing a person in constant pain.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

“I’ve been scratching my head for a while on it,” he told CNBC, noting that he wasn’t celebrating WeWork’s troubles. This is a business, he added, “where there are no shortcuts.” His fortune continued to rise through the fall and early spring. IWG’s stock crept up and up, hitting an all-time high in the new year, just before the global pandemic hit. * * * — Meanwhile, WeWork’s struggles continued. The SoftBank-led team began sifting through the wreckage of the inefficient empire Neumann built with their money, casting for ways to turn the business around and lob off fat. An easy spot was WeWork’s eclectic collection of companies, which were put on the sales block.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

Several false coronavirus “cures” killed hundreds of people who drank chlorine or excessive alcohol to rid themselves of the virus. There was, of course, no cure or vaccine at the time. International groups, like the World Health Organization (WHO), fought coronavirus misinformation on the Hype Machine as part of their global pandemic response. My group at MIT supported the COVIDConnect fact-checking apparatus, the official WhatsApp coronavirus channel of the WHO, and studied the spread and impact of coronavirus misinformation worldwide. But we first glimpsed the destructive power of health misinformation on the Hype Machine the year before the coronavirus pandemic hit, during the measles resurgence of 2019.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus
by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
Published 18 Mar 2021

Britain has nearly 20 times the number of cases per head of population and 40 times the number of deaths, and somehow we’ve concluded that we can’t learn from that.’1 The final assessment comes from Lord O’Donnell, who would have been in charge of mobilising the civil service if a pandemic had happened when he was cabinet secretary from 2005 to 2011. ‘I think we have to accept the fact that a country that was ranked second in the world for its preparedness for a global pandemic has done very badly on virtually every front. If you look at the health side our outcomes are very poor in terms of excess deaths. On the economic side we’ve got bigger falls in GDP than almost everybody else. If you look at individual wellbeing, which is the best overall measure, we’ve had a very large fall, bigger than in other countries.’2 The death toll from the pandemic’s first year left tens of thousands of families across the country in mourning.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century
by Tim Higgins
Published 2 Aug 2021

” *4 In 2018, Tesla sold an estimated 117,000 Model 3 cars compared to 111,000 of the Lexus RX, to make it the top-selling luxury vehicle for the year, according to Edmunds. EPILOGUE “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” Elon Musk tweeted on March 6. It was the same day Apple began encouraging employees to stay home, one of many tech giants taking efforts to slow the spread of the novel virus. The global pandemic of early 2020 was threatening to ruin Tesla’s moment. Just weeks earlier, Musk had been onstage in Shanghai celebrating the start of Model 3 production in China, defying skeptics who thought he couldn’t pull off such a feat in less than a year. Two days after his performance, the World Health Organization announced the discovery of a mysterious pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan, a large Chinese city more than five hundred miles to the west.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

They specifically mentioned that ventilators would be “limited and difficult to restock”, that request processes for medical supplies from the government were dysfunctional, and there was inadequate testing to see who had contracted this deadly version of the flu. Yet another simulation that was used to study how a global pandemic would affect the world in general, and the United States, in particular, was called Lock Step. In 2010, the Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network published a white paper that laid out how governments around the planet would be able to take control of society through a massively publicized pandemic that was set to kill millions of people.

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by James Bridle
Published 6 Apr 2022

The ongoing collapse of this system is evidenced by the general and increasing global dissatisfaction and distrust in government, the rise of charismatic and authoritarian leaders, and an apparent inability to address widespread and systemic issues such as poverty and healthcare, climate change and a global pandemic. That it continues to function is largely and inescapably because we are in thrall to its central mechanism – voting – which the very originators of democracy, the ancient Athenians, viewed as inherently corrupting. When confronted with systems of control which are incapable of generating within themselves the necessary conditions for meaningful change to occur, it is necessary to reach outside them in order to find a source of novelty and strangeness sufficiently powerful to spin the system into a new configuration.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
by Nancy Jo Sales
Published 17 May 2021

I don’t want to tell her what I’ve been hearing from the women who’ve been sending me texts and emails since “love in the time of corona” began (I see the phrase is already getting more than four billion results on Google). Surprisingly, they say nothing much has changed in the dystopian world of online dating, despite the onset of a global pandemic. They’ve sent me screenshots of guys wanting to “quarantine and chill,” “looking to smash with masks.” It’s the usual kind of stuff, but now that there’s the threat of contagion, the numbers game online dating is so often described to be has a different calculation: How many will wind up sick?

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

Only it turned out that the doctor she quoted was not a doctor, but rather a well-known male porn star dressed in scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck. The tweet revealing the prank (pulled off by The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein) was “liked” seventy-one thousand times. Wolf’s fortunes changed markedly in March 2021, one year after the global pandemic was first declared. This is the start of the After Bannon era. In this period, Wolf both shifted and honed her Covid message, zeroing in on a set of fears related to the prospect of so-called vaccine passports. The idea of using vaccine-verification passports for international travel had been floated months earlier in a slick video produced by the World Economic Forum as part of its “Great Reset” campaign.

The Good, the Bad and the History
by Jodi Taylor
Published 21 Jun 2023

The first thing that struck me was that Insight pods were considerably less sophisticated than those of both St Mary’s and the Time Police. There were cameras but no recorders. No decon lamp that I could see. For all their avowed purpose of preserving and respecting History, they obviously didn’t care what pathogens they carted from one time period to another. I couldn’t help thinking back to the mysterious origins of several global pandemics. No time for that, however. Concentrate, Maxwell. This wasn’t my first Insight pod – I’d once been having a poke inside one when the bloody thing kidnapped me. Which hadn’t been the best moment of my life. This one was almost identical. There was a small control console, a large locker – weapons for the safe stowing of, presumably – together with what seemed to me to be a very inadequate first-­aid kit.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

The spirit of the city as we knew it has vanished in the shadow of luxury condo towers, rampant greed, and suburbanization. This is not unique to New York. Hyper-gentrification, the term I use for the force that drives the city’s undoing—gentrification on speed, shot up with free-market capitalism—is a global pandemic, a seemingly unstoppable virus attacking much of the world. San Francisco is dying, maybe even faster than New York. You see it in Portland and Seattle. Austin and Boston. Paris, London, Barcelona, and Berlin have all been infected. The virus has spread as far as Tel Aviv, Beirut, Seoul, and Shanghai.

Investing Amid Low Expected Returns: Making the Most When Markets Offer the Least
by Antti Ilmanen
Published 24 Feb 2022

Mercer CFA Institute (2020), Global Pension Index, Mercer Australia. Merton, Robert C. (1973), “An Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model,” Econometrica, 41(5), 867–887. Misirli, Efdal; Daniela Scida; and Mikhail Velikov (2020), “Peer momentum,” SSRN working paper. Mitchell, Olivia S. (2020), “Building better retirement systems in the wake of the global pandemic,” SSRN working paper. Morecroft, Nigel; and Craig Turnbull (2019), “Institutional equity investing in Britain from 1900 to 2000,” Financial History Review 26(1), 1–19. Moore, Don A. (2020), Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely, Harper Business. Moreira, Alan; and Tyler Muir (2017), “Volatility-managed portfolios,” Journal of Finance 72(4), 1611–1644.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

‘I probably knew the whole of the Shropshire Lad by heart,’ he said, ‘we used to recite [it] over and over, in a kind of ecstasy’ as part of what he called an ‘enormous gush of “country” sentiment’.37 After the Armistice was signed in 1918, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, went to Wolverhampton to launch his re-election campaign in front of an adulatory crowd where he promised to build ‘a fit country for heroes to live in’.38 But such optimism did not last long as this cultural turn inwards and backwards spilled over into politics. A victorious nation stumbled into the next few years as a sadder, poorer and more insular place bereft of the confidence it had once felt. A global pandemic killed upwards of 250,000 people in the UK, especially the young. Britain’s economy was saddled with debts ten times higher than before a war in which more money was spent by the government than in the previous forty years. Border controls introduced properly for the first time during a war when every alien was regarded as a ‘potential subversive’ remained in place afterwards to protect England from a continental Europe stricken with revolution and civil war.

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris
by Mark Honigsbaum
Published 8 Apr 2019

Twice this pandemic century, in 1976 and again in 2003, scientists thought the world was on the brink of a new influenza pandemic, only to realize that the outbreaks were false alarms and that the real danger lay elsewhere. Then in 2009 the WHO declared that the Mexican swine flu, a ressortment of two well-known H1N1 swine-lineage viruses that had circulated separately for over a decade, met the criterion of a pandemic virus, triggering the activation of global pandemic preparedness plans. On paper, this was the first pandemic of the twenty-first century and the first influenza pandemic in forty-one years. The fact that the swine flu was an H1N1, just like the Spanish flu, raised the prospect that this might be the Big One and that governments should expect a wave of illness and deaths similar to that in 1918–1919.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

Santander, Spain, may have the world’s most extensive sensor network, with the company Libelium having installed 400 devices to locate parking spots and 700 more to measure and control ambient parameters for noise and carbon monoxide as well as temperature and sunlight. Remote health exams via the web can offer improvements in urban (and rural) health care, especially for those without regular access to doctors. And electronic record keeping is a money-saving boon to public health that improves patient care and helps cities deal with new global pandemics. Even video games, going all the way back to SimCity (which was issued in a new version in 2013) and Second Life, allow experimentation with modes of urban design and cosmopolitan living. Second Life, like most web-based innovation, may be exploited mainly for entertainment (virtual sex and shopping and partying), but it also includes rules for living, principles of design, and a virtual currency with some real-world value.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 Sep 2020

U.S. shale, they expected, would inevitably be a major casualty of a price war, owing to its higher costs and the constant drilling it required, compared to Saudi and Russian conventional oil.2 * * * — Yet what was not fully understood at the beginning of March was that this battle for market share was being launched into a market that was rapidly shrinking owing to the virus. The epidemic in China was turning into a global pandemic. Sixteen years earlier, in 2004, the National Intelligence Council, a research organization in the U.S. intelligence community, had published a report titled Mapping the Global Future, which presented scenarios for the year 2020. One of the scenarios imagined was a pandemic in 2020. It was eerily prophetic, even as to the year: It is only a matter of time before a new pandemic appears, such as the 1918–1919 influenza virus that killed an estimated twenty million worldwide.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

It’s also the story of how a leading technology company became so omnipotent over the course of a single decade that many started to worry that it might definitively tilt the proverbial playing field against smaller companies. And it shows how one of the world’s most famous businesspeople appeared to lose his way, and then tried to find it again—right in the midst of a terrifying global pandemic that further augmented his power and profit. It’s a tale that describes a period in business history when the old laws no longer seemed to apply to the world’s most dominant companies. And it explores what happened when one man and his vast empire were about to become totally unbound. PART I INVENTION Amazon, December 31, 2010 Annual net sales: $34.20 billion Full- and part-time employees: 33,700 End-of-year market capitalization: $80.46 billion * * * Jeff Bezos end-of-year net worth: $15.86 billion CHAPTER 1 The Über Product Manager There was nothing particularly distinctive about the dozen or so low-rise buildings in Seattle’s burgeoning South Lake Union district that Amazon moved into over the course of 2010.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence
by Amy B. Zegart
Published 6 Nov 2021

But ask American foreign policy leaders what keeps them up at night, and you’re sure to hear something from the nuclear list of horrors: proliferation to countries like Iran, North Korea, and Syria; the risk of conflict between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed neighbors; a Middle East war against nuclear-armed Israel; America’s eroding nuclear deterrence in Europe and Asia; alarming nuclear modernization by Russia and China; nuclear terrorism; nuclear accidents; and the risk of miscalculation and accidental nuclear war by the United States and others. Humans face three foreign policy challenges that are truly existential: global pandemics, climate change, and nuclear annihilation. Only the first two are top of mind for most people these days. Second, nuclear threat intelligence constitutes a tough test for my argument that emerging technologies and open-source information are fundamentally challenging U.S. intelligence. Tough tests are analytically compelling.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle
Published 2 May 2022

Two years earlier: Jena McGregor, “Anderson Cooper was Tim Cook’s Guide for Coming Out as Gay,” Washington Post, August 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/08/15/why-tim-cook-talked-with-anderson-cooper-before-publicly-coming-out-as-gay/. He told Cooper that: Anderson Cooper on The Howard Stern Show, May 12, 2020, https://www.howardstern.com/show/2020/05/12/robin-quivers-struggles-turning-down-houseguests-amidst-global-pandemic/. Cook called Tyrangiel: Bloomberg Surveillance, “Apple CEO Tim Cook: I’m Proud to Be Gay” (video), Bloomberg, October 30, 2014, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2014-10-30/apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-proud-to-be-gay. “Throughout my professional life”: Tim Cook, “Tim Cook Speaks Up,” Bloomberg, October 30, 2014, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-30/tim-cook-speaks-up.

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine
by Christopher Miller
Published 17 Jul 2023

Shevchenko) here censorship, press here, here, here, here Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) here, here champagne, Ukrainian here chanson music here Chazin, Natan here checkpoints, Kyiv here checkpoint run-ins, CM’s here Chernichkin, Kostya here, here Chernov, Mstyslav here Chernyshov, Oleksiy here child exploitation and propaganda here children’s hospital attack, Mariupol here China here Chornovol, Tetyana here, here Chubarov, Refat here Churchill, Winston here CNN here coal industry, Ukrainian here Communist Party of Ukraine here Cossacks here, here, here, here, here, here, here Covid-19 global pandemic here Crimea here, here, here Belbek air force base here forced referendum on secession (2014) 134-here invasion and annexation of (2014) here, here, here, here, here, here, here Kerch Strait bridge here, here Privolnoye infantry base here pro-Kyiv activists here pro-Moscow militia forces here, here, here, here, here, here pro-Russia and pro-Ukraine demonstrations here relationship with the Ukraine here Sevastopol port here takeover of parliament at Simferopol here Tatars here, here cyberwarfare here Daily Telegraph here, here, here Danilov, Oleksiy here, here, here Debaltseve army base here Debaltseve (2015), Battle of here, here Debaltseve city here, here, here Demchenko, Captain Oleksandr here, here, here Denisova, Lyudmila here Derevyanko, Borys here ‘dictatorship laws’ here Dnipro Battalion here Dnipropetrovsk here Dolgopolov, Alexandr here Dombrovsky Quarry here the Donbas here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here civilian front line devastation here escalation of fighting pre-2022 war here executions by firing squad here, here lack of evacuation programs (2014) here Moscow ‘Russifying’ here presidential election (2014) here pro-Kyiv militia (2014) here pro-Russian demonstrations (2014) here pro-Russian militant forces take power (2014) here referendum on secession here, here, here, here see also individual places by name; Artemivsk; Bakhmut; Battle of the Donbas (2022); Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR); Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR); Mariupol; Slovyansk Donbas Battalion here, here Donetsk here, here, here, here, here, here anti-government demonstrations (2014) here, here, here see also Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Donetsk National University here Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘anti-independence’ celebrations (2014) here Battle of Debaltseve (2015) here, here Battle of Donetsk Airport (2014) here, here, here central morgue here Cossack bomb-disposal squad here forces shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 here, here forces shoot down Ukrainian military aircraft (2014) here kidnappings and interrogation here, here life at the Ramada hotel here Minsk I here, here Minsk II here, here, here pro-Russian/separatist forces here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here propaganda here, here puppet leadership here, here, here, here referendum on secession here, here Russian forces here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Ukrainian presidential election (2014) here Unity Day bus attack (2014) here Victory Day celebrations (2014) here Donetsk soccer stadium here Donetsk Airport (2014), Battle of here, here, here Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic here Donetskie Novosti newspaper here drones, Shahed here, here drones, use of domestic here Dubchak, Andriy here Duliby village here Dzhaparova, Emine here Eastern Partnership Summit here The Economist here election (2014), presidential here election (2019), presidential here Elizabeth II, Queen here Emelyanenko, Captain Maksym here Energoatom – National Nuclear Energy Generating Company here energy/fuel shortages, Kyiv here Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity here armed assaults, 20 February here the Berkut here, here, here, here, here, here conflicts, 1 December here, here, here, here conflicts following ‘dictatorship laws’ here extremist groups here, here, here, here formation of the EuromaidanPR group here Lenin statue toppled here Maidan encampment here, here march on parliament, 18 February here party leaders negotiation with Yanukovych here Party of Regions paid-for demonstration here regional demonstrations here reporters and activists kidnapped and beaten here speakers and performers here, here, here, here, here, here volunteer security corps/samooborona here, here women’s sotnya here Yanukovych flees Mezhyhirya estate here European Commission here European Union here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here evacuation programs here, here, here, here, here, here, here Evening Kvartal TV program here extremist groups, Ukraine here, here, here, here, here, here Fabius, Laurent here Facebook here, here, here, here, here, here Federal Security Service (FSB), Russian here, here, here, here, here, here Fedonyuk, Ruslan here Fedotav, Pyotr here Feldman, Evgeny here, here, here, here Fil, Rima here filtration camps, Russian here, here Financial Times here, here First Strike Company bomb-disposal squad here First World War here, here flags here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Forbes Ukraine here France here, here funerals and memorials, military here Garanich, Gleb here gas industry, Dnipropetrovsk here, here Georgia, invasion of (2008) here, here Germany here, here, here Gilmour, David here Girkin, Igor ‘Strelkov’ here, here, here, here, here, here Glazyev, Sergey here GlobalPost here The Glory of Sevastopol newspaper here Gongadze, Georgiy here Gorchinskaya, Katya here, here, here, here, here, here Gordeyeva, Valentina here Great Patriotic War here, here GRU here, here Grytsenko, Oksana here Gulf War (1990–91) here Hadeyev, Alexander here Haidai, Serhiy here, here hair trade, blonde here Halyna, Dr here Haran, Olexiy here Havryliuk, Mykhailo here Heavenly Hundred - Nebesna Sotnya here Higgins, Eliot here Hilsum, Lindsey here Hitler, Adolf here HIV/AIDS here, here Hollande, François here Holodomor here Holtsyev, Mark here, here Horlivka Institute for Foreign Languages here, here Hromadske TV here Hryluk, Serhiy here Ibraimov, Ildar here, here illegal mines here Ilovaisk here Ilovaisk (2014), Battle of here, here Ilya (Donbas separatist) here, here, here, here Independence Day (2022), Ukrainian here Independence Day (2014), Ukrainian here independence demonstration, 1980s Ukrainian here Independent here Instagram here Irpin, Kyiv Oblast here Irvanets, Oleksandr here Ivan (Ukrainian Orthodox priest), Father here Ivanov, Volodymyr here Ivashchenko, Denis here Izyum here Jakub (Kyiv Post journalist) here Japarov, Eskander here Jews here, here, here, here Johnson, Boris here journalists and activist kidnappings here, here murders/disappearances here, here, here, here Kanayeva, Vera here Kazachenko, Olga Yevgenyevna here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Kazakhstan here Kerch Strait bridge, Crimea here, here Kharkiv here, here, here, here, here Kharkiv Pact here, here Kherson here, here Khersones ancient ruins here Khlyvnyuk, Andriy here Khodakovsky, Alexander here Khokholya, Sergei here Khomyak, Albert here Khrushchev, Nikita here, here, here kidnappings in Crimea here kidnappings, journalist/activist here, here Kiehart, Pete here, here, here, here, here, here Klitschko, Vitali here, here, here, here, here, here Klopotenko, Ievgen here Klymentyev, Vasyl here Kohikov, Petro here Kolomoisky, Igor here Komunar here Konstantin (CM’s friend and language tutor) here Konstantinov, Vladimir here kopanki – illegal mines here Korostylev, Oleg here Koshel, Vitaly here Koshikova, Olena here Koshiw, Isobel here, here, here Kosse, Alina here Kostiuk, Yuriy here Kostyantynivka here Kovalenko, Iryna here Kozak, Dmitry here Kramatorsk here, here, here, here, here Krasne village school here, here, here Krasnoarmiisk here Kravchenko, Yuriy here Kravchuk, Leonid here Kremlin, Russian government in the here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Moscow, Russian government in; Putin, Vladimir; Russian Federation; Russian military Kryvonozhko, Lieutenant General Anatoliy here, here, here Kryvoruchko, General Serhiy here Kuchma, Leonid here, here, here, here, here Kukharchenko, Colonel Viktor here Kuleba, Dmytro here, here Kulish, Andriy here Kvartal 95 here, here Kyiv city here, here, here, here air strikes, October (2022) here bomb shelters here central railway station here checkpoints here distribution of rifles to civilians here energy conservation here first strikes against (2022) here, here, here Lenin statue toppled here pre-war atmosphere (2022) here road and traffic signs here summertime, post-siege (2022) here Tymoshenko protests here see also Battle of Kyiv (2022); Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity Kyiv City State Administration here, here, here Kyiv Post here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Kyiv, Ukrainian government in here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity; Kuchma, Leonid; Kyiv city; Ukraine; Yanukovych, Viktor; Yushchenko, Viktor; Zelensky, Volodymyr Kyivan Rus here Kyivskiye Vedomosti here Kyrpach, Lyudmyla and Oleksandr here languages, Russian and Ukrainian here, here, here, here Lenin statue toppled, Kyiv here Leninopad here Levin, Maks here ‘little green men’ here, here, here, here Livadia Palace, Crimea here LiveJournal blog here, here Lopushanska, Mariana here Luhansk here, here, here, here, here, here, here morgue and hospital here Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lukyanchenko, Oleksandr here Lukyanov, Mykola here Lutsenko, Ihor here Lviv here, here Lyagin, Roman here, here Lyashko, Oleh here, here Lyman here Macron, Emmanuel here Maidan camp settlement here Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 here, here search for the missile launch site here Maloletka, Evgeniy here Malyar, Hanna here Malyovana, Viktoria here Malyshev, Mikhail here Mamchur, Colonel Yuli here Manafort, Paul here Mariinka here, here Marinovka here Maritime Guards of the Border Guard Service, Ukrainian here Mariupol here attack and Russian siege (2022) here, here, here Donbas war (2014) here police station shootout here Ukrainian Navy here Markosian, Olena here Markushyn, Oleksandr here, here Martinovskaya, Vera here Mashable here Matchenko, Andriy here Matsuka, Oleksiy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Mazur, Valentina here McDonald’s here medals of honor here, here, here Medvedchuk, Viktor here, here, here, here Medvedev, Dmitry here, here, here Mejlis here, here Men’s Day here mental health issues, veteran here Merkel, Angela here, here Mezhyhirya estate, Yanukovych’s here Miller, Christopher here accommodation in Artemivsk here in Ana-Yurt, Crimea (2014) here Artemivsk library English club here, here Artwinery, Artemivsk here attacked by Cossacks in Crimea here banned from the DNR and LNR here Battle of Donetsk Airport (2014) here checkpoint run-ins here City Hall in Artemivsk here, here in Crimea (2014) here, here, here in Crimea (2022) here detained by masked rebel fighters here detained by Strelkov here in the Donbas (2014) here, here in the Donbas (2019–22) here, here, here, here, here the Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity here, here exploring the Donbas here first strikes against Ukraine (February 2022) here food in Artemivsk here friends in Artemivsk here, here, here ‘Fuel Duel’ Kyiv Post article here interview with Oleksandr Turchynov here interviews with Volodymyr Zelensky here joins the United States Peace Corps here Krasne village school here, here, here in Kyiv (2022–23) here, here, here, here, here, here in Kyiv (2013–14) here, here Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 here, here in Mariupol here Ministry of Education meeting in Artemivsk here missile strikes against Kramatorsk here, here neighbors in Artemivsk here nightlife and celebrations in Artemivsk here Peace Corps writing grants here, here politics in Artemivsk here Russian and Ukrainian languages here, here, here, here, here Russian Cossack bomb-disposal squad here Russian-Ukrainian Interregional Economic Forum here salary and cost of living in Artemivsk here, here salt mines in Artemivsk here, here uncovering Strelkov’s records here, here visits kopanki illegal mines here Milley, General Mark here Ministry of Education, Ukraine here Ministry of the Interior, Ukraine here Minsk I/Minsk Protocol here, here, here Minsk II/Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements here, here, here, here, here missile systems development, Ukrainian here Moldova here Monastyrsky, Denis here morgue, Donetsk here Moroz, Igor here, here, here, here, here, here Moscow, Russian government in here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here The Moscow Times here Moskva here, here, here murder and disappearances of journalists here, here, here, here Musiy, Oleh here Mykolaivka here Nalyvaichenko, Valentyn here Natasha (CM’s friend in Artemivsk) here, here National Guard, Ukrainian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here National Memory Union here National Security and Defense Council, Ukrainian here, here Navy, Ukrainian here Nayyem, Mustafa here, here, here Nazar, Natalia here Nazi Germany here, here, here, here, here, here, here occupation of Artemivsk here New Citizen here New York Times here, here New York, Ukraine here Nicholas II, Tsar here Night Wolves biker group here Nihoyan, Serhiy here Nikolaychuk, Andriy here NKVD, DNR here Normandy Format Group here North American Treaty Organization (NATO) here, here, here Novosti Donbassa here, here, here, here, here, here, here Novy Stil here nuclear fuel supplies here Nuland, Victoria here, here Nykyforov here Obama, Barack here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Obolon district, Kyiv here, here Odesa here, here Odnorih, Halyna here ‘Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow,’ Ukrainian battle hymn here Okean Elzy here, here Oksana and Daria (displaced Mariupol residents) here Oleksiivna, Katerina here Olenivka prison here oligarchs, Ukrainian here, here, here, here, here Oliphant, Roland here, here, here openDemocracy here Oplot here Opposition Bloc – For Life party here Opytne here Orange Revolution here, here, here, here Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) here, here Osmolovska, Aliona here Ostaltsev, Leonid here, here Paevska, Julia ‘Taira’ here Palace of Culture, Mariupol here Pan, Cor here Panchenko, Valentina here Paradise nightclub, Artemivsk here Parasiuk, Volodymyr here Party of Regions here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity; Yanukovych, Viktor Parubiy, Andriy here, here Paton Walsh, Nick here Patriot of Ukraine here Patrushev, Nikolai here Pavlov, Arsen here Peter the Great here Petsa, Myroslava here Pichko, Maria and Oleksiy here, here Pinchuk, Viktor here, here Podufalov, Pavel here Pokrovsk here, here Poland/Polish people here, here, here, here, here, here police force, Ukrainian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here war time recruits in Kyiv here station shootout, Mariupol here Ponomarev, Vyacheslav here Poroshenko, Petro here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD here Potemkin demonstrations here Povalyaeva, Svitlana here Pravda here presidential election (2014), Ukrainian here presidential election (2019), Ukrainian here press/media bribes here censorship here, here, here control in the Donbas here, here Priazovskii rabochii newspaper here Prigozhin, Evgeny here, here prisoner exchanges here, here Prisoners of War here, here, here, here, here, here, here Privolnoye infantry base, Crimea here pro-Kyiv militia in the Donbas (2014) here Prokhanov, Alexander here propaganda, Russian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Pukach, Oleksiy here Purgin, Andrei here, here Pushilin, Denis here Putin, Vladimir here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here announces ‘special military operation’ (2022) here, here Customs Union proposal here, here invasion and annexation of Crimea here, here, here, here, here, here Kerch Strait bridge here, here Minsk II here, here, here, here Mariupol Port here and Volodymyr Zelensky here, here, here Wagner Group here, here see also Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR); Kremlin, Russian government in the; Moscow, Russian government in, Russian Federation; Russian Military Pyatt, Geoffrey here Pyrozhenko, Alexander here Radical Party here railway station, Kyiv central here Ramada Hotel, Donetsk here, here Ratushnyi, Roman and Taras here Red Army Day here Red Cross here refugee crisis here rent-a-crowd protests here, here, here Reporters Without Borders here Reva, Mayor Oleksiy here, here, here Revolution of Dignity see Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity Revolution on Granite here Reznikov, Oleksiy here, here RIA Novosti newspaper here ribbon of St George – kolorady here Right Sector here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here riot police – Berkut here, here, here, here, here, here Road Control here Rogozin, Dmitry here Roosevelt, Franklin D. here Rostislav ‘Slava’ (CM’s friend) here, here Ruslana here Russian Empire here Russian Federation here Customs Union proposal here, here, here, here expulsion of US Peace Corps here financial support for Ukraine here, here Federal Security Service (FSB) here, here, here, here, here, here, here nuclear fuel supplies here President Zelensky’s address to here pro-Russian demonstrations, Ukraine here propaganda here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Putin announces ‘special military operation’ here, here see also Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR); Kremlin, Russian government in the; Moscow, Russian government in; Putin, Vladimir; Russian military Russian military here, here atrocities in Bucha here attack and siege of Mariupol (2022) here, here attacks against civilians here, here, here, here Baltic Fleet at Mariupol here Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol here, here, here, here, here bomb the International Center for Peacekeeping and Security, Yavoriv here conflict escalation in the Donbas, pre-2022 war here detention and interrogation civilians here first attacks against Ukraine (2022) here injured soldiers pose as Ukrainians here Izyum – Donbas front line here Kyiv airstrikes October (2022) here in the Donbas (2014) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here in the Obolon district, Kyiv here, here invasion and annexation of Crimea here, here, here, here, here Privolnoye infantry base here Prisoners of War here, here recruitment of state prisoners here second day strikes on Kyiv (2022) here seizure of Ukrainian navy ships, Sevastopol here shoot down civilian Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 here, here target Antonov Airport here target Bakhmut here, here, here, here target Irpin district here unprepared and uninformed troops here US intelligence regarding here, here, here withdrawal from Kyiv Oblast here, here Russian Revolution here Russian Spring/pro-Russian demonstrations here Russian-Ukrainian Interregional Economic Forum here Russian Unity party here Rybachuk, Oleg here, here Rybakova, Iryna here, here, here, here, here Rychkov, Vadym here, here Rychkova, Tetiana ‘Tanya’ here saboteurs, Russian here, here, here Sadokhin, Colonel Ihor here St Michael’s Monastery and Cathedral, Kyiv here, here, here, here Salim, Mohd Ali bin Md here salt mines, Artemivsk here, here samooborona/volunteer security corps 97 here sanctions and travel bans, Western here, here, here, here Savur-Mohyla here, here Sea of Azov here Second World War here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Seddon, Max here, here Semenchenko, Semen here, here Sentsov, Oleg here Sergatskova, Katya here Sergei Prokofiev International Airport here Sergeyev, Fyodor ‘Artyom’ here Servant of the People party here Servant of the People TV program here, here Sevastopol, Crimea here, here, here Severodonetsk here Shakhtar Donetsk FC here Shanghai here, here Shevchenko, Petro here Shevchenko, Taras here, here Shevchuk, Oleg here Shmyhal, Denys here Sikorski, Radosław here Simmonds, Julian here Sisenko, Oleksandra here Sizov, Vitaliy here Skibitsky, General Vadym here Skuratovsky, Ivan here Slava (CM’s friend from Artemivsk) here, here, here, here, here Slavov, Dmytro here Slavutych warship, Ukrainian here Slok, Gary here Slovyansk here, here, here Snake Island border guards here Sneider, Noah here, here, here, here, here Snizhne here Sobytiya newspaper here Social–National Party of the Ukraine (SNPU) here Sokolov, Nikolai Georgievich here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Soledar, Ukraine here, here sotnya units here, here South Ossetia here Soviet Air Force here Soviet Union here, here, here, here collapse of here, here, here, here Great Patriotic War/WWII here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here persecution and exile of Tatars here propaganda here Soviet-era weapons and vehicles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Ukraine as part of here, here war in Afghanistan here, here St Paul Pioneer Press here The St Petersburg Times here Stakhanov, Aleksey here Stalin, Joseph here, here, here, here, here statues and monuments here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Stefanchuk, Ruslan here Steinmeier, Frank-Walter here Stepanov, Anatoliy here, here, here Stoyanov, Serhiy here Strashko, Nina here Strutynska, Senior Lieutenant Valentina here, here, here Strutynskyi, Yevhen here student newspaper, Donetsk National University here student protesters here, here, here, here supply runs to troops, civilian here Supreme Court, Ukraine here Surkov, Vladislav here Surovikin, General Sergei here surzhyk here, here, here Svoboda here, here, here, here, here Sybirtsev, Oleksandr here Sydor, Father Ivan here Syrova, Tetyana here Taganrog prison, Russia here Tarasenko, Andriy here Tatars, Crimean here, here, here, here Ternopil corvette, Ukrainian here Territorial Defense Force here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here The Times here Thorez, Maurice here Time magazine here Tinkalyuk, Ruslan here, here, here titushki here, here, here, here, here Torez here, here, here trade agreement proposal, EU here Trade Unions Building, Kyiv here, here Transfiguration of The Lord Pentecostal Church, Slovyansk here Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine here Trump, Donald here Trusov, Platoon Commander Valentin here tryzub here, here Tryzub (paramilitary group) here, here, here Tsybulska, Liubov here, here Tsyupa, Oksana here Turchynov, Oleksandr here, here, here, here, here, here Turevich, Anatoliy here Twitter here, here, here, here Tyahnybok, Oleh here, here, here, here, here, here Tychyna, Private Ihor here Tykhomirova, Nina here Tymoshenko, Yevheniya here Tymoshenko, Yulia here, here, here, here, here, here, here Tyshchenko family here UDAR party here UEFA European Football Championship (2012) here Ukraine artificial famine/Holodomor here declaration of independence (1991) here, here, here decommunization program here emergence of nation here first strikes against (February 2022) here HIV/AIDS epidemic here illegal mining industry here Independence Day celebrations (2014) here industrial water pollution here journalist murders and disappearances here, here, here, here Minsk I here, here, here Minsk II here, here, here, here nuclear fuel supplies here Orange Revolution here, here, here as part of the Soviet Union here, here, here pre-war atmosphere (2022) here presidential campaign and election (2019) here presidential election (2014) here pro-Russian demonstrations (2014) here Putin’s Customs Union proposal here, here, here, here relationship with Crimea here relationship with the European Union here, here response to US intelligence warnings here, here Tymoshenko protests here see also individual places by name; Artemivsk; Crimea; the Donbas; Donetsk; Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR); Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity; Kyiv city; Kyiv, Ukrainian government in; Miller, Christopher; Ukrainian military Ukrainian Front here Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) here, here Ukrainian military here, here airborne forces here, here, here, here airstrike on Snizhne here Antonov Airport attack here Battle for Bakhmut (2022) here, here Battle of Debaltseve (2015) here, here Battle of Donetsk Airport (2014) here, here Battle of Ilovaisk (2014) here, here Central Air Command here, here death of two brothers here defending Irpin here dismantled by Yanukovych here forces at Belbek air force base, Crimea here forces at Privolnoye infantry base, Crimea here, here front line, Izyum here funerals and memorial services here Independence Day celebrations (2014) here Maritime Guards of the Border Guard Service here the navy here, here outbreak of war (2022) here pre-2022 war in the Donbas here Prisoners of War here, here, here, here, here Putin addresses here retake Slovyansk here, here siege of Mariupol (2022) here surrender in the Donbas here take out Moskva, Russian flagship here, here Tanya Rychkova’s supply runs here, here volunteer food supplies here, here weapons development here, here Western arms and ammunition supplies here withdrawal from Crimea here withdrawal from Debaltseve here see also Berkut; National Guard; police force, Ukrainian; Security Service of Ukraine (SBU); Territorial Defense Force Ukrainian War of Independence (1917–21) here Ukrainska Pravda newspaper here, here, here Ukrainskiy Vybor organization here Ukravtodor here ultranationalists, Ukraine here, here, here, here, here United Kingdom here, here United Nations here, here United States Embassy, Ukraine here United States of America here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘Fuck the EU’ - Victoria Nuland YouTube conversation here intelligence warnings to the Ukraine here, here, here, here offer to evacuate Zelensky here sanctions and travel bans here, here, here United States Peace Corps here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Unity Day bus attack (2014), Donetsk here Unity Day clashes, Kyiv (2014) here Vakarchuk, Svyatoslav here Valeryevna, Maria here Varenytsia, Inna here, here Varianitsyn, Second Captain Roman here Vasylkiv here, here Vechernyaya Odesa here Velyka Novosilka here Verbytsky, Yuriy here Veremiy, Vyacheslav here Verkhnya Krynka here Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine parliament here, here, here, here, here Vesti newspaper here Victory Day celebrations and referendum here, here Vika (CM’s language tutor and friend) here Viktor (kopanki miner) here Vindman, Alexander here Vitaliy (apprentice surgeon in Kyiv) here Vitko, Vice-Admiral Aleksandr here VKontakte here, here Vlasova, Anastasia here, here Volodymyr (pro-Russian Crimean militiaman) here Voronenko, Oleksandr here, here, here Vpered newspaper here Vyacheslav, Yarko here Vyshyvana, Ahafiya here Vyshyvaniy, Kyrylo and Vasyl here vyshyvanky shirts here, here, here Wagner Group here, here war crimes/atrocities, Russian here Warners, Tom here water pollution, industrial here water supplies here weapon depot, Paraskoviivka here, here weapon supplies, Western here, here Webb, Isaac here, here, here Westinghouse here White Hammerhere Wild Ducks volunteer unit here Wings of Phoenix here Women’s Day here women’s sotnya here writing grants, Peace Corps here, here Yakymenko, Oleksandr here Yalta Conference (1945) here Yanukovych, Viktor here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Euromaidan protests and revolt here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Mezhyhirya estate and destruction of state secrets here Yarosh, Dmytro here, here, here Yatchenko, Sergei here Yatsenyuk, Arseniy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Yavoriv here Yelets, Volodymyr here Yermak, Andriy here, here, here YouTube here, here, here, here, here, here Yurash, Sviatoslav here, here Yushchenko, Viktor here, here, here Zahoor, Kamaliya here Zahoor, Mohammad here, here Zaitsev, Denis ‘Raven’ here Zakharchenko, Alexander here Zakharchenko, Vitaliy here Zaldastanov, Aleksandr here Zaluzhny, Valery here, here, here Zaporozhzhia here Zarivna, Daria here Zavtra newspaper here Zelenska, Olena here, here, here Zelensky, Volodymyr here address to the Russian federation here addresses the Ukraine here, here, here, here, here, here, here civilian mobilization here Donald Trump scandal here economic forum in Mariupol (2020) here outbreak of war (Feb 2022) here, here presidential campaign (2019) here press conference (Jan 2022) here refuses option to evacuate Kyiv here response to US warnings about Russia here television career here, here visits remains of Bucha here and Vladimir Putin here, here, here Zhilin, Evgeny here Zhilkin ‘the Body Collector’, Yaroslav here Zhyzneuski, Mikhail here Ziyatdinov, Aziz here, here Zverkovsky, Danil here BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This electronic edition first published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Christopher Miller 2023 Christopher Miller has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work Map credits: Ukraine © PeterHermesFurian/Getty Images; The Donbas © Goran_tek-en, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons; Crimea © PeterHermesFurian/Getty Images All rights reserved.

Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 9 Mar 2000

If we break down global boundaries and open universal contact in our global village, how will we prevent the spread of disease and corruption? This anxiety is most clearly revealed with respect to the AIDS pandemic.2 The lightning speed of the spread of AIDS in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia demonstrated the new dangers of global contagion. As AIDS has been recognized first as a disease and then as a global pandemic, there have developed maps of its sources and spread that often focus on central Africa and Haiti, in terms reminiscent of the colonialist imaginary: unrestrained sexuality, moral corruption, and lack of hygiene. Indeed, the dominant discourses of AIDS prevention have been all about hygiene: We must avoid contact and use protection.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
by David Deutsch
Published 30 Jun 2011

This is often held up as an indictment of – to give it its broad context – Enlightenment hubris. We need lose only one battle in this war of science against bacteria and their weapon, evolution (so the argument goes), to be doomed, because our other ‘so-called progress’ – such as cheap worldwide air travel, global trade, enormous cities – makes us more vulnerable than ever before to a global pandemic that could exceed the Black Death in destructiveness and even cause our extinction. But all triumphs are temporary. So to use this fact to reinterpret progress as ‘so-called progress’ is bad philosophy. The fact that reliance on specific antibiotics is unsustainable is only an indictment from the point of view of someone who expects a sustainable lifestyle.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

She didn’t know me from Adam, and she could have been forgiven for rejecting the assignment. I’m glad she didn’t. Stephanie Frerich’s stewardship of this project was the greatest blessing. She read every line of this book several times, devotedly and doggedly pushed my thinking, and fought for this project in the face of delays and amid a global pandemic. There is not enough space to point out every error she corrected or weak sentence she strengthened, and if this book manages to tell the PayPal story faithfully and well, it is because of her efforts. She was what every author hopes for: an editor who cares about the project as much as the author does.

The Economic Weapon
by Nicholas Mulder
Published 15 Mar 2021

The interwar history of sanctions is instructive for our twenty-first-century world in another way as well. Sanctions exploited the economic networks of interwar globalization but ultimately undermined its political foundations. Today, as the world economy reels from financial crises, nationalism, trade wars, and a global pandemic, sanctions are aggravating existing tensions within globalization. That sanctions are intended to promote international stability is, unfortunately, no defense against this risk: unintended negative consequences can be just as destructive as premeditated harms. Interwar history should sharpen our sense of what the stabilizing power of provision could have done if it had not been overshadowed by the destabilizing effects of deprivation, real and imagined.

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else
by Jordan Ellenberg
Published 14 May 2021

Kehrling, so they must be acquainted. And as it happens I myself also know Mr. Kehrling quite well. Apart from the low figure for the world’s population, this could have been written in 2020. The anxiety and unsettledness the narrator feels is the same one we now feel, in the middle of a global pandemic, and the same one Guare’s characters feel, holed up in their Upper East Side apartment. It is an anxiety about the geometry of the world we live in. We evolved to understand a world where what was near us was what we could see, hear, and touch. The geometry we inhabit now, and the one Karinthy in the 1920s was already having to get used to, is different.

Alpha Trader
by Brent Donnelly
Published 11 May 2021

While a strong US economic data point should be a catalyst for a higher dollar, for example, there are plenty of days when data comes in strong and the USD goes down. There are many types of market catalyst. Here is a list of some biggies, working from most macro to least. Market catalysts 1. International geopolitics (e.g., trade war, G20 Summit, global pandemic, OPEC meeting, military conflict) 2. Domestic politics (elections, coups, scandals, passage of new laws, court decisions) 3. Central bank action or speeches 4. Economic data 5. Company news a. Earnings b. Analyst up/downgrades c. Personnel changes (especially CEO or CFO) d. Capital structure (dividends, buybacks, secondary issuance) 6.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by Greta Thunberg
Published 14 Feb 2023

Assuming this figure applies beyond his studies, then if 25 per cent of the population visibly change their practices, norms and behaviours, the climate movement’s victories should be more widely accepted, durable and effective. Of course, this may seem like a much harder task than organizing 3.5 per cent of the population for mass protests. But research shows that the 25 per cent threshold can be reached with surprising speed. In times of crisis, such as a global pandemic, our societies can quickly change our behaviours and practices, for example wearing a mask, washing our hands and physically distancing ourselves from others. As with public health, when it comes to climate justice, we have a solid understanding of what behaviours need to change directly – which industries we support, what types of energy we buy, how we heat and cool our homes, what we eat, where and how we travel, how we process waste, how much we invest in bold, sustainable technologies and programmes, and how often we consider sustainability in our day-to-day choices – on a global scale.

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023

Boomers, who dominated the culture for decades, are retiring at a rapid clip. Gen X’ers are moving into top leadership positions, sometimes reluctantly. Millennials are entering the prime of life and are seeking more responsibility. Gen Z’ers are finding their voice and understanding their influence. Polars are overcoming getting their start during a global pandemic, with the potential for strength and resilience born of adversity. Mining data collected across decades gives us a broader and more accurate picture of generational differences than ever before. That data clearly shows that attitudes, personality traits, behaviors, education, and the speed of life have all changed tremendously over these six generations.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

I say all of this without meaning to criticize; there were good reasons for Obama’s circumspection when it came to the Middle East. Elsewhere, such as in eastern Europe and Asia, Obama actually reinforced America’s military presence to balance Russia and China, and his use of the American military to stem the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was decisive in preventing a global pandemic. So the notion that America under Obama just withdrew from the world is nonsense. But there was a pulling back in the Middle East, and it had two major consequences: it abetted the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, and it contributed to the massive outflow of refugees from that region into Europe.

On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads
by Tim Cope
Published 23 Sep 2013

This not only provided military advantage but also helped prevent vassal states from revolting by keeping the people happy with stability and thriving economies. Just as this complex network could carry a messenger or Silk Road trader from Mongolia to Europe without affray, it equally aided the passage of the plague. Just like a global pandemic would do today, the plague paralyzed the flow of trade, isolating cities and countries, and eventually entire continents. Mongolian aristocracies found themselves with depleted militaries, unable to procure the same kind of taxes that had funded the empire, and more outnumbered by subjects than ever before.

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order
by Rush Doshi
Published 24 Jun 2021

[近期学界关于‘百年未有之大变局’研究综述].” 38“Xi Jinping’s First Mention of the ‘Two Guidances’ Has Profound Meaning [习近平首提‘两个引导’有深意].” 39Zhang Yuyan [张宇燕], “Understanding the Great Changes Unseen in a Century [理解百年未有之大变局].” 40Zhang Yunling [张蕴岭] et al., “How to Recognize and Understand the Century’s Great Changes [如何认识和理解百年大变局].” 41Ibid.Zhang Yunling [张蕴岭] et al. 42“Deeply Understand the Big Test of Epidemic Prevention and Control [深刻认识疫情防控这次大考],” People’s Daily [人民日报], April 23, 2020. 43Chen Qi [陈琪], “The Impact of the Global Coronavirus Pandemic on the Great Changes Unseen in a Century [全球新冠疫情对百年未有大变局的影响],” Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China [中华人民共和国商务部], April 22, 2020, http://chinawto.mofcom.gov.cn/article/br/bs/202004/20200402957839.shtml. 44“Peking University Center for American Studies Successfully Held an Online Seminar on U.S. and China Relations under the Global Pandemic [北京大学美国研究中心成功举办‘全球疫情下的美国与中美关系’线上研讨会],” School of International Studies, Peking University [北京大学国际关系学院], April 13, 2020, https://www.sis.pku.edu.cn/news64/1324227.htm. 45Chen Jimin, “COVID-19 Hits International System,” China-US Focus, April 27, 2020, https://www.chinausfocus.com/foreign-policy/covid-19-hits-international-system. 46Wu Baiyi, “American Illness.” 47“Deeply Understand the Big Test of Epidemic Prevention and Control [深刻认识疫情防控这次大考].” 48Yuan Peng [袁鹏], “The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Great Changes Unseen in a Century [新冠疫情与百年变局],” Contemporary International Relations [现代国际关系], no. 5 (June 2020): 1–6. 49Shi Zehua [史泽华], “Why Has American Populism Risen at This Time [美国民粹主义何以此时兴起],” U.S.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

This mix almost perfectly describes the conditions found in Southeast Asian countries like China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam (China alone is home to about half the world’s pigs34). These countries are very often the source for the flu, both the annual strains and the more unusual varieties that can potentially become global pandemics.* So they have been the subject of most of the medical community’s attention, especially in recent years because of the fear over another strain of the virus. H5N1, better known as bird flu or avian flu, has been simmering for some years in East Asia and could be extremely deadly if it mutated in the wrong way.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

Journal of Economic Perspectives 18: 51–74. Murphey, Rhoads. 1999. Ottoman warfare, 1500–1700. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Murray, Charles. 2012. Coming apart: the state of white America. New York: Crown Forum. Murray, Christopher J. L., et al. 2006. “Estimation of potential global pandemic influenza mortality on the basis of vital registry data from the 1918–20 pandemic: a quantitative analysis.” Lancet 368: 2211–2218. Murray, Sarah C. 2013. “Trade, imports, and society in early Greece: 1300–900 B.C.E.” PhD thesis, Stanford University. Nafziger, Steven, and Lindert, Peter. 2013.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald
Published 24 Apr 2017

In 2010, he did what few of his colleagues have ever done, which is to admit that the School actually had a responsibility that it has failed to live up to. “If you look at the kinds of problems that our society faces, not only American society, but global society—sustainability, climate change, global pandemics, entrenched poverty—these are issues that will require business to be part of the solution,” he said. “But business will not be part of the solution if it is populated by individuals who have a very narrow conception of what their role is, who have a very narrow view about how business fits into the larger institutions of society.

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
by David France
Published 29 Nov 2016

If you knew what to look for, you saw in their faces the burden of a shared past, the years and years of similar services. This was what survivors of the plague looked like. The crowd swelled to five hundred. Some among them were adorned in mementos: faded protest buttons or T-shirts with militant slogans. This was the generation that fought AIDS from the dawn of the global pandemic. Most had been members or supporters of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP—the radical protest organization that started in New York City but went on to count 148 chapters in 19 countries, with perhaps 10,000 members at its peak. The movement collapsed in the mid-1990s, when the advent of effective medicine finally staunched much of the dying.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

Major platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are overflowing with content that is harmful, dangerous, and often illegal. Few can dispute that these platforms have become go-to destinations for the spread of disinformation and the manipulation of public opinion on critical issues ranging from global pandemics to vaccines, and from migration to democratic elections. The role of social media in the January 6 Capitol attack vividly brought this reality home to Americans; however, one can argue that this is just the culmination of a trend that has been building for a long time—precisely because there has been too little, and not too much, content removal.

Wanderers: A Novel
by Chuck Wendig
Published 1 Jul 2019

Strife was born in its wake. It conjured fear and paranoia, and those things internally led to localized violence, then rioting, then civil wars. And that was something Benji had only seen on a local scale, mostly in Africa. But White Mask was more than just localized pockets of Ebola. It was a global pandemic. A hundred thousand dead days ago. Double that now, probably. It was moving faster than people could keep up. It wasn’t just the dead. It was the fact so many of the living were infected—many that wouldn’t know it yet for a month or more. What would happen then? Yes, people would die.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Published 1 May 2017

The UN and the dispatching of multinational peacekeeping forces. International agreements to hinder trafficking of blood diamonds, elephant tusks, rhino horns, leopard skins, and humans. Agencies that collect money to aid disaster victims anywhere on the planet, that facilitate intercontinental adoption of orphans, that battle global pandemics and send medical personnel to any place of conflict. Yes, I know, I’m an utter naïf if I think laws are universally enforced. For example, in 1981 Mauritania became the last country to ban slavery; nevertheless, today roughly 20 percent of its people are slaves, and the government has prosecuted a total of one slave owner.1 I recognize that little has changed in many places; I have spent decades in Africa living around people who believe that epileptics are possessed and that the organs of murdered albinos have healing powers, where beating of wives, children, and animals is the norm, five-year-olds herd cattle and haul firewood, pubescent girls are clitoridectomized and given to old men as third wives.

State of Emergency: The Way We Were
by Dominic Sandbrook
Published 29 Sep 2010

Only when she has begged the stone for forgiveness – and received by telepathy some home truths about man’s greed and pollution – is the terrible process reversed, the world apparently having been restored to ‘balance’ between nature and machine – although what that means is anybody’s guess.42 In April 1975, only a month after the conclusion of The Changes, the BBC showed the first episode of what would become the last word in eco-catastrophe dramas. Thanks to its terrifying global-pandemic opening, its earnest back-to-the-land message, its endless shots of Volvos trundling down country lanes, and its cast of balding men in parkas and feisty women in dungarees, Survivors captured the spirit of the mid-1970s better than almost any other cultural product of the day. It follows the adventures of three plucky survivors – Greg, an engineer, Abby, a middle-class housewife, and Jenny, a young secretary – in the aftermath of a devastating pandemic that has wiped out the vast majority of the world’s population.

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition
by Robert N. Proctor
Published 28 Feb 2012

Viewed from afar, one would almost think that cigarette makers have been granted a license to kill. 29 Globalizing Death Tobacco exports should be expanded aggressively because Americans are smoking less. DAN QUAYLE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1990 We stand on the threshold of a global pandemic of tobacco-related diseases that is nothing short of colossal. ALLAN BRANDT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 2007 Humans are naturally inquisitive, and it would probably be hard to find an animal, vegetable, or mineral that has not, at some time or another, been put to the inhalation or ingestion test.

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
by Laurie Garrett
Published 15 Feb 2000

Examples of such lurking microbial threats, and humanity’s apparent impotence to deal with them, abounded at the millennium, the three most potentially catastrophic being HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis. Combined in 1998 the three microbes claimed five million lives, according to the World Health Organization.97 HIV was, by the close of 1999, a lightning rod for protest against pharmaceutical companies, TRIPS, and global inequities in public health. The forecast for the future of the global pandemic was very, very grim. Already, according to the UNAIDS Programme, the virus’s impact on Africa was “catastrophic, and the scenario will only worsen unless global leaders work together to invest more—much more—in prevention efforts and programmes to address the multitude of social and economic problems that AIDS has wrought.”98 Experts envisioned nations obliterated by the world’s newest plague, held out little (if any) hope of a cure for the viral disease, and differed significantly at the end of the century only on one point: how many more decades would pass before an effective, affordable HIV vaccine could be used worldwide.