lockdown

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description: an emergency protocol that restricts movement, often implemented during public health crises like pandemics

256 results

pages: 652 words: 172,428

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

Has Lost More Than 200,000 People to COVID-19,” NPR, September 22, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/09/22/911934489/enormous-and-tragic-u-s-has-lost-more-than-200–000-people-to-covid-19. 58. “Journalists Detained, Assaulted in India During COVID-19 Lockdown,” Committee to Protect Journalists, April 28, 2020, https://cpj.org/2020/04/journalists-detained-assaulted-in-india-during-cov/. 59. Christophe Jaffrelot and Jean Thomas Martelli, “Current Crisis Consolidates Populist Rapport Between a Leader and a Fictional Representation of People,” Indian Express, April 29, 2020, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/india-covid-19-coronavirus-lockdown-narendra-modi-6383721/; Aparna Sundar and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, “COVID-19 in Narendra Modi’s India: Virulent Politics and Mass Desperation,” The Wire, August 1, 2020, https://thewire.in/health/covid-19-in-narendra-modis-india-virulent-politics-and-mass-desperation; Prem Shankar Jha, “Modi’s ‘Stimulus Package’ Is a Gigantic Confidence Trick Played on the People of India,” The Wire, May 18, 2020, https://thewire.in/political-economy/modis-stimulus-package-is-a-gigantic-confidence-trick-played-on-the-people-of-india; Subrata Nagchoudhury and Shilpa Jamkhandikar, “BJP, Courting Votes in Bihar State, Promises Free COVID-19 Vaccines,” Reuters, October 22, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavius-india-cases-idUSKBN2770EL. 60.

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News & World Report, April 17, 2020, https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-04-17/rwanda-uses-drones-to-help-catch-lockdown-transgressors; Jason Beaubien, “Why Rwanda Is Doing Better Than Ohio When It Comes to Controlling COVID-19,” NPR, July 15, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/07/15/889802561/a-covid-19-success-story-in-rwanda-free-testing-robot-caregivers; “COVID-19 Response in Rwanda: Use of Drones in Community Awareness,” World Health Organization Rwanda, July 20, 2020, https://www.afro.who.int/news/covid-19-response-rwanda-use-drones-community-awareness; Bariyo, “Rwanda’s Aggressive Approach to Covid Wins Plaudits—and Warnings”; “Rwandan Drones Take to air with COVID-19 Messages,” ADF Magazine, September 30, 2020, https://adf-magazine.com/2020/09/rwandan-drones-take-to-air-with-covid-19-messages/. 5. Beaubien, “Why Rwanda Is Doing Better Than Ohio.” 6. “Rwanda Re-Imposes Strict Lockdown in Capital After COVID-19 Cases Surge,” Reuters, January 19, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-rwanda/rwanda-re-imposes-strict-lockdown-in-capital-after-covid-19-cases-surge-idUSKBN29O0WT; “COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering,” Johns Hopkins University & Medicine, Coronavirus Resource Center, accessed April 3, 2021, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html; “Mortality Analyses,” Johns Hopkins University & Medicine, Coronavirus Resource Center, accessed April 3, 2021, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality. 7.

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Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, “2020 Goalkeepers Report: COVID-19 a Global Perspective,” Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, September 2020, https://www.gatesfoundation.org/goalkeepers/report/2020-report/#GlobalPerspective; “The Pandemic Is Plunging Millions Back into Extreme Poverty,” The Economist, September 26, 2020, https://www.economist.com/international/2020/09/26/the-pandemic-is-plunging-millions-back-into-extreme-poverty. 57. “Wuhan Lockdown ‘Unprecedented,’ Shows Commitment to Contain Virus: WHO Representative in China,” Reuters, January 23, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/wuhan-lockdown-unprecedented-shows-commitment-to-contain-virus-who-representative-in-china-idUSKBN1ZM1G9. 58. Sharon Chen and Claire Che, “WHO Says China Actions Blunted Virus Spread, Leading to Drop,” Bloomberg, February 24, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-24/who-says-china-lockdown-blunted-new-epidemic-leading-to-decline. 59.

pages: 561 words: 138,158

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

Woodbury, “How Many Americans Have Lost Jobs with Employer Health Coverage During the Pandemic?” Commonwealth Fund, October 7, 2020. 21. H. Meyers-Belkin, “ ‘Today Is Wonderful’: Relief in Lagos as Nigeria Emerges from Covid-19 Lockdown,” France24, May 5, 2020. 22. E. Akinwotu, “ ‘People Are More Scared of Hunger’: Coronavirus Is Just One More Threat in Nigeria,” Guardian, May 15, 2020. 23. O. Sunday, “Gangs Terrorised Africa’s Largest City in Coronavirus Lockdown. Vigilantes Responded,” South China Morning Post, May 18, 2020. N. Orjinmo and A. Ulohotse, “Lagos Unrest: The Mystery of Nigeria’s Fake Gangster Attacks,” BBC, April 15, 2020. 24.

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OECD Economic Outlook, Volume 2020; https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/oecd-economic-outlook_16097408. 52. R. Carroll, S. Jones, L. Tondo, K. Connolly, and K. Gillet, “Covid-19 Crisis Stokes European Tensions over Migrant Labour,” Guardian, May 11, 2020. M. Andriescu, “Under Lockdown Amid COVID-19 Pandemic, Europe Feels the Pinch from Slowed Intra-EU Labor Mobility,” Migration Policy Institute, May 1, 2020. 53. M. Weisskircher, J. Rone, and M. S. Mendes, “The Only Frequent Flyers Left: Migrant Workers in the EU in Times of Covid-19,” Open Democracy, April 20, 2020. 54. S. Jha, “Migrant Workers Head Home in Coronavirus Lockdown, Exposed and Vulnerable,” Business Standard, March 26, 2020. 55.

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Rousseaux, “Coronavirus: 35 millions de Français devant l’allocution de Macron, un record d’audience absolu,” Le Parisien, March 17, 2020. 22. N. Aspinwall, “Coronavirus Lockdown Launches Manila Into Pandemonium,” Foreign Policy, March 14, 2020. 23. K. Varagur, “Indonesia’s Government Was Slow to Lock Down, So Its People Took Charge,” National Geographic, May 13, 2020. 24. M. Afzal, “Pakistan Teeters on the Edge of Potential Disaster with the Coronavirus,” Brookings, March 27, 2020. 25. M. Mourad and A. Lewis, “Egypt Declares Two-Week Curfew to Counter Coronavirus,” Reuters, March 24, 2020. 26. D. Pilling, “No Lockdown, Few Ventilators, but Ethiopia Is Beating Covid-19,” Financial Times, May 27, 2020. 27.

pages: 432 words: 143,491

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

‘Oxford hospital worker’s PPE fears before coronavirus death’, Oxford Mail, 21 May 2020. 12: Worst of All Worlds 1. ‘The government is flying half blind into the next phase of the coronavirus crisis’, Observer, 3 May 2020. 2. ‘Exclusive: Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover’, Telegraph, 5 May 2020. 3. ‘“Complacent” UK draws global criticism for Covid-19 response’, Guardian, 6 May 2020. 4. ‘Pressure on Dominic Cummings to quit over lockdown breach’, Guardian, 22 May 2020. 5. ‘New witnesses cast doubt on Dominic Cummings’s lockdown claims’, Guardian, 23 May 2020. 6.

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Doctors make decisions on who will benefit from care every day, as part of normal clinical decision-making.’ A few weeks before our article was published, Simon Stevens, the NHS chief executive, had told an online discussion held by The Spectator magazine that the biggest mistake of the pandemic had been the late lockdown, which he blamed in part on ‘the absence of testing’. He said seven out of ten people of working age who died from the virus had picked up the infection before the full lockdown. ‘So that will turn out to be a crucial period,’ he concluded. However, the response to our article from his colleague was furious. Professor Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, said: ‘These untrue claims will be deeply offensive to NHS doctors, nurses, therapists and paramedics who have together cared for more than 110,000 severely ill hospitalised Covid patients during the first wave of the pandemic, as they continue to do so today.’

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‘Serious weaknesses in the UK’s current plans for suppressing covid-19 risk a second major outbreak’, BMJ, 5 June 2020. 8. ‘Coronavirus lockdown: Now it’s the economy, stupid’, The Sunday Times, 7 June 2020. 9. ‘Boris Johnson is tied up in knots over the coronavirus’, The Sunday Times, 14 June 2020. 10. ‘Coronavirus: Government accused of ignoring experts as top advisers absent from press briefings’, Independent, 15 June 2020. 11. ‘Coronavirus: WHO warns against further lifting of lockdown in England’, Guardian, 15 June 2020. 12. ‘Boris Johnson is tied up in knots over the coronavirus’, The Sunday Times, 14 June 2020. 13.

pages: 475 words: 127,389

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

Gulick et al., “Treatment with Indinavir, Zidovudine, and Lamivudine in Adults with Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection and Prior Antiretroviral Therapy,” New England Journal of Medicine 1997; 337: 734–739. 94 A.S. Fauci and R.W. Eisinger, “PEPFAR—15 Years and Counting the Lives Saved,” New England Journal of Medicine 2018; 378: 314–316. 7. Things Change 1 E. Gibney, “Coronavirus Lockdowns Have Changed the Way Earth Moves,” Nature, March 31, 2020.; T. Lecocq et al., “Global Quieting of High-Frequency Seismic Noise Due to COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown Measures,” Science, July 23, 2020. 2 L. Boyle, “Himalayas Seen for First Time in Decades from 125 Miles Away after Pollution Drop,” The Independent, April 8, 2020; India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative Air Pollution Collaborators, “The Impact of Air Pollution on Deaths, Disease Burden, and Life Expectancy across the States of India: The Global Burden of Disease Study 2017,” Lancet Planetary Health 2019; 3: e26–e39. 3 M.

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There has been some criticism of the Chinese standards for reporting cases (for instance, initially they did not include asymptomatic cases of infection in their counts) and of the honesty of the reporting (certainly, information about the earliest cases in Wuhan was suppressed).36 But the enormous reduction in cases once China mobilized to control the epidemic was an astonishing achievement from a public health point of view, even if some of the Chinese numbers were fuzzy. To be clear, China, and other countries that subsequently implemented their own lockdowns, had not eradicated the virus; it had merely temporarily stopped its spread. When the lockdowns were lifted, the virus would come back.37 My personal involvement with COVID-19 research began the day after Wuhan initiated its lockdown. On January 24, I was contacted by some Chinese colleagues with whom I had been collaborating for several years, analyzing mobile-phone data from China. Previously, we had been looking at how high-speed rail lines and earthquakes reshaped how people interacted with one another to form social networks, a topic of interest to me since 2001.

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Weinberger, et al., "Estimation of Excess Deaths Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States, March to May 2020," JAMA Internal Medicine, July 1, 2020. 87 G. He et al., “The Short-Term Impacts of COVID-19 Lockdown on Urban Air Pollution in China,” Nature Sustainability, July 7, 2020; R.K. Philip et al., “Reduction in Preterm Births during the COVID-19 Lockdown in Ireland: A Natural Experiment Allowing Analysis of Data from the Prior Two Decades,” medRxiv, June 5, 2020; G. Hedermann et al., “Changes in Premature Birth Rates during the Danish Nationwide COVID-19 Lockdown: A Nationwide Register-Based Prevalence Proportion Study,” medRxiv, May 23, 2020. 88 K.I. Bos et al., “A Draft Genome of Yersinia pestis from Victims of the Black Death,” Nature 2011; 478: 506–510. 89 F.M.

pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). Notes CHAPTER ONE: This is the Lonely Century 1 ‘Covid-19: One Third of Humanity under Virus Lockdown’, The Economic Times, 25 March 2020, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/covid-19-one-third-of-humanity-under-virus-lockdown/articleshow/74807030.cms?from=mdr; Mia Jankowicz, ‘More People Are Now in “Lockdown” Than Were Alive During World War II’, ScienceAlert, 25 March 2020, https://www.sciencealert.com/one-third-of-the-world-s-population-are-now-restricted-in-where-they-can-go. 2 Ido Efrati, ‘Calls to Israel’s Mental Health Hotlines Spike during Coronavirus Crisis’, Haaretz.com, 22 March 2020, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-calls-to-israel-s-mental-health-hotlines-spike-during-coronavirus-crisis-1.8698209?

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As you might have suspected, our smartphones and in particular social media have played an integral role: stealing our attention away from those around us, fuelling the worst within us so that we become ever more angry and tribal, making us behave ever more performatively and compulsively in pursuit of likes, retweets and follows, eroding our ability to communicate effectively or empathetically. This held true even during the coronavirus lockdown. For alongside the Pope live-streaming his daily Mass on Facebook, DJ D-Nice throwing a dance party attended by more than 100,000 people on Instagram, the springing up of local Facebook groups in which neighbours who’d never spoken to each other before shared ‘how to stay sane’ tips, Wi-Fi passwords and baby milk, racist attacks and hate speech escalated on social media, conspiracy theories circulated ever faster and marriage guidance counsellors told me of a spike in clients feeling lonely because their partners were now even more consumed than usual by their phones.41 Our smartphones and social media are just two pieces of the puzzle though.

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Whilst a survey conducted in April 2020 in the US also found significant increases in loneliness during lockdown, especially amongst millennials and Generation K. See, respectively, ‘Loneliness During Coronavirus’, Mental Health Foundation, 16 June 2020, https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/coronavirus/coping-with-loneliness; ‘Report: Loneliness and Anxiety During Lockdown’, SocialPro, April 2020, https://socialpronow.com/loneliness-corona/. 4 Peter Hille, ‘Coronavirus: German Phone Helplines at “Upper limits”’, DW.com, 24 March 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-german-phone-helplines-at-upper-limits/a-52903216. 5 Cigna, ‘Loneliness and the Workplace: 2020 U.S.

pages: 407 words: 119,073

Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future
by Ian Johnson
Published 26 Sep 2023

They talk of dropping out—“lying flat” or “running” away are two popular terms. But this alienation can quickly flip to action. The Covid lockdowns are one especially relevant example, when many people in this book, such as Ai Xiaoming and Jiang Xue, were thrust back to public prominence after years of being marginalized. On New Year’s Day 2023, for example, Jiang Xue published one of her most popular articles.2 It came a few weeks after a wave of protests across China helped convince the government to drop its draconian policy of pandemic lockdowns. She described the year of lockdowns and frustration, and the cry for freedom that young people had made, drawing on her wide reading of Eastern European intellectuals to make sense of China’s ossified political system.

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Through digital technologies, such as PDF-style magazines and books, downloadable videos, and other creative ways of bypassing censorship, they have produced easily shared works that challenge the Communist Party’s whitewashing of history. These technologies and stratagems have allowed China’s counter-historians to withstand intense government pressure. Many work quietly and privately when faced with suppression but jump into the public fray when the government is overwhelmed by mass unrest, such as during the Covid lockdowns between 2020 and 2022. Maybe just as important, digital technologies have allowed young Chinese to rediscover a lineage of like-minded people stretching back to the pre-history of the People’s Republic. Books that were once available only in foreign research libraries are now easily shared. Stories of heroic resistance fighters are documented on films that are circulated on the sly.

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They will point out that Ai Xiaoming is barred from leaving China, while Jiang Xue, as of writing this conclusion in 2023, had left the country to visit her daughter in Canada and possibly to work abroad. The Hong Kong publishers have been shut down and their books scattered across the globe. And during the Covid lockdowns, people rose up in more than twenty cities across China—Wuhan, Xi’an, Shanghai, Beijing—including young people, workers, and the elderly. They helped hasten the end of the government’s draconian policies. But at the end of it all, Xi still ruled China with an iron fist and many demonstrators were detained.

pages: 334 words: 96,342

The Price of Life: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides
by Jenny Kleeman
Published 13 Mar 2024

country=GBR 451 people https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 more than 150 protesters Gayle, Damien and Busby, Mattha, ‘Police arrest 155 anti-lockdown protesters in London’, The Guardian (28 November 2020). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/28/met-police-anti-lockdown-protest-london The Argus Doherty-Cove, Jody, ‘Lockdown protest leader was on Labour’s Executive Committee’, The Argus (22 May 2020). https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/18467876.lockdown-protest-leader-labours-executive-committee/ Covid death figures ‘The pandemic’s true death toll’, Economist (25 October 2022). https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates?fsrc=core-app-economist?utm_medium=social-media.content.np&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_content=discovery.content stay at home Sandford, Alasdair, ‘Coronavirus: Half of humanity now on lockdown as 90 countries call for confinement’, Euronews (2 April 2020). https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/02/coronavirus-in-europe-spain-s-death-toll-hits-10-000-after-record-950-new-deaths-in-24-hou World Bank ‘COVID-19 to Add as Many as 150 Million Extreme Poor by 2021’, World Bank (7 October 2020). https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/covid-19-to-add-as-many-as-150-million-extreme-poor-by-2021 shutting the economy down Yakusheva, Olga; van den Broek-Altenburg, Eline; Brekke, Gayle; and Atherly, Adam, ‘Lives saved and lost in the first six month of the US COVID-19 pandemic: A retrospective cost-benefit analysis’, Plos One (21 January 2022). https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?

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For my parents, David and Manou Contents Preface PART ONE – THE PRICE OF TAKING A LIFE Chapter 1 £15,180: the average hitman Chapter 2 $100m, or $150m – or $400bn: the world’s most expensive weapons system Chapter 3 £3,217,740: an average murder PART TWO – THE PRICE OF A LIFE LOST Chapter 4 £200,000: life insurance Chapter 5 £11,000 – if you’re British: criminal injury compensation PART THREE – THE PRICE OF A LIFE CREATED Chapter 6 £13,750 – or $200,000 if you’re gay: biological parenthood PART FOUR – THE PRICE OF SAVING A LIFE Chapter 7 $2–3,000: Silicon Valley philanthropy Chapter 8 £20–30,000 per year: the National Health Service Chapter 9 £180,000 per year: Covid lockdown PART FIVE – THE PRICE OF A HUMAN BEING Chapter 10 $368,901: the average ransom demand Chapter 11 From $400: a slave PART SIX – THE PRICE OF A HUMAN BODY Chapter 12 $5,000 – excluding shipping: a cadaver Epilogue Acknowledgements Notes and Sources Index Preface There are numbers on your head.

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John reckons his work has led to at least £300 million of claims being refuted, and thirty or forty people being convicted of fraud. You could write a book about the hundreds of scammers he’s unearthed. And he has: a self-published memoir entitled Go Away, I’m Dead. Written during the enforced break from visiting morgues caused by the Covid lockdown, the book is a travelogue of his experiences on dirt roads and in dodgy hotels across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, investigating the putatively deceased. I was looking forward to a detailed examination of his caseload, an insight into the mindset of insurance scammers from someone who knows them better than anyone, but it’s not that kind of book; there are surprisingly few details on the cases he’s debunked.

pages: 245 words: 71,886

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

Guardian, 18 June 2020. www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/18/piloted-in-may-ditched-in-june-the-failure-of-englands-Covid-19-app p. 148 ‘On 27 March 2020, against lockdown rules, Dominic Cummings’ Stephen Castle and Mark Landle, ‘Dominic Cummings Offers a Sorry-not-Sorry for UK Lockdown Breach’. New York Times, 25 May 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/world/europe/dominic-cummings-boris-johnson-coronavirus.html p. 149 ‘On 5 May 2020, it was revealed that Neil had broken lockdown rules.’ Anna Mikhailova et al., ‘Exclusive: Government Scientist Neil Ferguson Resigns After Breaking Lockdown Rules to Meet his Married Lover’.

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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 372(1721), 26 May 2017. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5394645/ p. 39 ‘The Ebola PHEIC in 2019 …’ ‘Ebola Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the CongoDeclared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern’. www.who.int/news/item/17-07-2019-ebola-outbreak-in-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-declared-a-public-health-emergency-of-international-concern p. 40 ‘And then came a dramatic update…” Lily Kuo, ‘Coronavirus: Panic and Anger in Wuhan as China Orders City into Lockdown’. Guardian. www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/23/coronavirus-panic-and-anger-in-wuhan-as-china-orders-city-into-lockdown p. 42 ‘I appeared at a press conference at Davos …’ ‘Press Conference: Coronavirus (COVID-19)/DAVOS 2020’. YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDQtXzu6z08 p. 43 ‘His company had quietly picked up the genetic sequence …’ ‘Moderna Announces First Participant Dosed in NIH-led Phase 1 Study of mRNA Vaccine (mRNA-1273) Against Novel Coronavirus’.

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Reuters, 15 September 2020. www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-astrazeneca-idUSKBN260187 p. 174 ‘Whatever happened behind the doors of Number 10 …’ ‘Insight Investigation: 48 Hours in September When Ministers and Scientists Split over Covid Lockdown’. Sunday Times, 13 December 2020. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx p. 187 ‘The UK strategy, such as it was, seemed doomed …’ Anjana Ahuja, ‘The Pandemic’s Darkest Hour is Yet to Come’. Financial Times, 4 January 2021. www.ft.com/content/0d519265-60ea-483e-87fb-9f7f94037031 CHAPTER 8 p. 189 ‘Known global cases: 79,231,893’ World Health Organization, ‘COVID-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update – 29 December 2020’, 29 December 2020. www.who.int/publications/m/item/weekly-epidemiological-update---29-december-2020 p. 199 ‘Scientists in the UK have been at the forefront of looking for new variants …’ Sarah Zhang, ‘Now We Can See a Virus Mutate as Never Before’.

pages: 289 words: 86,165

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

,” New York Times, June 3, 2020. 30 “Not the United States”: Selena Simmons-Duffin, “As States Reopen, Do They Have the Workforce They Need to Stop Coronavirus Outbreaks?,” NPR, June 18, 2020. 32 750 million people: Raymond Zhong and Paul Mozur, “To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China,” New York Times, February 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/business/china-coronavirus-lockdown.html. 32 built two new hospitals: Lingling Wei, “China’s Coronavirus Response Toughens State Control and Weakens the Private Market,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2020. 32 restricting the publication: Nectar Gan, Caitlin Hu, and Ivan Watson, “Beijing Tightens Grip over Coronavirus Research, amid US-China Row on Virus Origin,” CNN, April 16, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/12/asia/china-coronavirus-research-restrictions-intl-hnk/index.html. 33 dictatorships often mishandle: “Diseases Like Covid-19 Are Deadlier in Non-Democracies,” Economist, February 18, 2020. 33 respond to famines better: Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor, 1999), 16. 33 over $6 trillion: Andrew Van Dam, “The U.S.

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If that reproductive rate grew to even 1.1 or 1.2, the country’s health-care system would soon be overwhelmed and the lockdowns would have to be reinstated. Merkel was letting the public understand the key measure that would determine her decisions. It has not been the case that simply imposing the harshest possible lockdowns produced the best results. Many of the governments that handled Covid-19 successfully, as in Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan, were able to do so with relatively brief or partial lockdowns, combined with widespread testing and tracing. The public can grasp nuance if it is presented honestly. But too often, elites have a patronizing attitude toward laypeople. Western experts at first overlooked the mounting evidence that in East Asian countries “universal masking” was a key component of their successful response.

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In 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report looking at how much job flexibility Americans enjoyed. Of those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, almost half reported working from home at least occasionally. For those with a high school diploma, fewer than 10% ever worked from home—for high-school dropouts, 3%. Not surprisingly, then, when Covid-19 hit and the lockdowns started, it was those who couldn’t work from home who were hurt most. Only 13% of people in households making over $100,000 were laid off or furloughed, compared with 39% in households making less than $40,000. Across the world, as the economy recovers, those with college degrees and advanced training are likely to fare better than those without, and big businesses will do better than mom-and-pop enterprises.

pages: 735 words: 165,375

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

Social Security Administration. “Social Security History: Chapter 4: The Fourth Round—1957 to 1965.” Accessed December 26, 2020. www.ssa.gov/history/corningchap4.html. Somerville, Ewan. “New Zealand’s Covid Response: Why Early Lockdown and Stringent Quarantine Kept Cases Down to Fewer Than 2,000.” iNews, October 28, 2020. https://inews.co.uk/news/world/new-zealand-covid-how-beat-coronavirus-free-lockdown-quarantine-coronavirus-cases-739493. Soper, George A. “The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 15, no. 10 (October 1939): 698–712. https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?

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The Occupy movement and the police response to it divided the city that had seemed so united. New York was hardly alone: the Occupy movement took over public squares from Boston to Berlin. In the years since, divisions have widened, creating more urban vulnerability. Two months after the COVID lockdowns had begun, a policeman killed an African American man in broad daylight in Minneapolis, by pressing his knee against the man’s neck for over eight minutes. Anger about the terrible racial disparities in police violence, perhaps reinforced by angst from months of lockdown, led streets to explode as they had not since the late 1960s.

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For diseases with human-to-human spread, exiling the visibly sick will not protect the healthy if the disease can be spread before the person is symptomatic, as in the case of COVID-19. A second form of social distancing is for each family to self-isolate, like the Byzantines who were “sitting in their houses” in Procopius’s narrative. That strategy carries the large costs that millions experienced during their own personal COVID-19 lockdowns. The downsides of family isolation are more extreme for the poor, who live in homes too small for comfort and who must work in proximity to others to survive. Only 13 percent of Americans with a high school degree or less were able to work remotely during May of 2020. In rich countries, prosperity and technology made it possible to self-isolate and still receive food and other necessities.

pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

isbn=9780674660489. 20 “Member States,” ASEAN, https://asean.org/asean/asean-member-states/. 21 “Total Population of the ASEAN countries,” Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/796222/total-population-of-the-asean-countries/. 22 “Economic Outlook for Southeast Asia, China and India 2019,” OECD, https://www.oecd.org/development/asia-pacific/01_SAEO2019_Overview_WEB.pdf. 23 “World Economic Outlook: Latest World Economic Outlook Growth Projections,” International Monetary Fund, October 2020, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/09/30/world-economic-outlook-october-2020. 24 “Vietnam Emerges a Key Winner from the US-China Trade War,” Channel News Asia, https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/commentary/us-china-trade-war-winners-losers-countries-vietnam-hanoi-saigon-11690308. 25 “Southeast Asia Churns Out Billion-Dollar Start-Ups,” Bain, https://www.bain.com/insights/southeast-asia-churns-out-billion-dollar-start-ups-snap-chart/. 26 “India's Economic Reform Agenda (2014–2019), a Scorecard,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://indiareforms.csis.org/2014reforms. 27 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, October 2020, Chapter 1, p. 9, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/09/30/world-economic-outlook-october-2020. 28 “India's Harsh Covid-19 Lockdown Displaced at Least 10 Million Migrants,” Niharika Sharma, Quartz India, September 2020, https://qz.com/india/1903018/indias-covid-19-lockdown-displaced-at-least-10-million-migrants/. 29 “International Literacy Day 2020: Kerala, Most Literate State in India, Check Rank-Wise List,” The Hindustan Times, September 2020, https://www.hindustantimes.com/education/international-literacy-day-2020-kerala-most-literate-state-in-india-check-rank-wise-list/story-IodNVGgy5hc7PjEXUBKnIO.html. 30 “Chinese Investments in Africa,” Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2018/09/06/figures-of-the-week-chinese-investment-in-africa/. 31 “Global Economic Prospects, Sub-Saharan Africa,” The World Bank, January 2019, http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/307811542818500671/Global-Economic-Prospects-Jan-2019-Sub-Saharan-Africa-analysis.pdf. 32 “The Asian Century Is Set to Begin,” Financial Times, March 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/520cb6f6-2958-11e9-a5ab-ff8ef2b976c7. 33 “World Economic Outlook: Latest World Economic Outlook Growth Projections,” International Monetary Fund, October 2020, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/09/30/world-economic-outlook-october-2020. 34 “Air Pollution,” World Health Organization, https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/. 35 “World Inequality Report 2018: Income Inequality in India,” World Inequality Lab, https://wir2018.wid.world/. 4 Divided Societies On the morning of August 12, 1961, Berliners woke up to a harsh new reality.

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Even in the United States, the country that epitomizes car culture, where owning a car is a rite of passage to adulthood, as one writer put it, millennials are increasingly opting out of car ownership. All these evolutions were underway well before the COVID crisis. Then, forced lockdowns of cities brought about a mini revolution in mobility. As World Economic Forum urban mobility specialist Sandra Caballero and Urban Radar CEO Philippe Rapin wrote during the crisis:43 “After COVID-19 lockdowns, roads emptied and transit agencies either completely stopped service or drastically reduced service, allowing pedestrians and cyclists to take back streets and sidewalks.” Cities from Oakland to Bogota and from Sydney to Paris, and even the city we live in, Geneva, Switzerland, built new bike lanes allowing people to commute in more eco- and public health–friendly ways.

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Initially confined to the city of Wuhan, this novel coronavirus, which often causes a severe respiratory disease, was rapidly becoming a primary public health concern across the country. Our colleague explained that much of Beijing’s population had travelled beyond the city to attend Lunar New Year celebrations and, as they returned, they carried the novel coronavirus with them, causing an outbreak and subsequent lockdown in the capital. My colleague kept his cool, providing objective facts on what the lockdown meant for our employees and operations. But from his voice, I could tell that he was very worried. His family, and everyone in his life, was affected, facing the dangers of infection and the lockdown in place.

pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

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pages: 442 words: 85,640

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

But if there is such a thing as beneficial stress, she says, then it’s likely to be something you can pinpoint for yourself. It’s probably not the stress that paralyses you, but the stress that you can push through, that makes you feel really great afterwards. HOW TO DEAL WITH UNCERTAINTY For me, and I think for a lot of people, much of the stress of the coronavirus lockdown was rooted in its uncertainty. Not for nothing is Limbo the first circle of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is described as a place where people have no hope yet continue their longing, and what are first mistaken for cries of anguish are in fact sighs of sadness. Yes, that sounds about right.

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Loneliness is often assumed to be a problem of social isolation, one that predominantly affects the elderly or vulnerable. There is some truth to this: half of people who are of retirement age in the UK say that the television is their main source of company. But loneliness can affect anyone. You might have experienced it yourself during the recent coronavirus lockdown. Actually, loneliness has less to do with being on our own, or having few friends, even if that is how it is often defined. It’s not social isolation, it’s feeling socially isolated. A lonely person will not feel less so simply by being surrounded by others. Similarly, a social butterfly won’t feel lonely just because they spend some time alone.

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So if you do decide to have that extra pint of lager, with its two units of alcohol, think about whether it’s worth the effort of working out for an extra twenty minutes to balance the books. HOW TO STOP OVEREATING If you feel like your diet has completely gone to pot during a year of coronavirus lockdowns in which you’ve struggled to find your regular food, and been stressed and bored – known risk factors for overeating – then you’re not alone. Emerging evidence suggests that many people, in the UK at least, are struggling to resist the comforts of food more than ever. Weight gain and its negative impact on our health might be an unforeseen consequence of the coronavirus pandemic.

pages: 225 words: 70,590

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

These options for hyperlocal, sustainable delivery meant these entrepreneurs—many of whom were our neighbors—could compete with the Amazons and Uber Eats of the world, and a situation that might have forced them to close their shutters allowed them to thrive. The question that now remains is whether the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis will be enough for car-dependent regions to pivot and create a “new normal.” But their reaction to the coronavirus lockdown, and the unique conditions experienced by people across the planet, has allowed for some optimism. In the book Resilient Cities: Overcoming Fossil Fuel Dependence, Peter Newman and colleagues write, “Resilience is built on hope, which gives us confidence and strength. Hope is not blind of the possibility of everything getting worse, but it is a choice we can make when faced with challenges.

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Aldred affirms this: “People with disabilities affecting their ability to travel make considerably fewer trips than those without. This can mean less access to education, employment, health services, social events, and leisure: all essential for social inclusion.” For Dr. Burdett, it’s about designing systems for humans, and all of their individual capabilities. During the COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand, which was one of the strictest in the world, Dr. Burdett conducted interviews of 300 people across the country, 90 of which were living with some form of physical disability. Twenty percent of disabled respondents stated that they had not left their home at all during the last week of lockdown, compared with less than 1 percent of nondisabled people.

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Climate change, for instance, is only one ongoing change that we are dealing with,” Wang suggests. Just as change is constant, so is the need for sustainability. “If we flip to a different stability regime, that must also be sustainable,” she emphasizes. Transforming the City and Its People For a few short weeks, the COVID-19 lockdown transformed the way Dr. Wang and her neighbors experienced the streets in a small town in North Yorkshire: “Many people around the world were suddenly able to see their beautiful cities under the blue sky again! There was no noise, pollution, or hazard from traffic. People claimed the road space back, and started walking in the middle of the road without fear.”

pages: 317 words: 87,048

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

Given the nebulous nature of QAnon, some people would be drawn in from wellness, some from the far right, some from anti-capitalism, and so on – letting people pick their own focus allows them to tailor the conspiracy. That made it easy for the movement to adapt to new circumstances, and quite naturally agglomerate with the disparate coronavirus conspiracy theories, which otherwise may have come from very different political traditions – anti-lockdown from a classical liberal perspective or anti-vaccine from a mistrust of mainstream medicine, for example. This ability to draw in disparate groups should not be mistaken for either harmony or consensus. The ability to reject any individual proposition made by a QAnon influencer in one statement (or broadcast interview) while then promoting the overall movement just moments later became a strength for QAnon.

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, www.thatsnonsense.com, 3 April 2020. 33. Kaitlyn Tiffany, ‘Something in the Air’, www.theatlantic.com, 14 May 2020. 34. Bruce Y. Lee, ‘5G Networks And COVID-19 Coronavirus: Here Are The Latest Conspiracy Theories’, www.forbes.com, 9 April 2020. 35. Alexander Martin,’ Coronavirus: 90 attacks on phone masts reported during UK’s lockdown’, https://news.sky.com, 25 May 2020. 36. ‘Coronavirus: ‘ “Murder threats” to telecoms engineers over 5G’, www.bbc.co.uk, 23 April 2020. 37. CBS, ‘Trump says coronavirus will “miraculously” be gone by April “once the weather warms up” ’, www.youtube.com, 11 February 2020. 38.

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And for a while, I definitely took on board quite a lot of the conspiracy theories in it – which I now look back on and think: you’re a clown.’ In the years following that, Mike slowly drifted away from conspiracy theories as his mum got ever more into them, but without ever becoming all that political, he says, or it intruding all that much on their life – until the Covid-19 lockdowns began. ‘I think it’s been accelerated by lockdown. Mum has, for a few years now, been quite religiously following these really alternative blogs … a lot of it is sort of really abstract, about awakening, and pseudo-spiritual and pseudo-scientific stuff. I didn’t realise she was in on all the Q stuff until this year, when I suddenly overheard Trump’s voice coming from her room!’

pages: 279 words: 100,877

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

Could Cambridge Analytica Have Delivered Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Victory? An Anthropologist’s Look at Big Data and Political Campaigning. Public Anthropologist, 3(1), 119–147. Lenthung, M. (2021). Why Experts Say Gun Violence Rose in 2020, Amid Pandemic Lockdowns. ABC News. Accessed April 18, 2022. https://abcnews.go.com/US/experts-gun-violence-rose-2020-amid-pandemic-lockdowns/story?id=80466932. Leonardatos, C. D. (1999). California’s Attempts to Disarm the Black Panthers. San Diego Law Review, 36, 947. Levitsky, S. and Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die. Penguin Books. Lewis, I. (2021). Ted Nugent Tests Positive for Coronavirus After Calling Pandemic a “Scam.”

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Meanwhile, Mark, a white Michigan gun seller, believed that the protests revealed liberal hypocrisy by providing an irresistible temptation for opportunistic Democrats to rally constituents. Describing Michigan Governor Whitmer’s response to the armed protesters who rallied against the lockdown orders in Spring 2020,63 months before the Black Lives Matter protests, he recalled, She was telling everybody that we were going to have a massive spike in coronavirus cases because of the [lockdown] protest [in Lansing, MI]. Well, now [during the Black Lives Matter protests] she goes over to Detroit area, which is a predominantly blue area and supportive of her in terms of voting, and she marches with them in a protest that is ten to fifteen times larger than the one that was at the [Michigan] capitol grounds.

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See also armed individualism gun sales: 2020 events’ effect on, 1, 37–42, 41–42, 50–62, 167–68; background checks/waiting periods, 1, 39; cycle of violence driving, 62; decline in (2022), 52; electoral cycle’s effect on, 50, 111, 212n35; to first-time vs. repeat buyers, 56, 58; increases in, 1, 6–7, 38–39; national impact of, 39; panic as driver of, 1, 40, 50, 53, 64, 103, 112–17, 120; refusal of, 116–18; Trump Slump for, 52, 212n35 gun sellers: conservative/gun culture promoted by, 5, 8, 24–25, 29–30, 64–65, 170; and conspiracism, 33, 76–77, 79–88; coronavirus lockdowns and, 40, 43–54, 68, 156; coronavirus theories and speculation of, 1–2, 82–88, 136–37, 143–44, 147, 156–57; educational role of, 33, 50, 63–66, 68–69, 103, 115–18, 141; as essential business, 44–46, 67; and gun control/law/politics, 63–66; and gun rights, 8, 40, 44–46, 49–50, 56, 65–66, 118–19, 141–43, 154; left-leaning, 30, 34, 153–58, 160–61; and partisanship, 104, 113–15, 119–22, 128–29, 146; political attitudes and engagement of, 29–31, 33, 40, 45, 49–50, 63–69, 103, 113–22, 139–65, 170; sales refused by, 116–18; as subject of study, 29–31, 192, 195–98; Trump Slump’s effect on, 212n35; Trump support from, 30, 79, 105, 119–20, 149–50, 152–53 gun violence, 53, 62, 168, 177 Habermas, Jürgen, 29 Haider-Markel, Donald, 56–57 Haney, Lynne, Offending Women, 200 Haney-Lopez, Ian, 14 Hanson, Rebecca, 194 Hemmer, Nicole, 105, 122 herd mentality.

pages: 266 words: 80,273

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One
by Debora MacKenzie
Published 13 Jul 2020

The virus was named SARS-CoV-2 because it was so similar to another one we had barely managed to beat back in 2003. As you know, the disease it causes was named Covid-19: “co” for corona, “vi” for virus, “d” for disease,” and 19 for the year it appeared. A lot of people just call it the coronavirus. Three months after Wuhan was locked down, some two billion people worldwide were also in some form of lockdown, and everyone, everywhere faced infection with the virus, with few effective treatments and no prospect of a vaccine anytime soon. Covid-19 has infected the entire human world. This pandemic has been like a big dog, picking up our fragile, complex society in its teeth and shaking it.

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That was supposed to happen after SARS. According to TRAFFIC, however, Guangdong imposed a trade ban on wildlife meat in late April 2003, but lifted it by mid-August—after SARS had disappeared—for 54 captive-bred species. Business as usual rapidly resumed. That may happen again. By late March, with cases of Covid-19 in China falling after weeks of lockdown and the problem perceived as over, China’s wildlife markets were reported to be re-opening. In any case, what are bats doing there? Peter Li of the University of Houston–Downtown says eating exotic wildlife is not traditional among the vast majority of Chinese. He says rural families turned to catching and then raising wild animals as a way to get food and then to make money, after the upheavals of the 1960s in China.

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“In spite of all our ‘alarmist’ outcries in the past for better pandemic preparedness, we are now starting to prepare when the house is on fire,” says Ab Osterhaus. What should we now be doing about that? You’d have thought we wouldn’t be lacking in pandemic plans: countries and experts have been talking about it ever since the world got spooked by H5N1 bird flu in 2004. Yet when Covid-19 arrived, there were disputes in many countries about whether to lockdown, how to do it, whether or not containment was possible, and when to lift restrictions. Instead of arguing about these things ahead of time, governments were vacillating just as medical staff ran out of ventilators and protective gear and the economic impact just of our efforts to slow the virus’s spread caused mass unemployment, bankruptcies, poverty, even starvation.

pages: 541 words: 173,676

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

Millennials’ lives and mental health have been influenced by online interaction, but most spent their formative years before it completely took over. Who did spend their teen years in the age of the smartphone? That would be Gen Z. Event Interlude: The COVID-19 Pandemic At first, the news seemed far away to people in the U.S.: In January 2020, a novel coronavirus was sickening people in Wuhan, China, leading to a lockdown of the city and the quick construction of hospitals to quarantine the infected. The hope was that the virus might not spread widely in North America. When a man in Washington State tested positive for the virus on January 15, 2020, the CDC announced that the risk to the public “remains low at this time,” adding, “it’s unclear how easily this virus is spreading between people.”

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By 2018, total fertility was at its lowest rate on record. That meant Millennials were having fewer children than any generation in American history. Fertility dipped even lower in 2020. That was likely a continuation of the previous trend and not due to the pandemic, given that babies born in 2020 were almost all conceived before pandemic lockdowns began in March 2020. In 2021, fertility increased slightly, but not enough to make much of a dent in the previous downward trend. Figure 5.32: Total fertility (estimated number of children per woman), U.S., 2000–2021 Source: National Vital Statistics, CDC The decline in birth rates occurred across all racial and ethnic groups, and was especially large among Black and Hispanic Americans (see Figure 5.33).

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Figure 6.64: Unhappiness of U.S. 12th graders by gender and political ideology, 1976–2021 Source: Monitoring the Future Notes: Graph shows the average response on a scale of 1 = very happy, 2 = pretty happy, and 3 = not too happy to the question “Taking all things together, how happy are you these days?” “Boys” and “girls” are used here even though some respondents are over age 18, in the tradition of high school students being referred to with these labels. The 2020 data were collected in February and early March 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns; sample sizes are smaller in that year. Figure 6.65: Percent of U.S. 12th graders high in depressive symptoms, by gender and political ideology, 1989–2021 Source: Monitoring the Future Notes: Graph shows percent with a score of 3 or above (neutral to agreement) on the average of six items measuring symptoms of depression on a 1–5 scale.

Longshot
by David Heath
Published 18 Jan 2022

Hospital intensive care units are teeming with patients who chose not to get their shots. Florida hospitals were running out of oxygen.1 Elsewhere, hospitals were running out of beds. The health care systems in at least 10 states are so full that they are in danger of collapsing.2 Australia and New Zealand were able to tame the pandemic with masks and lockdowns.3 But in the United States, compliance with public health measures was always lax. Vaccines were our only way out. Despite a herculean effort and a surplus of vaccine, only 57% of Americans were fully vaccinated by late October 2021. More than 93 million Americans who could get the shot were still shunning it, even as new cases and deaths soared day by day.4 For the first time in vaccine history, science didn’t win.

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Dave Muoio, “10 States Nearing—or Exceeding—Hospital Capacity during COVID’s Summer Resurgence,” Fierce Healthcare, August 19, 2021, https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals/10-states-nearing-or-exceeding-hospital-capacity-during-covid-s-summer-resurgence. 3. Jay Bhattacharya and Donald Boudreaux, “Eradication of Covid Is a Dangerous and Expensive Fantasy,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/zero-covid-coronavirus-pandemic-lockdowns-china-australia-new-zealand-11628101945. 4. “COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed August 31, 2021, https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total. 5. Michaeleen Doucleff, “The Delta Variant Isn’t as Contagious as Chickenpox.

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Once hospitals in Italy were overwhelmed, Mascola knew we had a pandemic on our hands. Just about the time schools across America started shutting down in mid-March, Moderna’s demonstration vaccine was given to the first volunteer in Seattle. It had been done in a record-setting 66 days. And by then, it wasn’t just a demonstration. The virus was spreading. The country went into a lockdown. The economy was collapsing. Everything had changed. The world was now eagerly waiting for the vaccine so that it could return to normal. CHAPTER 2 History of Vaccines In October 1977, a man transporting two smallpox-infected children to an isolation camp in Somalia got hopelessly lost.

pages: 458 words: 132,912

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

Peter Aitken, “Fauci Claims Herd Immunity Numbers Were ‘Guestimates,’” Fox News, December 2020, www.foxnews.com/politics/fauci-herd-immunity-numbers-guestimates. 16. Doubts about lockdown costs to benefits: Greg Ip, “New Thinking on Covid Lockdowns: They’re Overly Blunt and Costly,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lockdowns-economy-pandemic-recession-business-shutdown-sweden-coronavirus-11598281419; Jon Miltimore, “California Has the Strictest Lockdown in the US—and the Most Active COVID Cases (by Far),” Foundation for Economic Education, January 6, 2021, https://fee.org/articles/california-has-the-strictest-lockdown-in-the-us-and-the-mostactive-covid-cases-by-far. 17. Jon Varney, “Crime Spikes as Soros-Funded DAs Take Charge: ‘They’re Not Progressive, They’re Rogue,” Washington Times, August 20, 2020, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/20/george-soros-funded-das-oversee-big-cities-skyrock. 18.

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The ultimate caricature of the fusion between temporary residency and citizenship came in early 2021. Citizens of Mexico, reportedly in the “thousands,” flocked to American border states—encouraged by Mexican health officials—to become vaccinated ahead of millions of American citizens. Thousands also crossed into the United States without COVID-19 testing at a time when many Americans were still in lockdown and the federal government was considering travel restrictions to and from Florida but not across the southern border. As one celebrity Mexican television host, Juan Origel, said of the ease of jumping ahead of citizens in the vaccination line and receiving shots without any legal reactions from US authorities, “I’ve known lots of Mexicans, thousands, who have gone to get the vaccine in the U.S.

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The failed efforts of Mueller’s special investigation to prove “collusion,” the failed try to remove him from office after impeachment, and the failed auxiliary attempts of the media may have had the unexpected effect of making Trump stronger rather than weaker. In February 2020, on the eve of the COVID-19 lockdown, for example, Trump’s approval rating in the Gallup poll had topped out at 49 percent. So how well did Trump or his administration actually achieve his stated ambitious goals, among them the implicit restoration of traditional citizenship? For the first time in over a decade, in the three years before the onset of COVID-19, average middle-class income rose, especially for most minorities, reaching the highest level on record in July 2019.

pages: 302 words: 112,390

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

Thomas Taylor, available at Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/63300/63300-h/63300-h.htm. 2 Alisha Haridasani Gupta, “Why Some Women Call This Recession a ‘Shecession.’ ” New York Times, May 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/us/unemployment-coronavirus-women.html. 3 Alexandra Topping, “UK Working Mothers Are ‘Sacrificial Lambs’ in Coronavirus Childcare Crisis,” The Guardian, July 24, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/jul/24/uk-working-mothers-are-sacrifical-lambs-in-coronavirus-childcare-crisis. 4 “Parenting in Lockdown: Coronavirus and the Effects on Work-Life Balance,” Office for National Statistics, July 22, 2020, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/parentinginlockdowncoronavirusandtheeffectsonworklifebalance/latest. Chapter 1: To Boldly Know Where No One Has Known Before 1 Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (London: Vintage, 2015). 2 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7142. 3 Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?

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“Instead of engaging in risky status-seeking endeavours,” the authors write, “low-status males would be more likely to marry, thus becoming risk-averse and future-oriented, and focus on providing for their offspring in the long run.”56 But there’s also another ugly possibility: that the “low status males” would just transfer the violence they would otherwise have perpetuated on society onto their wives and children. A relative reduction of crime in the public sphere may result in a concomitant increase of violence in the private sphere, which is exactly what happened in many countries during the COVID-19 lockdowns: as assaults and robberies declined, intimate partner violence skyrocketed.57 Socially imposed monogamy may just hide the problem behind closed doors, and too often, women and children can become the sacrificial lambs. Having a wife and children may make a man more risk averse (and evidence suggests that it reduces his testosterone levels), but it does not automatically increase a man’s social standing.58 My own father (who died over twenty years ago) was a status-obsessed immigrant driven to acquire all of the material accoutrements of success.

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In other cases, one partner just might not share the same interests or connect well with the other partner’s preexisting friends, which might lead to a cooling of those friendships in favor of the relationship or other “couple friends.” The increasing isolation of the parental couple prevents the formation of relationships that would make it easier to raise our children more cooperatively in wider networks of alloparents. People recognized the inherent weakness of the biparental model during the COVID-19 lockdowns when they hastily formed “pandemic pods” with other parents to share childcare and homeschooling responsibilities. Outside of these exceptional circumstances, most kids are still raised and provided for by one or two parents. But what if we could somehow separate out our mating practices from our child-rearing practices to think creatively about how we might arrange our private lives to maximize the amount of love, care, and support both we and our children could enjoy?

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa
Published 19 Oct 2022

You accept that bad things may happen, and if it does, what will you do? I can almost clinically take apart the worst-case scenario. I know I can survive it. There are always upsides to even the worst events. If I were to go to jail, I could sleep, for one. In those last months of 2019, and certainly by the covid lockdowns of March 2020, I was so exhausted that I was starting to break down. The Duterte propaganda machine had been attacking me not just with visceral sexist and misogynistic posts for almost four years but also with metanarratives about my so-called criminality to help set the stage for the government’s future acts against me.

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And when young Filipino students study history, they will find that the first Filipino person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was a courageous journalist determined to tell the truth. I hope that, for the sake of future generations, they will be inspired by her example. —Amal Clooney Prologue The Invisible Atom Bomb Live in the (Present) Moment (of the Past) Since the pandemic lockdown began in March 2020, I have been far more emotional than I had ever allowed myself to be. I feel the pent-up anger at the injustice I have no choice but to accept. That’s what six years of government attacks have done. I may go to jail. For the rest of my life—or, as my lawyer tells me, for more than a hundred years.

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You could feel the energy from every member of Rappler; the editorial team, which was under attack publicly, was supported by graphics, video production, technology and data, administration–human resources, finance, and most of all, sales.28 Our commercial team, working with our core managers, found the solution in our investigative journalism: the very same processes we had developed to track networks of disinformation online became the foundation of a data- and tech-based business model that grew by 12,000 percent from 2018 to 2019, helping power our first year of profitability. Until 2016, we had been powered largely by advertising. Once the online attacks began and our advertising revenue dropped, we pivoted the company toward other tech services, which prepared us for the pandemic lockdown. Then our community kicked in. We began a crowdfunding campaign that helped pay our legal bills. At the end of 2018, we began Rappler+, the first news membership program in the Philippines. Its members are our most devoted users, emotionally linked to our mission and values. They kept asking us, “How can we help?”

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

This squared virality meant that if you put out the right kind of pandemic-themed content—flagged with the right mix-and-match of keywords (“Great Reset,” “WEF,” “Bill Gates,” “Fascism,” “Fauci,” “Pfizer”) and headlined with tabloid-style teasers (“The Leaders Colluding to Make Us Powerless,” “What They Don’t Want You to Know About,” “Bill Gates Said WHAT?!?”)—you could catch a digital magic-carpet ride that would make all previous experiences of virality seem leaden in comparison. The players know the game: for instance, the viral video Plandemic got the Covid conspiracy ball rolling in the early lockdown days, collecting eight million views in its first week. Its director, Mikki Willis, told the Los Angeles Times, “We knew the branding was conspiratorial and shocking. Unfortunately, in this age, you kind of have to be that to get people’s attention.” Disaster Doppelgangers This is a twist on the disaster capitalism I have tracked in the midst of earlier shocks.

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Then I realized what I had done: “ecofascism” is the accurate term to describe the threat. And how convenient it is for coalescing fascist forces if the term has been so abused and pipiked that anti-fascists are loath to use it to accurately describe events in the real world. At around that time, my friend Alex called from Australia and we caught up over video. “Is it true that Covid lockdowns are turning Australia into a fascist state?” I asked. “Because that’s what Naomi Wolf just told Steve Bannon. I can’t seem to find reliable reports.” Alex, one of my few friends unfazed by my listening habits, shrugged and replied, “The police are bad. But it’s weird: I used to know who the fascists were and who the anti-fascists were.

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But what we were seeing on the campaign trail was that these logics were spreading, diagonally, from authoritarian conservatives through to parts of the green and New Age left, following well-worn neural pathways with long and sinister histories. The thread that connects them is simple and stark. It’s a comfort with culling. The Who’s Who of Woo When we were still living in New Jersey, which at the time trailed only New York as the state with the highest number of Covid deaths, the early anti-lockdown defiance came mainly from two groups. The first were the extremely religious: evangelical Christians, many of whom packed megachurches despite the lockdowns, and our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, who came into conflict with local authorities for continuing to congregate for large funerals and other services despite the health orders.

pages: 106 words: 33,210

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

The United Nations Population Fund estimated at least 15 million more cases of domestic violence as a result of pandemic restrictions. The fund’s executive director, Natalia Kanem, called the impact of lockdowns on women ‘totally calamitous’. And, in the UK, calls raising concerns about child abuse rose by 20 per cent. Disruption of health systems and services in low- and middle-income countries is expected to be especially devastating. Timothy Roberton and his colleagues from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health calculated that the pandemic lockdowns would lead, at the very least, to 253,000 additional deaths of children under five and 12,200 additional maternal deaths across 118 of the poorest countries in the world.6 The worst case scenario they studied is almost incomprehensible in its tragic proportions – a further 1.2 million child deaths and 56,700 maternal deaths.

…

Social distancing and avoiding mass gatherings now became the approved policy of the Trump administration. But the virus had taken hold and deaths began to escalate – as did unemployment as the economy crashed. By May, the US Treasury had announced it was borrowing a record $3 trillion to pay for the coronavirus relief measures passed by Congress. Wuhan began its lockdown early – on 23 January. Through strenuous efforts to cut the lines of viral transmission, China was able to begin to lift its restrictions on 8 April. As it did so, Deborah Birx, appointed by Pence as the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, reported that the epidemic had now reached its peak in the US.

…

Sweden was another outlier, but for different reasons. Anders Tegnell, the country’s state epidemiologist, has been accused of pursuing a policy of herd immunity, which has led (as of mid-May 2020) to over 33,000 cases of COVID-19 and 3,992 deaths. But that is neither fair nor true. The first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed on 31 January, in a woman returning from Wuhan. Although no national lockdown has been introduced, Tegnell has issued a series of strong recommendations, which most people have complied with – limits on mass gatherings, closure of secondary schools and universities, working from home, avoiding unnecessary travel, and physical distancing.

pages: 349 words: 99,230

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

Amanda Kinnunen and Anna-Karin Gustafsson, “Relative Calm on the Industrial Action Front in 2020,” Industrial Relations and Social Dialogue (blog), Eurofound, April 8, 2021, www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/article/2021/relative-calm-on-the-industrial-action-front-in-2020. 15. Scott Neuman, “Essential Workers Plan May Day Strikes; Others Demand End to COVID-19 Lockdowns,” NPR, May 1, 2020, www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/01/848931228/essential-workers-plan-may-day-strikes-others-demand-end-to-covid-19-lockdowns; Shirin Ghaffary, “The May Day Strike from Amazon, Instacart, and Target Workers Didn’t Stop Business. It Was Still a Success,” Vox, May 1, 2020, www.vox.com/recode/2020/5/1/21244151/may-day-strike-amazon-instacart-target-success-turnout-fedex-protest-essential-workers-chris-smalls; Michael Sainato, “Strikes Erupt as US Essential Workers Demand Protection amid Pandemic,” Guardian, May 19, 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/19/strikes-erupt-us -essential-workers-demand-better-protection-amid-pandemic; Bridget Read, “Every Food and Delivery Strike Happening over Coronavirus,” The Cut, May 27, 2020, www.thecut.com/2020/05/whole-foods-amazon-mcdonalds-among-coronavirus-strikes.html; Daniel A.

…

Because the basement was at capacity, the vast majority of bodies were stored in trucks on shelves. The trucks were long and so dark that Mariel carried a lantern with her. “I was literally the light at the end of the tunnel,” she told me. That night, April 27, Mariel made an entry in her pandemic diary that she shared with me: “I can’t remember the last time I touched someone who was living.” The lockdown phase of the pandemic, which varied widely according to multiple factors—region, industry, demographics, political orientation, social class—lasted roughly from early March to early June 2020. In New York City, for example, there was a dramatic reduction in movement of the city’s working population.

…

The lines in February depict an average month of work-related travel; the April map shows the travel patterns of what are mostly essential workers. Generally speaking, different cities’ and regions’ maps look different based on their respective economies—those with larger populations who could work from home tended to reduce their travel profile more. However, across the world, movement during the pandemic’s lockdown phase was directly related to occupation and social class more than any other factors. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy were more likely to hold jobs that increased their exposure to the virus because they had no ability to telecommute. A May 2020 study of a large grocery store in the Boston area found that employees with customer-facing jobs were about five times more likely to have coronavirus antibodies than workers in other roles.5 Additional studies have attributed high rates of COVID-19 infection to workplace exposures in agriculture and construction.6 In a 2020 survey of service workers, 41 percent responded that they were not able to consistently maintain physical distance from others on the job.7 Researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School collected so much data documenting COVID-19 anxiety among service workers that, to dramatize the magnitude of the problem, they tweeted out a different survey respondent quote every minute for five days straight.8 The high dispersion factor of the coronavirus was an early indicator that workplace transmission could be driving the pandemic.

pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
by Diane Coyle
Published 11 Oct 2021

To my mind, values cannot be wholly separable from empirical investigation, and yet it is important for economists to aspire to be as impartial as possible. Economic knowledge certainly accumulates. If we had not learned lessons from the experience of the 1930s, the consequences of the 2008–9 financial crisis would have been far more severe, and governments would not have introduced furlough schemes during the coronavirus lockdowns. If we had not created and learned from market design (defining the rules that make markets work well), far fewer of the apps on our phones could work. There are other important differences between economics and its critics. One is whether it is ever acceptable to put monetary values on intrinsically good things like nature or human life.

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Some opponents of proposals for extending the domain of markets in UK health care object on grounds of fairness—preferring rationing by waiting list to rationing by price—and on grounds of civic participation—the NHS being one of the most important civic institutions in this country, binding us together through common experience. This was highlighted in 2012 when it featured prominently in the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games, a celebration of the best of British. The 2020 experience of the Covid19 pandemic, when Britons applauded the NHS from their doorsteps weekly during lockdown, sent the same message. Although some are ideologues, at least some supporters of reform seek to introduce the discovery process of competitive supply to improve NHS efficiency and do not see this as amounting to privatisation or making monetary values paramount.

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Employers said they could hire graduates who were technically very able and could manipulate models, but who were wholly unable to apply what they had learned in any real-world context, did not have practical data skills, were unable to communicate with non-specialists, were unaware of context or recent economic history, and had not been taught any of the new, policy-relevant areas of economics, particularly the behavioural findings. As well as the energetic student-driven reform movement, there was tremendous public interest in the economy—an evident passion to understand the world in uncertain times, and a sense that events had seriously tested economics. The interest has only grown. As the pandemic-related lockdowns have continued, the appetite for discussion about what kind of economic recovery is desirable, and whether GDP growth is a good target, is apparent. So wanting to see change in economics is not a fringe or ‘heterodox’ agenda. Nor is it just a question of changing the curriculum, or the academic research agenda, for the future; it is also about the kind of impact assessment work undertaken widely in public policy and consultancies.

pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
by Andrew Ross
Published 25 Oct 2021

Each of these companies is now moving into the real estate market itself, by building or investing in residential housing and shared living space. Google, Amazon, and other corporate giants are in close pursuit. From 2016, start-ups began to attract significant quantities of venture capital to compete in this scramble.16 Even at the height of the coronavirus lockdown, plans were announced for Central Florida’s first “build-for-rent” subdivision, a professionally managed community type that has now emerged as the next fast-rising asset class in this league.17 While the pandemic hit the sector hard, Osceola strenuously lobbied Tallahassee for a fast reopening of its top-priority VHRs.

…

OUT OF WORK The COVID-19 pandemic delivered a sharp blow to most employers, especially small businesses with scarce capital reserves. It also broke the momentum of rising wages across the country. After mass layoffs, the ready availability of workers desperate for jobs meant that demands for higher pay would be on mute for a while. During the first months of the pandemic lockdown, national unemployment levels went from record lows to record highs. LHT industry employees in top travel destinations like New York, Hawaii, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, Atlantic City, Myrtle Beach, Flagstaff, and Orlando were the hardest hit of all. When the theme parks closed in March 2020, Disney World unions pushed for employees to continue receiving pay during the shutdown.

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In 2019, those two cities plus eight others—Berlin, Bordeaux, Brussels, Kraków, Munich, Paris, Valencia, and Vienna—demanded that the EU take a stronger regulatory stand against Airbnb. “European cities believe that homes should be used first and foremost for living in,” they declared in a joint statement. Introducing a ban on professional Airbnb hosting, the mayor of Prague declared that the trend had effectively turned his city into a “distributed hotel.” During the pandemic lockdown, Dublin and Lisbon, among others, ordered landlords to find long-term tenants or forfeit their units to the city. Such regulations are cheered on by housing advocates, who blame Airbnb and other nightly rental platforms for driving up neighborhood rents and removing affordable units from the market.13 A 2019 study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that the entry of Airbnb into a community reduces the stock of long-term rentals, creating economic costs that outweigh the benefits of increasing tourism.14 A detailed McGill University study of New York City showed that two-thirds of Airbnb revenue came from likely illegal listings and that Airbnb rentals had removed as many as 13,500 units from the long-term rental market.

pages: 244 words: 78,238

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

Carnival had been experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks on its ships since late January. But now, company executives seemed unsure of how to proceed. Broward County demanded that the cruise line find the solutions, which is how Dale Holness, the county commissioner, ended up in a near-empty public hearing room in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown, calling for testimony from a former nuclear submarine commander. Carnival Corporation could not have cast a stronger advocate for their cause than their chief maritime officer, William Burke. Dressed in a navy suit and lilac tie, Burke cut an impressive figure when Holness summoned him to the podium just before the lunch break.

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The crew members were now living in guest cabins, and while visiting was prohibited, they were allowed fresh air. In addition, meals in the dining room allowed for supervised encounters. The ship was divided into a Red Zone for those who were ill or suspected of being sick, and a Green Zone for those who had already been through the COVID-19 cycle—roughly a third of the crew at that point. Every person in the Red Zone was placed under lockdown. Anyone found wandering, crossing through, or sneaking into that part of the ship—however briefly—would be quarantined. APRIL 14 Caribbean Sea, the Bahamas Anne Weggeman, who worked aboard the Zaandam as a receptionist and then on the emergency medical line, was shocked by the captain’s announcement of another two weeks of lockdown.

…

Anny watched, racked with grief, as the attendant slowly revealed Wiwit’s face, then gently covered him again before closing the wooden coffin. “We were able to see the final seconds of him being put into the cremation container,” Anny said. It would take another two months to bring Wiwit’s ashes home. Anny, helped by Holland America, had to work through maddening bureaucratic hurdles. The global COVID-19 lockdown made every step of the process complicated. Adding to the chaos, no one could find Wiwit’s passport. It was missing. Somewhere, in the transfer from ship to ambulance to hospital, it had disappeared. Anny now had to prove that the man she’d watched slowly die was indeed her husband. Month after month, she fought to confirm his identity, but it was futile.

pages: 101 words: 24,949

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City
by Jack Brown
Published 14 Jul 2021

Equally, major protests see citizens travel from across the country to converge on the capital’s public spaces, often in Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, or Parliament Square. Here they gather to express opposition to issues as diverse as the Iraq War or the ban on foxhunting in the early 2000s or, more recently, to structural racism or the coronavirus lockdowns in 2020. Political power lies in the capital’s streets as well as its historic buildings. Regional imbalances? With so much going on in one place, it is unsurprising that London has such a dominant role within its nation. The Institute for Fiscal Studies recently ranked the UK as one of the most geographically unequal nations in the developed world,43 a notion that is often repeated.44 London’s dominance is far from ideal, for capital or country.

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But this was push-back against what seemed to be the inevitable rise of cities as the engines of growth and prosperity. The world was rapidly urbanising, and this trend showed no sign of stopping.3 London, in decline as recently as the 1980s, was predicted to continue its now decades-long trend of demographic and economic growth.4 Then came the coronavirus pandemic. COVID city London was put into its first lockdown on 24 March 2020 following a statement by the prime minister the previous evening. The city centre fell eerily silent. Signs went up in pub windows, outside cinemas, and above music venues, all promising to ‘be back soon’. But this was a statement of optimism and hope rather than certainty.

pages: 447 words: 111,991

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

As I wrote this book, the world changed dramatically. When I first started my research, there was no such thing as Covid-19, and lockdowns were the remit of zombie apocalypse movies. But as I was halfway through writing my first draft, countries around the world began shutting their borders and issuing stay-at-home orders to their populations – all to prevent a virus wreaking havoc on their health systems and economies. On one level, the pandemic felt distinctly low-tech. Lockdowns have been used for millennia to prevent the spread of disease. Quarantines are nothing new: the word derives from the time of the Black Death, when sailors had to isolate for 40 days before coming on shore.

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We’ve already met Sid Karunaratne, with his penchant for automating his own day job. The tools that allowed Sid and his team members to work from home (or the beach) were wide-ranging – and where possible they took advantage. This kind of unregulated, arm’s-length management is as far away from Taylorism as one could imagine. And it only accelerated during the coronavirus lockdowns, when internet-enabled remote work became the norm for most white-collar workers. But not every employee works for a firm which provides the freedom to work how and where they like. And the same technologies that enable remote work – from a beach, a mountain or by a lake – can also be turned against employees.

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CONCLUSION: ABUNDANCE AND EQUITY 1 ‘Virological: Novel 2019 Coronavirus Genome’, Virological <https://virological.org/> [accessed 10 January 2021]. 2 Rino Rappuoli and others, ‘Vaccinology in the Post−COVID-19 Era’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(3), 2021 <https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2020368118>. 3 ‘424B5’, Moderna Stock Offering, SEC <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/000119312520033353/d871325d424b5.htm> [accessed 12 January 2021]. 4 ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker’, March 2020 <https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker> [accessed 10 January 2021]. 5 ‘Coronavirus: The World in Lockdown in Maps and Charts’, BBC News, 6 April 2020 <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52103747> [accessed 19 April 2021]. 6 Hannah Mayer et al., ‘AI Puts Moderna within Striking Distance of Beating COVID-19’, Harvard Business School Digital Initiative, 24 November 2020 <https://digital.hbs.edu/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning/ai-puts-moderna-within-striking-distance-of-beating-covid-19/> [accessed 11 January 2021]. 7 Carrie Arnold, ‘How Computational Immunology Changed the Face of COVID-19 Vaccine Development’, Nature Medicine, 15 July 2020 <https://doi.org/10.1038/d41591-020-00027-9>. 8 50 watt-hours is the equivalent of using a typical LED lightbulb for about six hours, using a modern iron for about two minutes, or running a laptop for about 30 minutes. 9 Niall P.

pages: 172 words: 50,777

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

People who felt underrepresented and unheard in the physical office benefited from the equality of everyone being the same size on screen, with none of the rigid hierarchies of the conference room table. This point was echoed by the digital entrepreneur and investor Tom Adeyoola who told me: I met more people during Covid-19 lockdowns than I would have done in the physical world. I attended start-up pitches in Northern Ireland, Cardiff, the north of England. I mentored founders in Jamaica, South Africa, the Commonwealth and all around the country. I would never have been able to do that before the pandemic unlocked the visual medium as a norm.

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During this period there was little original thinking to imagine office life as anything other than glamorous co-working spaces or smart HQs, bookended by global travel for those in the upper echelons of office life and by trips to the coffee stalls and bars in the vicinity of the city-based office for the rest. In the fourth phase, the Nowhere Office, beginning in 2020, everything is moving off its old moorings and significant change seems possible. Covid-19 grounded everyone, from the executive constantly shuttling between airports to the deskbound PA. While working full time from home during pandemic lockdowns was temporary, it has left a sticky residue. It no longer seems right or sensible to work full time from the office. People recognise that their work, and therefore their time, is a valuable commodity and they want to have a greater say in when and where they sell it. Hardliners and Softliners It is clear, however, that our attitudes to how we work are complex and inconsistent.8 Take for instance the Ipsos data that Generation Z and older millennials wish both to work from home three days a week (62 per cent of Generation Z and 56 per cent of millennials) while at the same time wanting (58 per cent of Generation Z and 48 per cent of millennials) to work face to face with colleagues, i.e. from an office.9 Forty-two per cent of people with children felt that working from home placed their mental well-being under additional stress, yet 62 per cent say that WFH (working from home) afforded them a better work–life balance.10 A huge Vodafone survey showed that 75 per cent of global companies had already introduced some form of hybrid or flexible working post-pandemic before a full return to work.11 Yet considerable ambivalence remains among some leaders.

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Our social selves and our work selves are inexorably linked now. The tech we use going forwards has to be the tech we trust, or the whole of the Nowhere Office will teeter on its foundations. The reliability of technology, and its resilience against either cyber-attack or basic human error remains a big ‘what if?’ Temporary pandemic lockdowns will feel like nothing if the digital lights go down for any extended period of time. Fully Present There’s a famous saying that 80 per cent of success is just showing up.20 The Nowhere Office affects presenteeism quite literally, and one productivity boost is the ability of organisations to hire people across a far wider geographical area than was thought possible or desirable pre-pandemic.

pages: 372 words: 98,659

The Miracle Pill
by Peter Walker
Published 21 Jan 2021

When I was there, city officials told me proudly that more than 80 per cent of children cycled to school, and – this was the statistic that most amazed me – the streets were now considered so safe that the official advice was that children should be perfectly able to cycle to school from the age of six. On their own.31 We in the UK can but dream of such movement-friendly urban landscapes, even if things might be about to shift at least slightly. One of the many things happening amid the coronavirus lockdown while I write this book is new government planning on how people can return to work but travel in socially distanced ways. With estimates that capacity on public transport could be cut by 90 per cent, and worries about gridlock if everyone drives, ministers have given local authorities new powers to carve out instant, temporary bike lanes using cones, and to widen pavements.

…

Motivated in part by this confusion, but also perhaps by the much more personal wish for a different answer about my supposed interior obesity, I read academic studies about the accuracy of BodPod measurements. These mainly suggested it is accurate, even if a few papers noted occasional anomalous readings. I needed a second opinion. With the coronavirus lockdown now in place, the only way was via the old-fashioned but still much-used skinfold technique. This uses sprung callipers to measure the thickness of an area of pinched-out skin from a few select places around the body, with the combined total of millimetres converted via online charts into a body fat percentage.

…

But if you are someone, like me, who does sit down a lot for work, that doesn’t mean you should ignore the issue. During my research, whenever I spoke on the phone to an academic or researcher connected to inactivity science, I would always ask them if they were speaking from a sit–stand desk. They invariably were. One of my activity-based pledges to myself, when I finish this book – assuming the coronavirus lockdown ever eases enough for me to regularly return to my office in Westminster – is to ask my newspaper to get me a sit–stand desk. That I’ve not done this so far is partly down to sheer practicality. The Houses of Parliament can be a magical place to work, but some of the conditions, especially in the upper-floor corridor reserved for the media, can be quite basic.

pages: 420 words: 135,569

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

So many companies and organizations, it seemed, wanted to throw out their assumptions and get some fresh thinking on how they could accomplish their goals. I had a fascinating conversation with the artistic director of a major ballet company, who asked me to help brainstorm how live ballet performance might change during and after the COVID-19 lockdowns. We did a quick version of the One Hundred Ways game to come up with some testable ideas and soon found ourselves thinking beyond the short-term constraints of a pandemic. One of the facts we flipped was: “Professional ballet dancers have a short career compared with other professions, usually retiring from performance between the ages of thirty-five and forty.”

…

She cites Dator’s law and argues that the field needs to challenge its two biggest assumptions with ridiculous, at first, ideas. It’s assumed that nuclear disarmament will be a slow, protracted, and incremental process that takes decades to achieve. But what if nuclear disarmament could happen fast—as fast as global COVID-19 lockdowns? Second, it’s assumed that the power to decide whether and when we rid the world of nuclear bombs lies in the hands of the nine nation-states that currently possess them: the US, the UK, Russia, China, and so on. But what if some other powerful agent—working outside normal diplomatic channels, unrelated to these national governments—found a way to force the issue?

…

By the end of the summer of howling, by my estimate, more than a million people had joined in. The howl died away by the fall, but it has periodically reemerged in our community, on election night, for example, on the evening of the January 6 violent attack on the US Capitol, and on the anniversary of our first COVID-19 lockdown. My family howled every night for months. It helped us feel less alone during the long lockdown. I personally howled to say, “I’m still here,” and to say, “I hear you,” and sometimes to say, “What the hell is wrong with our country?” and to say, after recovering from a COVID-19 illness I thought was going to kill me, “There is air in my lungs, and I can breathe without gasping again, and I am grateful to be alive, and I hope I never forget this gratitude.”

pages: 236 words: 73,008

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

The broad-spectrum antibiotics are administered by IV drip the next day and he returns to his overnight duties. According to government regulations, the community hospital can only do triage and medical check-ups. Fever patients, regardless of how serious, have to take themselves to the Wuhan Pu’ai Hospital, a designated hospital for novel coronavirus patients. It is several kilometres from the community hospital. Because of the government ban on all vehicles during lockdown, most patients have no option but to trudge to the bigger hospital. ‘Young people are strong enough to walk back but most of the old people who walk to hospital do not return.’ The Wuhan Pu’ai Hospital is a chaotic scene. Lin Qingchuan learns that at the end of January, the entire emergency department is completely ‘wiped out’ by the sickness.

…

If you happen to walk close enough you’ll see that, beneath the brim of his hat, the face is perpetually alert and vigilant. Li is one of Wuhan’s ‘black’ motorcycle operators who transport people illegally. During that unrelenting spring of 2020 he straddled his motorcycle to carry doctors, nurses and coronavirus patients along the highways and backstreets of Wuhan. ‘From the start of the lockdown til the end,’ Li says, evincing a certain degree of pride, ‘I was out on my motorcycle every day. I didn’t ever stop working.’ Li is now in his sixties. He was born in a small village outside Wuhan. After graduating from high school, he moved with his family to Wuhan city and they set up a wonton stall.

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The majority are infected with the coronavirus, though he does transport the occasional volunteer, nurse or doctor. On 30 January, he meets a couple in their sixties. Li takes them from Wuhan Central Hospital to Jiangwan Road. The husband holds on to Li’s shoulders while the wife squeezes behind her husband and holds on to his waist. They discuss the coronavirus catastrophe and life under lockdown. About two days later Li receives a phone call. It is the husband. ‘We both tested positive,’ he says. ‘Terribly sorry, driver, you’ll need to get tested.’ Li doesn’t follow the advice. From the beginning to the end Li never gets tested. He repeatedly claims he is ‘not scared’ because ‘that is a feeling he never gets’.

pages: 262 words: 69,328

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

In 2021, best picture went to Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, a haunting portrait of itinerant Americans on the road, longing for both freedom and some elusive sense of belonging. And in 2020, Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s dark satire of class warfare in contemporary Seoul, became the first foreign-language film to win best picture. The COVID lockdown, which created an increased demand for streaming content at the very time when movie and television production was shut down, meant that many American distributors and platforms, led by Netflix, looked abroad for material—not just the U.K. and Canada, but also India, South Korea, Spain, Japan, Mexico, and France.

…

According to Politico, there was a wave of more than 12,500 protests across 148 countries in 2022—many of them aimed at what people saw as incumbent governments’ failures to protect them from rising food and energy costs. Among the most successful protests were those in China against the government’s draconian zero-COVID policies and constant lockdowns—which led, after two weeks, to the government making a surprising pivot away from its harshest restrictions. Protests are rare in an authoritarian country where dissent is quickly quashed, and demonstrators wore masks as much to protect themselves from government surveillance as from the airborne virus; they recognized fellow protesters by the blank pieces of paper that many clutched in their hands—a sly reference to censorship in China.

…

For instance, anime and manga were passionately embraced during the 1980s by the otaku—young people in Japan, stereotyped as isolated, tech-savvy outsiders, obsessed with their nerdy interests in things like old Godzilla movies and tropical fish. Then manga and anime began to go mainstream, as the internet accelerated globalization. Streaming and the pandemic lockdown further spurred their popularity. According to The Hollywood Reporter, global demand for anime grew 118 percent during the first two years of COVID. In the 1980s, the term “graphic novel” began being widely used (in place of “comics”) to describe storytelling—both fiction and nonfiction—that inventively combined images and words.

pages: 361 words: 110,233

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

The one I love the most is of us together in front of that colorful wall of graffiti. But it’s not the one I posted when we took it; rather, I love the slightly more intimate of the two selfies we’d taken that day. In this one, Olivier had leaned in at the last moment and kissed me on the cheek. When the coronavirus lockdowns began, and I realized I was going to go days, then weeks, then a full year, without a single kiss from anyone for any reason, I started trying to conjure, as I fell asleep at night, sense memories of particularly memorable kisses I’d shared—with lovers like André or Anwar; or the one I gingerly planted on the head of my mother, Margaret, on her last day on this earth; or the one I received from my dear straight buddy Daniel, on my right cheek under some mistletoe at a Christmas party.

…

Epilogue in Austin, Texas, went viral: Marcie Bianco, “COVID-19 Mask Mandates in Wisconsin and Elsewhere Spark ‘My Body, My Choice’ Hypocrisy,” NBC News, August 3, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/covid-19-mask-mandates-wisconsin-elsewhere-spark-my-body-my-ncna1235535. at the Texas State Capitol: Manny Fernandez, “Conservatives Fuel Protests Against Coronavirus Lockdowns,” New York Times, April 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/us/texas-protests-stay-at-home.html. children living near the airports: Angel Mak et al., “Lung Function in African American Children with Asthma Is Associated with Novel Regulatory Variants of the KIT Ligand KITLG/SCF and Gene-by-Air-Pollution Interaction,” Genetics 215, no. 3 (2020): 869–86.

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While Michelle Perdue says she can get “very creative” in helping such people, they might just give up. They might inject alone, or inject with unsterilized syringes—placing themselves and their social circle at higher risk for both viruses and overdose death. The coronavirus pandemic made all this worse. Perdue told me that in the six months after the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, the Cabell-Huntington Harm Reduction Program started seeing about half as many people as it had before the pandemic, and not because rates of addiction and drug use were decreasing—which likely means more risk of HIV and HCV transmission and overdose deaths. And by April 2021, West Virginia governor Jim Justice signed an onerous law making it harder to distribute and obtain sterile syringes, against the advice of public health professionals in the state and around the nation.

pages: 371 words: 122,273

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

The support of the group had buoyed him up and everyone was hopeful that they might be able to stop the eviction. But, at the end, he was distressed, in shock. The eviction, after months of fighting, was very final. As temperatures dropped and new coronavirus lockdown regulations came into force pausing evictions, Anthony camped out in his work van. He did not sleep a wink. Such was the arbitrary stop/start nature of the government’s support for renters during the pandemic that the second lockdown saw the reintroduction of a rule which had been in place earlier that year: bailiffs could not attend evictions personally because it could increase the transmission of Covid-19.

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Overall, sold prices in Brighton over the year were 15 per cent up on the previous year. Average Private Rent: In 2021 the average rent for a one-bedroom home was £1,265, for a two-bed it was £1,750, and for a three-bed it was £2,087. — It was 4 November 2020. One day before England would be placed into its second coronavirus lockdown. The sky was clear, the autumn air crisp. Forty-seven-year-old Anthony Howell, a labourer and part-time care worker, was being evicted by his private landlord. He had been dreading this moment; oscillating between resistance and denial. For months, cortisol had coursed through his veins as he fought it – by email, over the phone – causing his muscles to tense up, the instinctive response that is supposed to guard the human body against injury.

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Overall, sold prices in Hungerford in that year were 11 per cent up on the previous year and 5 per cent up on the 2018 peak of £348,238. Average Private Rent: In 2021 the average rent for a one-bedroom home was £650 and for a two-bed it was £863. At the time of writing, there were no three- or four-bedroom homes listed for private rent. — ‘Christ,’ Barry said when I asked how he was feeling in the middle of the first coronavirus lockdown. ‘I was on the streets for years. My home … this place, it’s like a five-star hotel. I’m so lucky. Mandy – my support worker – she’s everything. I’d marry her if I could. I want the world to know about what these guys have done for me.’ Barry, 67, a former rough sleeper, was wearing a burgundy polo neck tucked neatly into his belted jeans underneath a grey jumper, his long grey hair curling where he had swept it back.

pages: 336 words: 91,806

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

Ian knew, from talking to Benja, and other friends, that working for Sama had changed their lives. Maybe, he thought, it could change his too and he would be able to move out of the place he was sharing with six other young men, and perhaps even save for the future. So he signed up to work for Sama and has worked there ever since. When we’d met virtually during the coronavirus lockdown two years ago to talk about Sama and his work, Ian had been a skinny kid with a shy smile and a scraggly moustache. Today, he is walking us to his new home which he shares with his wife and four-month-old baby in the heart of Kibera. ‘Things are different,’ he says. The neighbourhood of Kibera in central Nairobi is an informal settlement, or a slum, one of the largest in Africa that houses some of the country’s poorest families.

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‘With layers and layers of technology, that boot doesn’t give an inch.’ * During our time talking, I had tried to figure out the end game. Did Maya – and even I – really believe that her actions could have any real consequences? Was speaking up enough to make a difference? A few months after our meeting, China erupted in protests against the long, brutal Covid lockdown imposed nationally for several months. Protest itself isn’t rare in China – they happen daily in towns and large cities across the country, but they are usually focused on single issues and rarely spread beyond the locals. But for the first time in late 2022, students, migrants, minorities like the Uyghurs around the country were up in arms about a range of issues stemming from lockdown, from labour and living conditions to their ability to do business.

pages: 125 words: 35,820

Cyprus - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
by Constantine Buhayer
Published 24 Feb 2022

What research is the UK High Commission funding? Are the Chinese bribing? Who is operating in the North? The island has served as a convenient base for espionage since the Crusades. After the Ottomans the only spy in town was Britain, which erected giant radar intercepting domes on the Troodos. During the Covid pandemic lockdown, one of the rare jet trails in the emptied skies was Britain keeping up its strategic flights from RAF Brize Norton to its Cypriot base in Akrotiri. The 1950s brought new intelligence personnel—Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Syrians, Egyptians. With the Cold War came the Americans who were anxious to keep tabs on the Soviet Russian interest, who themselves remain anxious to keep tabs on American movements, and on the Middle East.

pages: 250 words: 79,360

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

Simplified historical and political models are manipulative in similar ways, embedding sweeping value judgements that not only reflect the prejudices of their creators, but also serve to reinforce the social consensus of those prejudices. The communities that share these models may be an entire society (‘the Nazis were evil’) or a subset (‘the damage of Covid-19 lockdowns is worse than the disease’). Shared models bring communities closer together, but when they become reinforced into conviction narratives that exclude other perspectives, they also divide us from other communities with different shared models. There is much talk at the moment about how social media may be causing a wider polarisation in views and political extremism; in my view, a contributing factor is the way it allows us to share and reinforce our mental models and avoid positive exposure to alternative perspectives.

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There is also what MacKenzie calls counter-performativity, the idea that making a prediction of some outcome actually makes it less likely for it to happen. Counter-performative models might, for example, forecast some kind of bad outcome in a ‘business-as-usual’ or no-intervention scenario, with the aim of motivating change that will avoid that outcome. Examples include forecasts of the unrestricted spread of Covid-19 in the spring of 2020, which motivated lockdown and social-distancing policies that reduced the spread and therefore ensured that the worst-case outcome did not happen. Counter-performative models of this kind tend to suffer from bad press and be accused of exaggeration or overhyping the problem. Widespread predictions that the date format used by mission-critical computing systems would cause devastating failures on the Y2K rollover from 31 December 1999 to 1 January 2000 were proved entirely wrong, at least in part because of the efforts of many system administrators to ensure that important systems were unaffected or patched.

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At the end of September 2020, with cases rising and no vaccine yet available, the UK government’s scientific advisors held a press conference in which they showed a possible future scenario (taking pains to say that it was not a prediction) of infections rising on a smooth exponential curve and translating into thousands of deaths per day over the winter. This was widely slated by the media as being alarmist, but proved to be sadly accurate as the UK faced an extremely challenging winter period, losing more citizens to Covid than in the first wave and having to enter a further period of lockdown. The next autumn, with a mostly vaccinated UK population but concerns about lack of immunity to the new ‘Omicron’ variant, similar concerns were raised. Fortunately, this time the worst-case scenario did not emerge: a huge spike in infections was accompanied by a smaller rise in hospitalisations and mortality.

pages: 197 words: 53,831

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

The business models of the oil and gas companies will not survive for ever, even if they continue to make money in the short term. There is already evidence that their record as excellent dividend payers is under threat. In April 2020, Royal Dutch Shell – the best dividend payer in the FTSE 100 – cut its dividend for the first time since the Second World War, due to the oil price slump caused by the coronavirus lockdowns. Analysts had already been warning that oil and gas companies were going to become less profitable due to climate change, prompting the Financial Times to argue that concerns would only mount over the role of Big Oil in investment portfolios. When Michael Barry was considering whether to divest fossil fuels in Georgetown’s endowment fund, one of his main concerns was the risks involved – both in getting out of fossil fuels and in staying invested in them.

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He says it is hard for some companies to accept that the world is changing and their products might be obsolete – for example, German car manufacturers that have perfected the internal combustion engine having to switch to electric. Oppenheim admits it is hard to know how the effects of the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020 will play out. On the one hand, companies might try to be more resilient for future shocks and governments could prioritise green recovery programmes, but on the other, people could be desperate to get back to normal and won’t have the financial resources to worry about the long-term climate crisis.

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Total greenhouse gas emissions, including from land-use change, reached a record high of 55.3 gigatonnes in 2018. To meet the 2 degrees goal, that figure needs to fall by 15 gigatonnes by 2030. To meet the 1.5 degrees goal, it needs to fall by 32 gigatonnes. To put that in context, while emissions fell considerably in the first few months of 2020 due to the coronavirus lockdowns, scientists predicted that the annual drop in global emissions would be just 7 per cent. So even though much of the global economy was shut down, it still wasn’t enough to cut emissions by the required amount. That is why wider long-term structural changes are so important – and none more so than in energy.

pages: 167 words: 57,175

And Finally
by Henry Marsh

I was still finding it very difficult to accept just how great were the changes that were coming. When faced by uncertainty, we all oscillate wildly at first between panic and dismissal – as I was to discover when my cancer was diagnosed. Over the next three weeks Covid-19 started to take over our lives. There was excitement – of a sort – when the lockdown was eventually imposed on 23 March. With neither cars nor aeroplanes the streets and sky suddenly fell silent, and the shelves in the shops were suddenly stripped bare. Shopping became something of an adventure, with the fear that going out you might catch the virus, and the difficulty of finding something to eat.

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The lockdown was an entirely novel and universal experience, overshadowed at first for me by Kate’s illness and the constant stream of death statistics in the media, as though there was some kind of deadly Olympiad in progress, with countries competing for the most deaths. I was also frightened that I would fall ill as well. But as it became apparent that a dry cough and fever were only two of the ways that Covid-19 could present, I realised that I had very probably contracted the infection myself several weeks before the lockdown. I had been to Ukraine in early February – a country where I have been working pro bono for many years – and lectured at the medical school in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk. Shortly after my return I developed severe abdominal pain, quite unlike anything I had ever had before, and rigors – the medical name for shivering attacks.

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Phil opened the kiln a few days after I talked with him. ‘The best ever,’ he said. ‘Rather ironical that this is probably the last one. But it will be a nest egg for my wife.’ It was indeed a superb firing. After his death Ha Jeong stored all the pots from this last firing in the barn. A few months later, and after the easing of the Covid lockdown, she organised a large party to celebrate his life. A few days later, thieves, who must have heard of his death, broke into the barn and stole the most valuable pieces. Ha Jeong had not had time to photograph or catalogue them, and so had no way of knowing exactly what had been stolen. The police were therefore unable to help.

pages: 134 words: 41,085

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

THE UNTRUSTFUL LEGACY As spring turned to summer, countries came out of lockdown, and the instructions became more complex, trust became ever more important. Everybody can understand “stay at home or you die”; it is harder to persuade people to stay two meters apart and stagger their use of the subway if they don’t believe you. Throughout the Coronavirus test, governments that were trusted got cooperation with testing and voluntary compliance with lockdowns. Sometimes the planning and thinking was a little too precise: when Switzerland rather wonderfully announced that it would allow prostitutes to go back to work in June but still ban judo, wrestling, and contact sports, it was rightly ridiculed.21 But in a way the last laugh was really with the Swiss.

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The horrors that were occurring in Codogno were plainly headed toward Cardiff and Chicago. The second was that there were good examples of how to deal with the virus. Since at least the Black Death in 1347, governments have used quarantines to halt the spread of plagues (the term comes from the Italian quaranta meaning forty days) and sensible ones did so again with Covid-19. China imposed its strict lockdown on Wuhan on January 23, cutting off all transportation links, and then extending mass quarantine to thirty-six million people across thirteen additional cities soon afterward. The number of new cases tumbled from 3,887 on February 4 to 139 on March 4.6 Singapore started taking the temperature of air passengers arriving from China on January 22.

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CHAPTER FOUR: THE COVID TEST 1.John Burns-Murdoch and Chris Giles, “UK Suffers Second-Highest Death Rate from Coronavirus,” Financial Times, May 28, 2020. 2.Tim Ross and Kitty Donaldson, “Boris Johnson Revamps Agenda to Meet Worst UK Recession in 300 Years,” Bloomberg, June 2, 2020. 3.Marc Champion, “Coronavirus Is a Stress Test Many World Leaders Are Failing,” Bloomberg, May 22, 2020. 4.Lara Zhou and Keegan Elmer, “Thousands Left Wuhan for Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore or Tokyo Before Lockdown,” South China Morning Post, January 27, 2020. 5.Richard Horton, The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 53. 6.“New World Curriculum,” The Economist, March 7, 2020, 19. 7.Jamie Grierson, “UK Government Under Fire After ‘Big Influx’ of Covid-19 Cases from Europe Revealed,” Guardian, May 5, 2020. 8.Laura Donnelly, “Earlier Lockdown Could Have Prevented Three-Quarters of UK Coronavirus Deaths, Modelling Suggests,” Daily Telegraph, May 20, 2020. 9.Rafaela Lindeberg, “Man Behind Sweden’s Controversial Virus Strategy Admits Mistakes,” Bloomberg, June 3, 2020. 10.Sen Pei, Sasikiran Kandula, and Jeffrey Shaman, “Differential Effects of Intervention Timing on COVID-19 Spread in the United States,” posted on medRxiv preprint server, May 29, 2020. 11.Drew Armstrong et al., “Why New York Suffered When Other Cities Were Spared by Covid-19,” Bloomberg, May 28, 2020. 12.Armstrong et al., “Why New York Suffered When Other Cities Were Spared by Covid-19.” 13.Fareed Zakaria, “If New York Founders It Will Be Because of Bad Government, Not the Pandemic,” Washington Post, June 11, 2020. 14.Raphael Rashid, “Being Called a Cult Is One Thing, Being Blamed for an Epidemic Is Quite Another,” New York Times, March 9, 2020. 15.Laura Spinney, “The Coronavirus Slayer!

pages: 154 words: 45,857

Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze
by Tawny Lara
Published 19 Sep 2023

Emotional aphrodisiacs, unlike food and herbs, don’t have to be substances. An experience that engages multiple senses can create a sexual experience, according to David Ortmann, a queer and sober psychotherapist and sex therapist and the author of Sexual Outsiders: Understanding BDSM Sexualities and Communities. “The COVID-19 lockdown left us disconnected from our senses, other than visual, because of increased screentime,” Ortmann told me. Getting back in touch with the senses is crucial to feeling present. “Put on perfume. Get some sex toys. Taste different types of chocolates and coffees,” he said. “Fill your senses with great smells and group bubble baths.”

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We’re replacing booze on a date, but the lighthearted fun of a drinking game can stay! Digital Get Down Many of us got more comfortable connecting on-screen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Video dates made meeting new people more accessible while staying safe and socially distanced. The pandemic lockdown also led to a surge in creative online activities. Virtual escape rooms, cooking classes, and group exercise classes became easily accessible if you had Wi-Fi and a screen. I took an online pasta-making class early in the pandemic. An adorable grandmother and granddaughter in Italy taught us how to make pasta from scratch—no pasta machine required!

pages: 206 words: 68,757

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
by Oliver Burkeman
Published 9 Aug 2021

For the least privileged, the dominance of this kind of freedom translates into no freedom at all: it means unpredictable gig-economy jobs and “on-demand scheduling,” in which the big-box retailer you work for might call you into work at any moment, its labor needs calculated algorithmically from hour to hour based on sales volume—making it all but impossible to plan childcare or essential visits to the doctor, let alone a night out with friends. But even for those of us who genuinely do have much more personal control over when we work than previous generations ever did, the result is that work seeps through life like water, filling every cranny with more to-dos, a phenomenon that seemed to only intensify during the coronavirus lockdown. It starts to feel as though you, your spouse, and your closest friends have all been assigned to different color-coded Soviet work groups. The reason it’s so hard for my wife and me to find an hour in the week for a serious conversation, or for me and my three closest friends to meet for a beer, isn’t usually that we “don’t have the time,” in the strict sense of that phrase, though that’s what we may tell ourselves.

pages: 407 words: 108,030

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason
by Lee McIntyre
Published 14 Sep 2021

We already know from previous research that Russia has been responsible for a steady stream of denialist propaganda on climate change,25 vaccines,26 and GMOs.27 Should it come as any surprise that the same is true of COVID-19?28 According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading misinformation about coronavirus are likely bots. Approximately 82 percent of the fifty most influential retweeters on ending the lockdowns and various COVID-19 conspiracies have been bots.29 This fits completely with Russian disinformation efforts to exploit existing fault lines in America to sow more discord and division. Some of these efforts can be traced directly to Russian military intelligence, which has used three English-language websites “as part of an ongoing and persistent effort to advance false narratives and cause confusion” during the pandemic.30 Apparently China has also gotten into the act, and has been trying to induce panic in the US.31 It is important to remember that the nexus between science denial, disinformation, and politics does not stop at the nation’s border.

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Imagine a conversation in which you are talking to a COVID-19 denier (which means that the person is already predisposed to believe in conspiracy theories), and you share the fact that Russia and China are engaged in a massive disinformation campaign on social media in support of the idea that the coronavirus is a “hoax” and we need to “liberate” ourselves from lockdown restrictions. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is a real live conspiracy! Might this not appeal to them? I’ve cited some sources earlier in this chapter that you can print out and hand to them. Some even include graphs and charts. You might encourage your interlocutor to think about who is benefiting from all of the polarization and division in the US.

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Sharon LaFraniere et al., “Scientists Worry About Political Influence over Coronavirus Vaccine Project,” New York Times, August 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/us/politics/coronavirus-vaccine.html 15. Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, “Antivaccination Activists Are Growing Force at Virus Protests,” New York Times, May 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/anti-vaxxers-coronavirus-protests.html. 16. Liz Szabo, “The Anti-vaccine and Anti-lockdown Movements Are Converging, Refusing to Be ‘Enslaved,’” Los Angeles Times, April 24, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-24/anti-vaccine-activists-latch-onto-coronavirus-to-bolster-their-movement. 17. Emma Reynolds, “Some Anti-vaxxers Are Changing Their Minds because of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” CNN, April 20, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/20/health/anti-vaxxers-coronavirus-intl/index.html; Jon Henley, “Coronavirus Causing Some Anti-vaxxers to Waver, Experts Say,” Guardian, April 21, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/anti-vaccination-community-divided-how-respond-to-coronavirus-pandemic; Victoria Waldersee, “Could the New Coronavirus Weaken ‘Anti-vaxxers’?”

pages: 199 words: 63,844

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

Booth, R., ‘GP calls for action after 125 of her care home patients die of Covid-19’, Guardian, 22 April 2020. Birrell, I., ‘A callous betrayal of our most vulnerable: The care home coronavirus scandal goes into the bedrock of our society – the failure to protect our most frail . . . in a system left to rot by our social care failure’, Daily Mail, 14 April 2020. ‘Coronavirus: “Earlier lockdown would have halved death toll” ’, BBC News, 10 June 2020. Cave, N., The Red Hand Files, Issue 6, October 2018, https://www.theredhandfiles.com/communication-dreamfeeling/, accessed 21 September 2020. Epilogue Heaney, S., Beowulf (London: Faber & Faber, 2000). Portions of the article ‘NHS doctor: Forget medals and flypasts – what we want is proper pay and PPE’ by Rachel Clarke originally appeared in the Observer on 3 May 2020.

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‘I thought we would all be safer if we were all near each other in the UK,’ Kathryn tells me. ‘It never crossed my mind that my parents could end up at risk from getting on that plane or being in an airport.’ A few days after he arrived back in Leeds, Kathryn’s father, Tony, began to feel unwell. Kathryn assumed that even if he did have Covid, being a fit and healthy sixty-year-old he would soon shrug it off. With lockdown imposed, she relied on telephone updates from her mother to check how he was faring. Although sufficiently unwell to be bedbound, Tony followed the advice he was given to stay at home, take paracetamol and drink plenty of fluids. ‘One day, though, when I spoke to Mum, she started crying.

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Economies nose-dived. Schools and workplaces closed. Populations hid inside their homes. Whole societies shut down. In most people’s living memory, no crisis had caused such global upheaval so swiftly and so comprehensively. The scale and pace of the pandemic were stunning. By March, most of Britain had entered a state of suspended animation. With lockdown, time – the one commodity most of us crave more than anything – was suddenly available in enforced, unnerving abundance. A population in quarantine tried to manage its fears and listlessness using the unconventional strategies of baking bread and stockpiling toilet rolls.

pages: 278 words: 91,332

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
by Daniel Knowles
Published 27 Mar 2023

And so over time, with a bit of boldness, cities can encourage walking and biking, without suffering many political consequences. LTNs are a good example of this. Unpopular as they often are initially, the evidence suggests after a while, people come to like them. A poll conducted by Transport for London in September 2020, a few months after most LTNs were rolled out at the end of the first coronavirus lockdown, found that 51 percent of people backed them, whereas only 16 percent opposed them. Remarkably, even car owners were more likely to back them than oppose them. What the car lobby misses is that most people actually do not want to have heavy traffic on their streets all of the time. Indeed, one of the drivers of the growth of LTNs in England has been that when one is introduced, people on neighboring streets ask for their own, because they are worried by the displacement.

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I am one of those hacks (a less derogatory term in the British media than in the American) who is motivated most of all by tight deadlines and sheer rush of breaking news. Crafting an argument that is intended to last years, not days, is a challenge. That you have read this far is only thanks to dozens of people who made sure I kept at it. Most thanks of all goes to Kate Barker, my agent, who in the midst of the first COVID-19 lockdown took the time to listen to my pitch and help me shape it into something worth writing, and then worked tirelessly to sell it. Over the next year, Kate also nudged me gently but firmly, making sure that I both did the reporting and started writing without leaving it all to the last minute (though I fear I still left too much).

pages: 601 words: 135,202

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

The tension centered on the portion of the package related to the Fed and Treasury’s rescue programs. “Any taxpayer assistance that goes to giant corporations must come with real strings attached,” Elizabeth Warren, the powerful Massachusetts Democrat, posted on Twitter late that Thursday, March 19.[37] The full stakes of the pandemic meltdown were coming into view. As coronavirus lockdowns sent the economy crashing, the Fed was probably going to get a huge pot of money and a mandate to run a significant portion of the government’s rescue. That support was going to bring with it intense scrutiny, as lawmakers insisted that the central bank try to funnel financial help far beyond the financial institutions it had been built to serve.

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.: allocation of money and oversight of rescue programs, 138–9, 191–2, 199, 238, 249–52, 253–62; Eccles’s testimony to, 66, 67; economic legislation of, 4–5; goals of Fed as set by, 12; Greenspan’s testimony to, 85–8; legislation on Fed’s dual mandate, 80; national debt and the debt limit debate in, 14–15, 333n2; oversight and audit of Fed by, 8, 85–8, 88n, 98–9, 102; pandemic response and programs to help businesses and households, 138–9, 164–5, 177–81, 179n, 183–4, 186, 187–8, 191–2, 195, 199, 238, 252, 281, 290–1, 293, 346n8; Powell’s recommendation on financial support from, 211–12, 239; reaction to rescue program of Fed during 2008 crisis, 94, 98–9; 2020 presidential election and continuation of pandemic relief efforts, 253–62, 263 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 103 coronavirus pandemic: closing down/lockdowns of businesses and schools during, 33, 144–5, 150, 158, 168, 184, 218–19, 252; congressional response and programs during, 138–9, 164–5, 177–81, 179n, 183–4, 186, 187–8, 191–2, 195, 199, 238, 281, 290–1, 293, 346n8; early thinking on impact of, 134–6, 135n; economic impact of, 6, 40–1, 137–8, 139, 142, 166–8, 178–80, 202–4, 218–19, 252, 263; emergency powers for response to, 3, 4–5, 135, 158–62, 278; Fed meeting before Asian markets open during, 33–5; Fed statement on, 142, 143; IMF response to, 196; impact on financial markets, 6, 29–36, 40–1, 135–6, 137–8, 139, 142, 145, 147–50, 151–2, 158, 186–7, 334n6, 343n27, 343nn34–35; impact on global economy, 134–5, 136, 137; interest rate cut as emergency move during, 137–8, 142–4, 148, 150, 167; monetary policy and, 4–5, 29–35, 38–41, 238–43; planning response to by Fed, 136–8, 139–40, 141–2; politics and Fed actions during, 8–9, 144; pragmatism during, 216–17; spread of illness in American communities, 136; start of in Wuhan market, 105, 111; success of Fed’s programs during, 248, 252, 350n10; Treasury securities market at start of, 29–32; Trump administration response to, 138, 138n, 164–5, 181–2, 192, 195, 199, 218–19, 281, 281n; Trump comments about, 134, 138, 145, 164, 182, 342n1; WHO declaration of global pandemic, 145, 148 corporate bond market, 31, 152, 166–8, 172–5, 176–7, 209–11, 213, 256, 294, 344n3, 345n15, 345n23 cryptocurrencies, 272, 274–5.

pages: 345 words: 100,989

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

IN LATE JANUARY 2021, Storm Christoph swept across the Atlantic Ocean and Ireland and bucketed rain in north Wales and the northwest of England. Rivers rose and swathes of the country were under water. There was also snow now blanketing parts of the region. The country was deep into another Covid-19 lockdown. Events in the US were tense following riots at the Capitol Building ahead of the inauguration of incoming president, Joe Biden. At this point, there were management or board meetings at Greensill every few days. At one Zoom meeting of Greensill Capital’s top executives, discussion turned to whether the company’s 1,000 or so employees – mostly based in the northwest of England – were caught up in the floods or the snow, or whether they should send a message of reassurance to staff in the US who might be concerned about the political situation there.

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What’s more, if Tradeshift defaulted, Greensill got to take over the whole business – an odd clause given it would be Credit Suisse’s clients, not Greensill, that would be out of pocket in those circumstances. It was a huge surprise to GA. They had also looked at making an investment in Tradeshift but decided against it. Yet here was Lex pouring a huge loan into the same company. By the summer of 2020, Caillaux was riding out the pandemic lockdown at a family home in Spain, where his wife is from. Work carried on remotely. GA was looking at an investment in an up-and-coming UK-based athletic fashion company called Gymshark. The private equity firm was thinking about putting about £200 million into the clothing company, which would value it at more than £1 billion.

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BaFin’s officials were the primary authority responsible for regulating Germany-based Greensill Bank. CBILS, CLBILS and CCFF – The Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme, Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme and Covid Corporate Finance Facility were all set up by the UK government in response to the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns on the country’s economy. Greensill Capital sought access to all of these facilities as the struggling company scrambled to find new sources of funding to support loans it had made. FCA – The Financial Conduct Authority is the UK’s main financial watchdog. Like BaFin, the UK regulator has been criticized for the effectiveness of its oversight.

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

“Italy Brokers Deal with Libyan Tribes to Curb Migrant Influx,” EURACTIV, April 2, 2017, www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/italy-brokers-deal-with-libyan-tribes-to-curb-migrant-influx/. 87.Council of the European Union, “Central Mediterranean Route,” July 3, 2019, www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/migratory-pressures/central-mediterranean-route/. 88.Displacement Tracking Matrix, “Libya’s Migrant Report,” International Organization for Migration, July 10, 2019, https://migration.iom.int/reports/libya-%E2%80%94-migrant-report-25-march%E2%80%94may-2019. 89.United Nations Support Mission in Libya and High Commissioner for Human Rights, Desperate and Dangerous: Report on the Human Rights Situation of Migrants and Refugees in Libya, December 20, 2018, www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/LY/LibyaMigrationReport.pdf. 90.Sally Harden, “Fear and Despair Engulf Refugees in Libya’s ‘Market of Human Beings,’” Guardian, April 15, 2019, www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/apr/15/fear-and-despair-engulf-refugees-in-libyas-market-of-human-beings. 91.Patrick Wintour, “Libya May Shut Migration Detention Centres after Deadly Air-strike,” Guardian, July 4, 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/04/libya-may-shut-migrant-detention-centres-after-deadly-airstrike. 92.Matina Stevis-Gridneff, “Europe Keeps Asylum Seekers at a Distance, This Time in Rwanda,” New York Times, September 8, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/world/europe/migrants-africa-rwanda.html; Adam Nossiter, “At French Outpost in African Migrant Hub, Asylum for a Select Few,” New York Times, February 25, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/world/africa/france-africa-migrants-asylum-niger.html. 93.IOM Regional Office for West and Central Africa, “IOM Steps Up Response for Migrants Stranded in Niger amidst COVID-19 Lockdown,” April 1, 2020, www.iom.int/news/iom-steps-response-migrants-stranded-niger-amidst-covid-19-lockdown. 94.Suliman Baldo, Border Control from Hell: How the EU’s Migration Partnership Legitimizes Sudan’s “Militia State,” The Enough Project, April 2017, https://data2.unhcr.org/fr/documents/download/55954. 95.Fatin Abbas, “Darfur and Development,” The Nation, March 10, 2005, www.thenation.com/article/darfur-and-development/; Fatin Abbas, “Coming to Terms with Sudan’s Legacy of Slavery,” African Arguments, January 18, 2018, https://africanarguments.org/2016/01/18/coming-to-terms-with-sudans-legacy-of-slavery-2/. 96.Raven Rakia, “IMF’s Involvement Fuels Sudan’s Continued Unrest,” Truthout, March 25, 2014, https://truthout.org/articles/imfs-involvement-fuels-sudans-continued-unrest/. 97.Jérome Tubiana, Clotilde Warin, and Gaffar Mohammud Saeneen, “Multilateral Damage: The Impact of EU Migration Policies on Central Saharan Routes,” Clingendael: Netherlands Institute of International Relations, September 2018, www.clingendael.org/sites/default/files/2018-09/multilateral-damage.pdf. 98.

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(Spain: FRIDE and the Gulf Research Center), 49. 21.Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 22.De Bel-Air, “Demography, Migration and Labour Market in Saudi Arabia,” 5. 23.Adam Coogle, Detained, Beaten, Deported: Saudi Abuses against Migrants during Mass Expulsions, Human Rights Watch, May 10, 2015, www.hrw.org/report/2015/05/10/detained-beaten-deported/saudi-abuses-against-migrants-during-mass-expulsions. 24.Coogle, Detained, Beaten, Deported; International Organization for Migration, “Ethiopian Diaspora Continues its Support to IOM for Migrants Returning Home from Saudi Arabia,” February 18, 2015, https://ethiopia.iom.int/ethiopian-diaspora-continues-its-support-iom-migrants-returning-home-saudi-arabia. 25.Human Rights Watch, “Saudi Arabia: Events of 2018,” World Report 2019, www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/saudi-arabia. 26.AlShehabi, “Policing Labour in Empire.” 27.Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt, 131. 28.International Labour Organization, “Labour Migration: Facts and Figures in Arab States,” www.ilo.org/beirut/areasofwork/labour-migration/lang--en/index.htm. 29.Hadi Ghaemi, Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates, Human Rights Watch, November 11, 2006, www.hrw.org/report/2006/11/11/building-towers-cheating-workers/exploitation-migrant-construction-workers-united. 30.Human Rights Watch, “The Island of Happiness”: Exploitation of Migrant Workers on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, May 2009, www.refworld.org/pdfid/4a125f4b2.pdf. 31.Human Rights Watch, Migrant Workers’ Rights on Saadiyat Island in the United Arab Emirates: 2015 Progress Report, February 10, 2015, www.hrw.org/report/2015/02/10/migrant-workers-rights-saadiyat-island-united-arab-emirates/2015-progress-report. 32.International Trade Union Confederation, The Case against Qatar, March 2014, www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/the_case_against_qatar_en_web170314.pdf. 33.Pete Pattison, “Revealed: Qatar’s World Cup ‘Slaves,’” Guardian, September 25, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatars-world-cup-slaves. 34.Robert Booth, “Qatar World Cup Construction ‘Will Leave 4,000 Migrant Workers Dead,’” Guardian, September 26, 2013, www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/sep/26/qatar-world-cup-migrant-workers-dead; Pattison, “Revealed.” 35.Amnesty International UK, “Qatar’s Lifting of Travel Restrictions for Many Migrant Workers Welcomed,” September 5, 2018, www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/qatars-lifting-travel-restrictions-many-migrant-workers-welcomed. 36.Amnesty International, “Qatar: Migrant Workers Illegally Expelled During COVID-19 Pandemic,” April 15, 2020, www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/04/qatar-migrant-workers-illegally-expelled-during-covid19-pandemic/. 37.Pete Pattisson and Roshan Sedhai, “Covid-19 Lockdown Turns Qatar’s Largest Migrant Camp into ‘Virtual Prison,’” Guardian, March 20, 2020, www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/mar/20/covid-19-lockdown-turns-qatars-largest-migrant-camp-into-virtual-prison. 38.Priyanka Motaparthy, “Understanding Kafala: An Archaic Law at Cross Purposes with Modern Development,” Migrant-Rights.org, March 11, 2015, www.migrant-rights.org/2015/03/understanding-kafala-an-archaic-law-at-cross-purposes-with-modern-development/. 39.Bina Fernandez and Marine de Regt, “Making a Home in the World: Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East,” in Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East: The Home and the World, Bina Fernandez and Marine de Regt, eds.

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“Corona is the virus, capitalism is the pandemic,” rings out loudly as millions of people endure devastating job losses, appallingly inadequate healthcare, collapsed social safety nets, cruel evictions and foreclosures, and fatal working conditions from grocery stores to meatpacking factories. As Whitney N. Laster Pirtle articulates, “[R]acial capitalism is a fundamental cause of the racial and socioeconomic inequities within the novel coronavirus pandemic.”14 While the right-wing “anti-lockdown” movement is a palpable refraction of the settler-colonial logic of frontier freedom, the most under-protected are the most overpoliced by the overlapping racial-capitalist state forces of, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore depicts it, organized abandonment alongside organized violence.15 Refugees and migrants are bearing a disproportionate distribution of risk and violence.

pages: 245 words: 75,397

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

Month-end: UST 10s at 0.64%; S&P +12.8%; Nasdaq +15.5%; dollar flat. Week Six of the Meltdown (Wednesday, April 1–Saturday, April 4) Every market crisis is different. There’s no one size fits all. World-wide, we now have more than 860,000 confirmed cases and 42,000 deaths. There are 3.5 billion people under some sort of coronavirus lockdown. Overnight, the Big D projected that the USA could face between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths. Mid-April is expected to be the peak, two weeks from now. The shutdowns have caused a complete collapse in economic activity and job loss is reaching Great Depression levels. I bet you can guess who’s getting laid off.

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But the S&P 500 is now up 30% from its lows in mid-March and back to where it was last October, when the outlook for 2020 corporate earnings looked sunshiny. Companies have sold record amounts of debt in recent weeks. Junk bonds, historically dodgy during an economic swoon, have roared back. To end the week, Obama made a virtual appearance. He never mentioned the Big D in his video commencement speech, but it was clear to everyone in the coronavirus lockdown that he was throwing shade. “Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy, that’s how little kids think,” Obama told a multinetwork audience of millions of high school seniors, who won’t have an in-person graduation this year. “Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grownups—including some with fancy titles and important jobs—still think that way,” the former POTUS added, “which is why things are so screwed up.

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Part 2: The Crash Chapter 4 The Virus Spreads January 2020 1/1/20—Huanan Seafood Market closed by local authorities in response to illness outbreak. 1/3/20—ISM manufacturing declines to 47.2, its lowest print in a decade. 1/7/20—At a closed politburo meeting, Xi Jinping requests prevention and control work to address the new coronavirus. 1/8/20—South Korea announces its first case of coronavirus from China: a woman who had recently traveled to Wuhan. 1/10/20—Payrolls miss at 145K; unemployment steady at 3.5%; average hourly earnings at 2.9%, first time -3% since July 2018. 1/11/20— China reports its first COVID-19 death. 1/11/20—WHO announces: “The Chinese government reports that there is no clear evidence that the virus passes easily from person to person.” 1/15/20—Phase 1 of US/China trade deal signed. 1/16/20—Trump impeachment trial begins in the Senate. 1/16/20—Japan announces first COVID-19 case. 1/20/20—First reported case of COVID-19 in the USA. 1/23/20—Wuhan goes into lockdown. 1/30/20—FOMC leaves rates unchanged, downgrades household spending description to “moderate” from “strong.” 1/30/20—WHO declares “global health emergency.” 1/31/20—President Trump bans Chinese travelers from entering the USA. Month-end: UST 10s at 1.51%; S&P -0.04% (up first half; gives back in second half); Nasdaq +2.0%.

pages: 357 words: 132,377

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

He raised taxes and fines to fight wars in an effort to reclaim it, probably murdered his nephew, then fell out with nobles whose families he sporadically kidnapped and killed. He had a particular penchant for starving hostages to death in dungeons. A row with the pope got so intense that weddings and funerals were banned across England, like a medieval version of a Covid lockdown, before John eventually made a humiliating peace by offering up the whole country as a papal fiefdom.15 As is the way of these things, some historians claim that John has been treated unfairly. But if Magna Carta is always being venerated as ‘good’, it seems logical the king who was forced to surrender to its demands must have been ‘bad’.

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The landowner was taking them to court that day to evict what they said was ‘a squat’ and the police were encircling them. But the campers claimed they had a right to do what they wanted there according to the Charter of the Forests, a companion document to Magna Carta passed in 1217.55 During the Covid lockdowns, a man called Graham Moore who, under the moniker ‘Daddy Dragon’, posts a lot on the internet about Europe, the deep state and the danger of vaccinations, turned up at Runnymede with some flags. He went to the John F. Kennedy Memorial to claim protection under the US constitution because he was standing on ‘American soil’ before launching a petition for England to be declared a ‘captive nation’.56 At the same time, businesses ranging from a hair salon in Oakenshaw, a tattoo parlour in Bristol, a martial arts centre in Wigan and a Christian bookshop in Gedling called The Mustard Seed all refused to obey Covid lockdown rules.

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Kennedy Memorial to claim protection under the US constitution because he was standing on ‘American soil’ before launching a petition for England to be declared a ‘captive nation’.56 At the same time, businesses ranging from a hair salon in Oakenshaw, a tattoo parlour in Bristol, a martial arts centre in Wigan and a Christian bookshop in Gedling called The Mustard Seed all refused to obey Covid lockdown rules. They placed identical notices in their window claiming that Clause 61 of Magna Carta allowed them to opt out of any law to which they did not consent. It did not, of course. The clause in question gave twenty-five barons the right to ‘distrain upon and assail’ the monarch if they decided he had breached the agreement.

pages: 487 words: 124,008

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Russia: “Moscow Deploys Facial Recognition Technology for Coronavirus Quarantine,” Reuters, February 21, 2020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT After traveling abroad: Patrick Reevell, “How Russia Is Using Facial Recognition to Police Its Coronavirus Lockdown,” ABC News, April 30, 2020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT tried to pass a bill: Ed Chau, “Facial Recognition Regulation: AB 2261 Is a Long Overdue Solution,” CalMatters, June 2, 2020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT But that bill: Ryan Johnston, “Facial Recognition Bill Falls Flat in California Legislature,” StateScoop, June 4, 2020.

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It had hired high-powered attorneys from established corporate firms, not just Abrams but also Lee Wolosky, a former national security advisor, and was recruiting employees with experience in government contracting. Clearview’s few dozen full-time employees were still working from wherever they wanted, and although a government contractor without an actual headquarters was oddball, it was less so in the pandemic; lockdowns and social distancing rules had emptied most corporate offices. Instead, the meeting took place in Abrams’s posh Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan, its foyer adorned with photos of Abrams alongside Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Abrams had a home office there, but it wasn’t huge, making it hard for us to maintain the recommended six-foot distance from one another in the time of Covid-19.

pages: 304 words: 90,084

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change
by Dieter Helm
Published 2 Sep 2020

Thirty years on from the UN’s drive to address climate change, we are still going backwards at an alarming rate. Up to the start of 2020, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere carried on going up relentlessly at around 2 parts per million (ppm) every year. The only thing that has worked and lowered carbon consumption is the Covid-19 lockdowns, sharply reducing GDP and emissions. Anger is not enough, and neither is despair at what has so far failed to happen. We can do much better. There needs to be a plan. This is my attempt to bring together my earlier arguments and analyses, to set out a better way of thinking through the carbon problem, and to lay out what a carbon policy would look like if we really wanted to limit global temperatures.

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Thirty years later, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to grow unabated. Over three decades, it went up from around 355 ppm to well over 400 ppm, rising by around 2 ppm per annum. In 2018, it went up by 2.7 ppm. Not even a blip for the global financial crisis dents the relentless upward path. Only the Covid-19 lockdowns and associated temporary collapse of global GDP have checked its path. Global temperatures have already increased by nearly 1°C since the Industrial Revolution. The world burns ever more fossil fuels. The last 30 years have been the golden age of the fossil fuels. Far more fossil fuels have been burnt in the past 30 years than in the entire nineteenth century.

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The right place to start is with consumption and us the consumers, and only then should we look to the producers. We have to remember that all this stuff that is made with fossil fuels, and thus causes carbon emissions, is made for us. When we temporarily stopped consuming so much during the Covid-19 lockdowns, such as shopping, eating out and travel, down went emissions. In order to get a handle on the consumption side and our role in causing climate change, we need to take a close look at our own carbon consumption and understand not only how much climate change each of us is causing, but also what we can do about it.

pages: 414 words: 117,581

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

Here’s Why He’s Worried,” New York Times, December 30, 2019; Tim Cook remarks, Apple Keynote Event, March 25, 2019; Mark Lawson, “Apple TV+: Less a Rival to Netflix, More a Smug Religious Cult,” Guardian, March 25, 2019; Josef Adalian, “We Learned a Lot About Apple TV+ Today, but Not How Much It’ll Cost,” New York, March 25, 2019; Elahe Izadi, “Bono Is Sorry U2’s Album Automatically Showed Up on Your iTunes,” Washington Post, October 15, 2014. CHAPTER 7: COOKING UP “QUICK BITES” Jeffrey Katzenberg interview with Dawn Chmielewski, “Coronavirus Lockdown Will Boost Meg Whitman’s and Jeff Katzenberg’s New Mobile Streaming Service Quibi,” Forbes, April 3, 2020; Katzenberg interview with Andrew Wallenstein, “Inside Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Plan to Revolutionize Media on Mobile Screens,” Variety, July 19, 2017; Dawn Chmielewski interview with Meg Whitman, “Coronavirus Lockdown Will Boost Meg Whitman’s and Jeff Katzenberg’s New Mobile Streaming Service Quibi”; Meg Whitman with Joan O’C. Hamilton, The Power of Many (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010), 22; Jason Blum interview with authors, October 16, 2020; Cody Heller interview with authors, July 8, 2020; Tegan Jones, “Dummy Is the Hilariously Filthy and Raw Show We Need Right Now,” Gizmodo, April 21, 2020; Jeffrey Katzenberg interview with Bill Snyder, “Jeffrey Katzenberg: How Failure Makes a Better Leader,” Stanford Business, March 13, 2018; Benjamin Mullin, “Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman Struggle with Their Startup—and Each Other,” Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2020; Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman keynote, Consumer Electronics Show, January 8, 2020; Dawn Chmielewski interview with Zach Wechter, “Meg Whitman, Jeffrey Katzenberg Raise $400 Million Second Funding Round as Quibi Prepares to Launch,” Forbes, January 8, 2020; Van Toffler interview with the authors, March 12, 2020.

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CHAPTER 13: “I LOVE THAT SHOW AND I THINK YOU WILL TOO” Lucian Grainge, Ted Cohen, Richard Plepler, and Lee Eisenberg were interviewed by the authors; Tim Cook is quoted from Apple’s September 10, 2019, product launch; Eddy Cue’s remarks are from an interview with Stuart McGurk, “Can Apple Hack It in Hollywood? We Talk to the Man Behind Apple TV+,” GQ, July 1, 2019. CHAPTER 14: QUIBI VADIS? Interviews with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman; Dawn Chmielewski, “Coronavirus Lockdown Will Boost Meg Whitman’s and Jeff Katzenberg’s New Mobile Streaming Service Quibi”; Jason Blum spoke with the authors and Grace Watkins posted remarks to Twitter. Our account also was informed by Spencer Kornhaber, “Quibi Is a Vast Wasteland,” Atlantic, April 11, 2020; Kate Knibbs, “Laughing at Quibi Is Way More Fun Than Watching Quibi,” Wired, July 15, 2020; Benjamin Mullin and Sahil Patel, “Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s On-the-Go Streaming Bet, Adjusts to Life on the Couch,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2020; Nicole Sperling, “Jeffrey Katzenberg Blames Pandemic for Quibi’s Rough Start,” New York Times, May 11, 2020.

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Katzenberg initially sought to blame the underwhelming debut on external forces, telling the New York Times in one particularly damaging interview, “I attribute everything that has gone wrong to the coronavirus.” A few weeks later, he said the slow start provided the equivalent of a beta period, allowing the company to take stock and regroup after hitting the “brick wall” of COVID-19. But in the midst of a nationwide lockdown, viewers were devouring hours of programming in marathon binge sessions on their living room TVs to fill the seemingly endless expanse of time, not seeking out movies and TV shows in “snackable” form. The roots of Quibi’s problems went deeper, though, to its founding premise.

pages: 426 words: 136,925

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

“The whole name of the game is getting the product to the customer in the quickest, most cost-effective way based on shipping costs,” Autry declared on a grand-opening tour of the building. The ramp-up at the warehouse started in mid-March of 2020, same as everywhere else around the country, as the coronavirus lockdowns took hold. Orders soared to holiday levels as millions of Americans decided that the only safe way to shop was from their home. It was just nine months into Hector’s time at the company, yet he was the only one who remained from his orientation class of twenty—the others either hadn’t been able to handle the pace, or had gotten injured, or had been terminated because they had run out of excused absences after getting injured.

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It was a romantic notion, tinged with the aura of a simpler time—a time when Samuel Grumbacher sent his sons and sons-in-law off to make the family name in small cities across Pennsylvania. But the notion was up against all manner of brute economic reality. The digital economy had produced winner-take-all companies and cities, and it was hard to imagine that the great leap forward in digitalization brought on by the pandemic lockdowns would not simply intensify that winner-take-all effect as the tech giants and their associated cities consolidated their market power yet further. It was not so surprising, then, that Facebook would seize the moment to lease all 730,000 square feet of converted office space in the monumental former post office building across from Penn Station in New York, or that Amazon would announce that it was adding at least 2,000 white-collar employees at the former Lord & Taylor flagship on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which it had bought for $1 billion.

pages: 334 words: 91,722

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

It certainly made the UK refusal to extend the transition period bizarre, and it meant that when that period ended businesses and government were less well-prepared than they might otherwise have been. Beyond these direct relationships, there was a complex web of interconnections between Brexit and responses to the coronavirus crisis. These included the very clear overlap between those, the self-styled ‘lockdown sceptics’, who thought that the coronavirus restrictions were overdone, should never have happened or should be lifted quickly, and that the whole thing was essentially a fuss about nothing, and those who supported Brexit, thought it easy and simple to deliver and claimed that it should have already been done.

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So Brexit provided an umbrella that could link the hardcore libertarianism of a very small ideological minority with the resentments, victimhood and perceived humiliations of a much larger group. And the spines of that umbrella were ‘freedom from the rules’. Almost all the high-profile fights of the post-referendum period were framed by this and, tellingly, it spilled over into objections from many Brexiters to coronavirus lockdown restrictions. Domestically, these ranged from the Miller case on parliamentary approval for triggering Article 50 through to the row (and court cases) over prorogation. They were all battles over whether ‘the rules’ (laws, conventions) had to be followed or whether the ‘will of the people’ trumped such niceties.

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It also seems likely that for some time to come the identities of ‘remainer’ and ‘leaver’ will continue to be significant features of the political and cultural landscape, very possibly inflecting traditional voting patterns as, to an extent, happened in the 2019 election. The bigger legacy of that would seem likely to be a moving culture war, taking in new issues apart from Brexit but always reflecting the divisions that Brexit both laid bare and magnified. That could already be seen in the way that, during the coronavirus pandemic, overlaps emerged between ‘lockdown sceptics’ and Brexiters, as discussed in Chapter Six. Indeed, Nigel Farage pivoted from making Brexit his main preoccupation to criticising the coronavirus restrictions (as well as treading his familiar territory of stoking panic about asylum seekers). As Brexit illustrated, Farage – or, in the future, someone like him – is able to strongly influence politics without necessarily winning seats in Westminster.

pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children
by Susan Linn
Published 12 Sep 2022

We sing what she calls “Blah Blah Black Sheep,” her version of that old nursery rhyme, and other songs, and we laugh together at the silliness we’re creating. It’s like hundreds of other play experiences I’ve had with children—except that Hazel is thousands of miles away. Thanks to the wonders of digital technologies, during the long COVID lockdown Audrey and I got to play with kids who were cooped up at home. I’m grateful for the digital platforms that made these sessions possible, but I’m also acutely aware of both the irony and the limits of my gratitude. After all, I’ve long been critical of the ways tech companies exploit kids—from incessantly hawking in-app purchases or costly upgrades to invading children’s privacy to equipping apps with features that make it hard for kids (and adults) to tear themselves away.

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Faith Boninger, Alex Molnar, and Michael Barbour, Issues to Consider Before Adopting a Digital Platform or Learning Program (Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center, September 24, 2020), section 3; Roxana Marachi and Lawrence Quill, “The Case of Canvas: Longitudinal Datafication Through Learning Management Systems,” Teaching in Higher Education 25, no. 4 (April 29, 2020): 418–34; Andrea Peterson, “Google Is Tracking Students as It Sells More Products to Schools, Privacy Advocates Warn,” Washington Post, December 28, 2015. 10. Criscillia Benford, “Should Schools Rely on EdTech?,” Fair Observer, August 12, 2020, www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/criscillia-benford-ed-tech-educational-technology-education-news-tech-coronavirus-covid-19-lockdown-world-news-68173. 11. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection,” PISA (OECD Publishing, September 14, 2015), 3, doi.org/10.1787/19963777. 12. Jake Bryant et al., “New Global Data Reveal Education Technology’s Impact on Learning,” McKinsey and Company, June 12, 2020, www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/new-global-data-reveal-education-technologys-impact-on-learning. 13.

pages: 309 words: 121,279

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

‘We received a lot of complaints from a small town in the Klang valley,’ Bee Yin tells me. ‘Polluted water. Many people complained about the smell.’ At the time, Bee Yin was the Malaysian government minister in charge of environmental issues. She has long dark hair and a politician’s charming, full-toothed smile. When we speak, Malaysia and the UK are in the midst of coronavirus lockdowns, so we talk over video chat; connection, glimpsed in isolation. She’s wearing a checked dress and sits in front of a window. Behind her, I can see sunlight bleaching the rooftops of Kuala Lumpur under an azure sky. Bee Yin instructed her agency to investigate. ‘We had them go have a look, and they saw that there were a lot of illegal plastic recycling factories,’ Bee Yin says.

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When I was there, it broke 145.1μg/m3 according to the website IQ Air. 43 François Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux, The Contamination of the Earth: A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age (Cambridge: MIT Press), 2020, pp. 824–38 (Kindle iOS edition). 44 Katarzyna Chojnacka, Dawid Skrzypczak et al., ‘Progress in sustainable technologies of leather wastes valorization as solutions for the circular economy’, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 313 (2021): DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.127902 45 Kazi Madina Maraz, ‘Benefits and problems of chrome tanning in leather processing: Approach a greener technology in leather industry’, Materials Engineering Research 3(1), 2001, pp. 156–64: DOI: 10.25082/MER.2021.01.004 46 Yujiao Deng et al., ‘The Effect of Hexavalent Chromium on the Incidence and Mortality of Human Cancers: A Meta-Analysis Based on Published Epidemiological Cohort Studies’, Frontiers in Oncology, 04/02/2019: DOI: 10.3389/fonc.2019.00024 47 Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta, ‘As Kanpur Tanneries Face Extinction, Adityanath’s (Mis)Rule Dominates Poll Talk’, The Wire, 19/02/2022: https://thewire.in/labour/as-kanpur-tanneries-face-extinction-adityanaths-misrule-dominates-poll-talk 48 Malavika Vyawahare, ‘This Kanpur village drinks neon green water & lives near a toxic waste dump as big as CP’, The Print, 15/03/2019: https://theprint.in/india/this-kanpur-village-drinks-neon-green-water-lives-near-a-toxic-waste-dump-as-big-as-cp/205769/ 49 Dipak Paul, ‘Research on heavy metal pollution of river Ganga: A review’, Annals of Agrarian Science 15(2), 2017, pp. 278–86: DOI: 10.1016/j.aasci.2017.04.001 50 Iqbal Ahmad and Sadhana Chaurasia, ‘Study on Heavy Metal Pollution in Ganga River at Kanpur (UP)’, Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research, 6 (2019), pp. 391–8. 51 Tanuj Shukla, Indra Sen et al., ‘A Time-Series Record during Covid-19 Lockdown Shows the High Resilience of Dissolved Heavy Metals in the Ganga River’, Environmental Science & Technology Letters 8(4), 2021, pp. 301–6: DOI: 10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00982 52 The other ‘Big Pollution Diseases’ were Minamata disease (methylmercury poisoning), Niigata Minamata disease (also methylmercury poisoning) and Yokkaichi asthma (sulphur dioxide poisoning).

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The buoy collects both data and physical samples, ‘so that we can know every single day the current condition of the river’. This system is just a prototype for now, and unable to test for specific chemicals – instead using water conductivity as a shorthand for metal content. Even then it is already proving useful. During the pandemic, for example, the team saw in real time the effect that lockdowns were having on pollution in the river: with tanneries closed, dissolved metal content fell by more than 60 per cent.51 ‘It was good, very clean,’ Satya says. ‘And now the industries are working again, all the pollutants have started getting back into the system.’ The remote system is needed, Bishakh explains, because existing data collected by the state pollution control boards tends to be poor quality, and often inaccurate.

pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

It also provided the ghosts of New Labour past – like former spin doctor Alastair Campbell – a chance to claw back relevance, to loom large once more in a new present. Tom Baldwin, the fast-talking, gruffly cheerful former director of communications and strategy to Ed Miliband, arrived at my flat two months after the fateful 2019 election and weeks before the coronavirus lockdown. Back in June 2018, he became the director of communications to the People’s Vote campaign. Baldwin joined People’s Vote in good faith: he genuinely wanted a new referendum in order to stop Britain’s divorce from the EU, a divorce that he believed would damage his country, which he loves. But it was soon clear to him that many of those he was working with had other priorities.

…

It’s 4 March 2020, and Britain is in the midst of an increasingly unsettling interlude: less than three months since Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party suffered electoral obliteration at the hands of Boris Johnson’s Brexit populists, and less than three weeks before Johnson’s government, belatedly recognizing the threat of the coronavirus pandemic, would impose a national lockdown. As I cycled to Mandelson’s offices, England’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, was warning journalists that ‘some deaths’ were likely. A storm was coming, but as yet it remained rumblings of thunder in the distance. The old world was still intact, and it was ruled by a Conservative government drunk on triumphalism, rolling around in its newly acquired power, seemingly oblivious to everything else.

pages: 347 words: 103,518

The Stolen Year
by Anya Kamenetz
Published 23 Aug 2022

And it just made me even more depressed, especially when I had to quarantine myself, and also being sick and me just being so confused, like, I don’t know how I’m going to recover from this pandemic or where I’m going to be after shelter because I don’t really have any resources, and I’m homeless, and it just doesn’t make sense.” LOCKDOWN IN LOCKUP When the pandemic lockdowns were called, David was finishing up a four-year sentence at the Swanson Center for Youth in Monroe, Louisiana, that began when he was seventeen. David, who, unlike most juveniles incarcerated in Louisiana, is white, was convicted of aggravated rape. Two years on, his sentence was up for modification.

…

“More fighting, more depression, more anxiety, more likely to lose patience with the children… or neglect if a parent needs to work.” And parents lost access to support from family, friends, and church, even stress relievers like exercise. However, data did not conclusively reveal more child abuse across the country during the pandemic. Domestic violence reports to police rose between 10 and 27 percent in various jurisdictions in the first weeks of lockdown. But official reports to child protection agencies fell between 20 and 70 percent across the country. Out of millions of emergency room visits nationwide, the total number in which child abuse or neglect was suspected dropped from March to October 2020 compared to the year before.

…

So in January 2020, with unemployment at a fifty-year low, women crossed over 50 percent of the paid workforce. This was hailed as a milestone and a sign of greatly equal things to come. Then lockdowns put the economy into a medically induced coma. Women lost just over half of the jobs that vanished in March and April 2020, the first recession in US history where women lost most of the jobs. Pandemic lockdowns cut retail, food service, hospitality, and childcare. Black and Latina women without a college degree lost more jobs than others. It was dubbed a “she-cession.” It stood in contrast to the Great Recession in 2008. That was a housing bust, which eliminated a lot of construction jobs, which meant it was deemed a “he-cession.”

pages: 342 words: 114,118

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

At home, the bullets and poison dispensed on his behalf only illuminate the fears of a ruler who lacks confidence in the sustainability of his own project. Whether he is defeated by a Navalny or clings to power for as long as he wants, Putin, at some point, will be gone; that much is certain. What will be his legacy? * * * — In my final trip before the first COVID lockdown, I met with Congressman Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in Washington. He’d recently completed the noble and ultimately incomplete ordeal of the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump, which also amounted to an autopsy of what Russia had done to America and what we had done to ourselves.

…

The only permanence was in the landscape around us and the human beings who moved within it, and the hope that they’d insist on a different direction of events. The ferry reached the dock and I joined an orderly procession of people walking onto the shore. * * * — At the height of the COVID lockdown in the United States, China introduced a national security law that essentially eliminated the legal divisions between mainland China and Hong Kong. Wrapped in the guise of securitized goals like antiterrorism, the laws placed Hong Kong at the whims of their Beijing rulers. Opposition figures and democracy activists were detained.

…

Part IV WHO WE ARE: BEING AMERICAN American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. —James Baldwin 21 Who We Are In late February 2020, I sat in Barack Obama’s Washington office talking about what had gone so wrong in global politics. COVID-19 was gathering force but had not yet descended upon us like a hurricane. Lockdowns were weeks away. The economic, climate, and racial crises were still hidden underneath the surface brush of American life. The Trump impeachment had predictably passed as inconsequentially as a cable news segment. Obama was grinding away to finish his memoir, having methodically missed self-imposed deadlines.

pages: 401 words: 112,589

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

Vogels, “The State of Online Harassment,” Pew Research Center, January 13, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/01/13/the-state-of-online-harassment/ 13“Readout of the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse Launch,” The White House Statements and Releases, June 17, 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/06/17/readout-of-the-white-house-task-force-to-address-online-harassment-and-abuse-launch/ 14“The Biden Plan to End Violence Against Women,” JoeBiden.com, accessed on August 12, 2022, https://joebiden.com/vawa/ 15Sophie Davies, “Revenge porn soars in Europe’s coronavirus lockdown as student fights back,” Thomson Reuters Foundation News, May 5, 2020, https://news.trust.org/item/20200505165904-e8umi 16Naimul Karim, “Police in Bangladesh launch all-woman team to fight digital abuse,” Thomson Reuters Foundation News, November 16, 2020, https://news.trust.org/item/20201116134414-24q4p/ 17The Korean National Police Agency (KNPA), 2013 [Crime Statistics in 2013], August 2014, p. 74 KNPA, 2014 [Crime Statistics in 2014], October 2015 p. 116 KNPA, 2015 [Crime Statistics in 2015], 2016, p. 122 KNPA, 2016 [Crime Statistics in 2016], 2017, p. 112 KNPA, 2017 [Crime Statistics in 2017], 2018, p. 120 KNPA, 2018 [Crime Statistics in 2018], 2019, p. 120 KNPA, 2019 [Crime Statistics in 2019], 2020, p. 120 KNPA, 2020 [Crime Statistics in 2020], 2021, p. 120 18Ibid 19Baek Gwang-Gyun, 3 [The 3rd symposium of the Sentencing Study Group-Digital Sex Crimes and Sentencing], The Supreme Court Sentencing Committee, June 3, 2019, p. 32 Kim Bo-Yeong, , 5 [Spycam porn sexual criminals grew both among men and women for the past five years], Asia Today, October 28, 2019, https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/view.php?

…

In the United States, a nationwide survey found that nearly 13 percent of three thousand participants had been threatened by or fallen victim to nonconsensual porn.11 With the sexually charged abuse disproportionately affecting young women, 33 percent of American women under thirty-five said in 2020 that they’d been sexually harassed online, far higher than 11 percent of their male counterparts.12 And in 2022, the Biden administration set up a task force focused on preventing online abuse13 after promising to study “rampant online sexual harassment … including revenge porn, deepfakes,” and their potential link with real-life violence against women, mass shootings, or extremism.14 Europe also saw an alarming rise in online posts of intimate images of women, usually by current or former partners who were “stuck at home in front of a screen” during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020.15 Around the same period, Bangladeshi police launched an all-women unit to tackle a rise in online harassment, as women account for most of the nearly 6,100 cases of digital abuse, including nonconsensual porn, reported in the country.16 The scenes in Seoul’s subways may strike some as overly paranoid, but data says otherwise.

pages: 385 words: 106,848

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

See also specific institutions business model of, 58 Celsius as, for cryptocurrencies, 110, 118 central function of, 17 Crypto Capital and, 61 effect of rise in interest rates on, 239 runs on, 70, 71 Tether and, 52–54, 56 “wildcat,” 70–71 Bannon, Steve, 34 Battlestar, 113 Bay Street Boys, 76–77 Bellow, Saul, 178 Belshe, Mike, 102 Bernasconi, Paolo, 209–210 Betts, John, 56–58 Bianchi, Vittorio, 41 Biden, Joe, 91 Bieber, Justin, 142 The Big Con (Maurer), 177 “Big Fatty,” 193 “the Big Store,” 177–178 Binance founder of, 5 FTX and, 79 investigations of, 213 lawsuit against, 238 “pig butchering” using, 181, 213–214 Bitcoin anonymity of users, 19 art by Picozzi, 205–206, 207 blockchain, 16 commercial applications of, 19 crash of, 236 Devasini on, 47 development of, 18 in El Zonte, El Salvador, 202–203 incomprehensibility of, as selling point, 16 in Lugano, Switzerland, 207, 208–209 Mallers and El Salvador and, 26 Miami’s proposed use of, 15 network maintenance, 18 as official currency of El Salvador, 199–201, 202–204 pollution produced by mining, 20 predictions about use of, 15–16 seized by FBI, 109 Silk Road and, 19 stolen from Bitfinex, 48, 96–98, 102, 103, 104, 105–106, 107–109 Tether purchase of, 239 trading in Japan versus in U.S., 86 Bitcointalk (forum), 34, 47 Bitfinex bailout of, by sale of crypto tokens, 64 Bitcoin City and, 202 Bitcoins stolen from, 48, 96–98, 102, 103, 104, 105–106, 107–109 Crypto Capital and, 61 Devasini and, 47 first bubble and, 51 hacking losses suffered by, 87, 102 New York State investigation of, 60 Noble Bank International and, 56, 61 reliability of, 48 Tether and, 38, 52 Tether’s line of credit to, 63–64 workarounds to move money, 60–61 Bitfinex’ed (pseudonym), 52–56, 163 BitGo, 101, 102, 103 BitMEX, 87 Blackbeard, 76 Blair, Tony, 129 blockchains addresses on, 102 described, 16–17 Ethereum and, 49 NFTs and, 139 public nature of, 163 “smart contracts” and, 114 BlockFi, 166, 168, 236 Bloom, Orlando, 129 Booker, Cory, 79, 91 Bored Apes ApeFest, 150–153, 157–158 celebrity owners, 141–142, 154 conspiracy theory about, 156, 157 FTX and, 154–155 Kennel Club, 144 market, 142–143, 144–145, 156, 158 monetization of, 155–156 NFTs as intellectual property, 155 online game, 154 purchasing process, 145–149 Three Arrows and, 166 Brady, Tom, 89, 129, 131 Brandolini, Alberto, 133–134 British Virgin Islands Financial Investigation Agency, 12 Bryant, Dez, 142 BTC-e, 48 Budovsky, Arthur, 37 Bukele, Nayib, 26, 199, 201, 203 “the bullshit asymmetry principle,” 133–134 Bündchen, Gisele, 131 Businessweek, 68–69, 137 BuzzFeed, 152–153 C Cambodia human trafficking in, 193–195 scam compounds, 182–188, 190, 193 Sihanoukville gambling boom, 195–196 Tether used in, 191–192, 193–195, 199 Casaleggio, Gianroberto, 44 Castiglione, John basic facts about, 59 cryptocurrency assignment, 59 questionnaire to cryptocurrency exchanges, 60 Castor, Amy, 167 Cazes, Alexandre, 104 Celsius Network assets of, 24–25 as bank for cryptocurrencies, 110, 118 Bankman-Fried and, 164–165 bankruptcy of, 167–169, 214, 238 business model of, 24, 25 DeFi and, 113–115, 117, 118 interest rates of, 161 investments made by, 164 management of, 117, 161 Mashinsky on safety of, 117, 164 pause of withdrawals from, 161 run on, 161–162, 164, 165 Stone as employee, 113–115, 116–117, 160 Stone’s departure from, 111 Stone’s legal dispute with, 112, 240–242 Tether and, 24, 25, 109, 117, 118–119, 164 Three Arrows and, 165 Centre for Effective Altruism, 84 Chad’s World, 32 The Chainsmokers, 142 Chakra (yacht), 30–31 Chalopin, Jean basic facts about, 66–67 at Crypto Bahamas conference, 136 Deltec under, 67 Devasini and, 67 on Tether’s assets, 67–68 van der Velde and, 136 China “mining” banned in, 20 Sihanoukville gambling boom and, 195–196 Tether as holder of debt of companies in, 68, 69 “Chinatown” (Cambodia), 185–187, 188, 190, 191–193, 197–199 Christie’s (auction house), 143 CipherBlade, 180–182 Clinton, Bill, 129 CMS Holdings, 27 Coinbase lawsuit against, 238 trading during Covid-19 lockdowns and, 9–10 usage of, described, 147, 159 Coincheck, 102 CoinDesk, 214, 216 Collins, Reeve, 36, 37, 115 Collins-Rector, Marc, 32–33 commercial paper, 23 Covid-19 lockdowns Axie Infinity during, 121–122 stock trading during, 9–10 Tether’s growth during, 65 Cramer, Jim, 168 C.R.E.A.M.

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He was a thirty-six-year-old professional who owned a house with a pool in a nice Boston suburb and served on two charitable boards. As he read about Dogecoin on Reddit, he grew convinced that for some reason, other people would buy the dog-joke cryptocurrency too. It wasn’t a crazy thing to think. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, millions of people had downloaded apps like Robinhood and Coinbase. Understimulated mentally and overstimulated monetarily, they’d started tapping the buy button. These day traders gathered on Twitter and Reddit, where they shocked Wall Street by sending shares of left-for-dead retailer GameStop up more than tenfold, nearly bankrupting hedge funds that bet against it.

…

Night, 155 Silicon Valley Bank, 71 Silk Road, 19, 98, 103 Singer, Peter, 81 Singh, Nishad background of, 85 characteristics of, 93–94 as cooperating witness against Bankman-Fried, 234, 235 move to Hong Kong by, 223 run on Alameda Research and, 226 Sky Mavis, 123, 124, 126 “smart contracts,” 114 Smooth Love Potion as official cryptocurrency of Axie Infinity, 120 purpose of, 124 used as cash, 122 Snoop Dogg, 142, 157–158 social engineering, 103 Soho, Jessica, 123 Solana, crash of, 236 Solana Monkey Business, 139, 144 Solano, Greg, 154, 156 Soriano, William, 203 Sotheby’s (auction house), 144–145 Spitzer, Elliot, 59 Stablecoins Celsius Network and, 24 described, 11, 25 genesis of, 32, 36 North Korea and, 170 TerraUSD as, 162, 163, 165, 166, 226 Tether as, 11, 57–58, 95, 170 theft of, 127 USDC as, 170 Star Atlas, 132–133 Stark, Jim, 132 Stepn, 133 stocks “pump-and-dump” schemes, 237 trading during Covid-19 lockdowns, 9–10 Stone, Jason basic facts about, 112 Battlestar and, 113 Bored Apes and, 150, 151, 155 as Celsius employee, 113–115, 116–117 on Celsius’s management, 161 DeFi and, 113 departure from Celsius, 111, 160 legal dispute with Celsius, 112, 240–242 Mashinsky and, 110, 112–113, 240, 241 move to Puerto Rico by, 115, 116 purchase of Mutant Ape, 110, 155, 160, 241 Strauss, Neil, 155–156 Suarez, Francis, 15 SushiSwap, 110 Sutton, Willie, 101 Switzerland, 207 T Tan, Bilce, 183–185 TerraUSD, 162, 163, 165, 166, 226 Tesla, 22 Tether Alameda Research as customer of, 74, 95 banking system and, 52–54, 56, 57 Bankman-Fried on trustworthiness of, 95 Bitfinex and, 38 business model of, 58 Celsius and, 24, 25, 109, 117, 118–119, 164 Chalopin on assets of, 67–68 conspiracy theories about, 27, 96, 138, 139 creation of, 11, 27, 34–35, 36 cryptocurrency exchanges and, 52 daily trading of, 13 Deltec and, 66, 67 effect of rise in interest rates on, 239 El Salvador and, 199, 203 first bubble and, 52 FTX and, 23, 95 hedge funds and, 26–27, 70 Hindenburg Research and, 72–73 as holder of commercial paper, 23 as holder of debt of Chinese companies, 68, 69 as holder of U.S. government bonds, 239 importance of, in cryptocurrency economy, 135 investments made by, 68 line of credit to Bitfinex, 63–64 management of, 11, 27, 39, 137 New York State investigation of, 62–63, 64–65 ownership of, 38, 239 Pierce and, 36, 38, 52 “pig butchering” using, 175, 176–179, 185, 213–214 purchase of Bitcoins by, 239 redemption guarantee, 163 run on, 163, 164, 170 growth during Covid-19 of, 65 solvency of, 63, 239–240 as stablecoin, 11, 57–58, 95, 170 traditional currency as backing of, 37, 63, 64 used in Cambodia, 191–192, 193–195, 199 Thailand, 104 Thatch, Edward, 76 Thiel, Peter, 29 Three Arrows Capital bankruptcy of, 166–167, 238 loans from Celsius and other cryptocurrency companies, 165–166 ownership of non-fungible tokens, 166 Tradeloop, 43 Transparency International Russia, 170 Trump, Donald, Jr., 30 U Ulbricht, Ross, 19 USDC, 170 utilitarianism Bankman-Fried’s embrace of, 82, 83–84 described, 222 “the Drowning Child” thought experiment, 81 V van der Velde, Jean-Louis, 136, 137–139, 206 Vanity Fair, 105 venture capital Founders Fund, 29 FTX and, 74, 89 Sequoia Capital, 21 Sky Mavis and, 123 Yuga Labs and, 154–155 “Versace Bedouin” (Morgan), 99, 103, 108 Voice of Democracy, 186, 190 Voyager Digital, 166, 168, 238 W Wagner, Michael, 132–133 The Wall Street Journal, 143, 216 Wang, Gary background of, 85 characteristics of, 93 as cooperating witness against Bankman-Fried, 234, 235 move to Hong Kong by, 223 run on Alameda Research and, 226 Watters, Jesse, 216 Web3, 120, 132, 141–142 Weil, Joseph “Yellow Kid,” 177–178 Wells Fargo, 52 Whitehurst, Brian Bitfinex focused on by, 60 cryptocurrency assignment, 59 SEC and, 64 Willett, J.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
by Kelly Weill
Published 22 Feb 2022

Flat Earth groups temporarily sidelined their spherical cause to proclaim the virus a hoax, or the result of a depopulation plot, or—in a synthesis with the anti-vax movement—part of an elaborate plot by Bill Gates to secretly inject people with microchips under the guise of vaccination. The sheer scale of the pandemic and its associated lockdowns sent the conspiratorial internet into new modes of collaboration. Plandemic, a COVID-19 conspiracy documentary featuring discredited virologist Judy Mikovits, spread like a plague across social media in early May 2020. Mikovits is a former research scientist who turned anti-vax after her main medical discovery was retracted because it appeared to have originated from a laboratory error.

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I might acknowledge the anxieties and fears that motivate their theories, and point to a resolution on the horizon (“They’re reopening for takeout soon”). This dialogue-based approach can work when everyone is on civil speaking terms. I cannot, however, make the yelling guy unsee every Trump-related COVID hoax he viewed during the pandemic lockdown. These confrontations can feel futile because they are violent outbursts at the end of a long process of radicalization, one that often begins out of sight, especially on the internet. But it’s not too late to stop funneling conspiracy theories into internet users’ brains and to provide them an off-ramp into reality.

pages: 291 words: 80,068

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

New Zealand’s brilliant Covid response: Interview by Kenneth Cukier with Michael Baker, health adviser to the government, June 2020. Britain’s pathetic Covid response: “Britain Has the Wrong Government for the Covid Crisis,” Economist, June 18, 2020, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/06/18/britain-has-the-wrong-government-for-the-covid-crisis. Britain’s Covid performance in June: “Coronavirus: UK Daily Deaths Drop to Pre-lockdown Level,” BBC News, June 8, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52968160. UK data on deaths and cases: “COVID-19 Pandemic Data in the United Kingdom,” Wikipedia, accessed October 30, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_Kingdom_medical_cases_chart.

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One need not feel powerless before a great force but can stand alongside it, provided the conditions instill a sense of fearlessness. Pluralism, the objective, can only exist if there is confidence, not fear. But who possesses such confidence? 9 vigilance we must remain on guard not to cede our power In the spring of 2020, as America’s Covid-19 lockdown began in earnest, a series of short TikTok videos went viral on social media. The chaotic word salad sounded familiar, as did the raspy voice: “We hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet, or just very powerful light.” But the words emanated from the youthful, dynamic Sarah Cooper, lip-synching the proposed Covid-19 remedy of Donald Trump.

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In Peru in 2020 a president is ousted after five days as the country is gripped by a popular uprising, while Bolivia’s former president (accused of vote rigging) triumphantly returns from exile, advocating a populist revolution against moderates. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte called on citizens to simply kill suspected drug dealers and saw his popularity soar. In Germany, some emotionalists call themselves Querdenker or “lateral thinkers” and protest Covid-19 lockdown measures and mask mandates. With a touch of nostalgia (and a dose of anti-Semitism) they wave flags of the German Empire from before the First World War. The emotional seems on the ascendency and the Enlightenment in descent. However, the solutions that the emotionalists advocate are odd cognitive concoctions.

pages: 314 words: 81,529

Badvertising
by Andrew Simms

THE LAND ROVER STORY The ASA received as many as 96 complaints about an advertisement we briefly mentioned earlier, in the Guardian on 12 June 2021 for a heavily polluting, oversized Jaguar Land Rover with a picture of the SUV enjoying itself in a sun-dappled forest. The headline, which for context appeared during the period of pandemic-related lockdowns, said: ‘LIFE IS SO MUCH BETTER WITHOUT RESTRICTIONS’. The text below the image said: Understandably, there are still restrictions as life slowly gets back to normal. Not so with the Defender, the 4WD vehicle with a capacity to go almost anywhere and do almost anything … a whole new world of freedom awaits.

pages: 348 words: 110,533

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

All you had to do was get on a plane. Canada, the UK, Australia—all were coming up with special immigration pathways for Hong Kongers in response to the new law. Get there, and they’d help with the rest, including sponsors or temporary housing. The pandemic offered some inconveniences—quarantine, COVID-19 tests, lockdowns—but that was nothing compared to the risk of staying put. The more complicated cases involved those without passports and facing charges such as rioting, arson, or assaulting a police officer. Given that the city’s only land border was with China, there was only one way out: over water.

…

Catherine continued speaking to Finn. In late January, SWHK kicked her out of the group for not explicitly taking sides. She felt like she’d lost the nearest thing she had to a family in this foreign place. She turned to Finn for support, and the two grew closer that winter, helping each other through the isolation of a second COVID lockdown across the UK. Catherine’s twenty-fifth birthday fell that April in 2021. Finn asked what she wanted to do to celebrate. Because he was now recognizable, Catherine suggested they do something more low-key than celebrate in London, perhaps a trip somewhere remote. She suggested going to Hastings, a seaside town on Britain’s southeastern coast.

…

She did it in style: at the Top Model search and fashion competition, in a yellow hard hat strapped with goggles, a respirator around her neck and an umbrella in her hand. Stand News interviewed her. Catherine had accepted the risks that came with her decision—ostracism from her family, never being able to return home—so hanging out with Finn was now the least of their concerns. With the COVID lockdown over, the two explored Britain as it came back to life that summer: watching the EuroCup final at a pub in Croydon over pints of beer; traveling to the cathedral city of Ely, where a Hong Kong chef had set up a booth at a weekend market; taking a trip to York. Spending time with Catherine was effortless, Finn thought.

pages: 490 words: 153,455

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

US-based research showed that mothers working outside the home these days spend just as much time caring for children as mothers did in the 1970s, when their only job was in the home. Others have estimated that “the size of the paid labor force would double if all unpaid caregivers were paid for their work.” During the coronavirus lockdown, one survey found that nearly half of men with young children reported splitting domestic duties equally—but their wives disagreed. Only 2 percent of women agreed that men were responsible for most of the housework during lockdown. Globally, United Nations researchers estimated in 1999 that all unpaid reproductive labor, if paid, would cost $16 trillion, a third of the world’s total economic activity—$11 trillion of which would be women’s share. 63 For the working class, it’s the impossibility of paying for help that forces the squeeze.

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What I want is for members of the artistic community to go away feeling what winning feels like and, also, how hard it is, how hard it is to even win a small battle, because that will make you realize how little power we actually have right now.” The artists’ union also held a campaign around arts funding from the government during the coronavirus lockdown. I suggested to O’Shea that, in a way, all of these collaborations and mutual support projects were themselves the beginnings of such a union. When I told the A4 Sounds crew about Natasha Bunten’s workers’ center, they reacted by saying, “Wow, that’s kind of what we are. An art workers’ center.”

pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by Philippe Legrain
Published 14 Oct 2020

As of 2016, immigrants had also co-founded more than half of the US’s eighty-seven unicorns, as start-ups valued at $1 billion (£770 million) or more are known.2 One unicorn, valued at $13 billion (£10 billion), is DoorDash, the country’s fastest-growing meal-delivery app and a lifeline for millions of Americans during coronavirus lockdowns, which was founded by Tony Wu, who moved to the US from China as a child.3 Across the entire US, nearly three in eight new businesses have at least one immigrant founder.4 Newcomers’ children have an outsized impact too. Apple’s Steve Jobs had a Syrian-born father. Fourteen of America’s twenty-five most valuable tech companies were co-founded by migrants or their children.5 Overall, immigrants co-founded 101 of the Fortune 500 most valuable listed companies in the US and their children 122, so an astonishing 45 percent in total.6 Those firms had $6.1 trillion (£4.7 trillion) in revenues and employed 13.5 million people.

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But in fact they are deeply flawed. For a start, they are based on the false premise that only highly skilled migrants are beneficial. But as Chapter 11 explains, migrants who lack formal qualifications provide a sizeable drudgery dividend. They are often the key workers who have provided essential services to societies in coronavirus lockdowns. Unless countries also allow them in, sectors that rely on them, such as care homes for the elderly, will struggle. Alternatively, and perversely, highly skilled migrants will end up doing jobs for which they are hugely overqualified – which they may still be willing to do, not least to give their children better opportunities – while migrants who would be more suited to such jobs are turned away.

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Chat to an Uber driver in Sydney or Melbourne and you’ll often find they are highly educated. Regrettably, the UK’s proposed points-based system announced in February 2020 would deny entry to the key workers – notably carers for the elderly (see Chapter 12) – for whom Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the rest of the country clapped every Thursday evening during the coronavirus lockdown.66 It would also turn away ambitious, enterprising people who work hard to improve their lot. Take Sushil and Anjana Patel, who arrived in the UK in the 1960s from Uganda with few qualifications. Had they had to apply for a UK work visa under the proposed new rules, they would have been denied entry.

pages: 257 words: 80,698

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals
by Oliver Bullough
Published 10 Mar 2022

That was when the Suez Veterans’ Association was due to lay up its standard – that is, to finally fold up its flag, because there were too few veterans to fly it any more – and to close for good. It would have been the final act in the history of this overlooked, determinedly narky and generous group of ex-servicemen, who had all served in British bases along the Suez Canal. Sadly, with two weeks to go, and the rapid spread of COVID-19 making total lockdown inevitable, the membership secretary was forced to contact the handful of surviving veterans (and me), and inform them the event had been postponed indefinitely owing to the risk to the attendees posed by the coronavirus. As far as I could tell, no one outside the SVA noticed, which, considering how little attention anyone in power had paid to the group before, was entirely appropriate.

…

The owners of the big new shops and the builders of the smart new buildings wanted to protect themselves from unforeseen risks, which meant they needed insurance. ‘My job was to find clients for the insurance companies, and I earned a commission from that. That’s how I earned my money,’ he explained over the phone from Kazakhstan (we were chatting during one of the COVID lockdowns, and I’d had to cancel my plans to fly out and visit him). ‘At that time there was a boom, a construction surge. Everyone was earning good money.’ But this caused Khassenov the same problem that had afflicted people earning significant sums of money in ex-colonies back in the 1960s: what should he do with it?

…

It makes for good comedy when Jeeves outsmarts the village bobby, or Bertie Wooster gets away with a scam because his chum is the local magistrate, but this is no way to run a financial system. Fraud and money laundering are spreading fast, too often Britain is at the heart of them, and the only way to stop that is to give the police the powers and resources they need. A few months before the first COVID lockdown I spent a jolly evening at a policing conference drinking with a table of officers from the west of England who specialised in investigating financial crime. I had expected to hear tales of how hard they found it to obtain evidence from overseas, but that wasn’t their concern at all; they were more bothered by their inability to gain usable evidence from the neighbouring police force fifteen miles away.

pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

What is only a mild disincentive to a wealthy motorist may be disproportionately punitive to someone on low, or no, income. 10 Department for Transport. 2020. Travel behaviour, attitudes and social impact of COVID-19. UK Government website, 23 July (www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-travel-behaviour-during-the-lockdown). 11 Department for Transport. 2021. All change? Travel tracker – wave 4 report. Report (www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-travel-behaviour-during-the-lockdown). 12 Phase 1 cuts journey times from 2 hours and 7 minutes to 1 hour and 40 minutes. Phase 2a will bring it down again, to 1 hour and 30 minutes, and then Phase 2b will bring it down further, to 1 hour and 11 minutes. 13 Department for Transport. 2015.

…

Hybrid working might be evenly spread across the week, but if everyone takes advantage of work-from-home Fridays and sticks to the same start and finish times, transport will suffer continued peak-time demand troubles. The size of chain is large, but it is not gargantuan. UK researchers estimate that even if every person who used to commute by car and worked from home during Covid lockdowns were to continue to do so for two days a week, then morning car trips would be cut by only 14%32 – that is a similar reduction to those seen in a typical school half-term holiday. If we’re lucky, though, a diffusion in demand could mean that transport networks adapt dramatically, spreading people out and delivering a higher quality of service.33 One thing we can be more certain about is climate change.

…

At a crossroads: travel adaptations during Covid-19 restrictions and where next? Report, March, Centre for Research in Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS) (www.creds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/CREDS-Decarbon8-covid-transas-briefing.pdf). 33 Interestingly, we do know a little about how people chose to work during the Covid-19 lockdowns. VPN data reveal that many people chose to start work earlier and finish later, but they often took a break of more than an hour in the middle of the day. 34 Committee on Climate Change. 2020. Policies for the sixth carbon budget and net zero. Report (www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Policies-for-the-Sixth-Carbon-Budget-and-Net-Zero.pdf).

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

The presumption is that the dominating disrupters will not themselves be disrupted either by upstart competitors (which they can buy) or by policymakers/regulators (which they can influence with their vast cash pools and increasing political power). The shift from a physical world to a digital/virtual world was accelerated by Covid-19 and lockdowns, further aiding these companies. Table 2.1 Decadal Perspective of Realized Asset Class Returns (Geometric Mean Premia), 1921–2020 Sources: AQR, Bloomberg. Notes: Compound average excess returns over cash for several asset classes. S&P500, NASDAQ and Tsy10 are US equity and bond indices.

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The top line shows the composite ratio (“value spread”) between cheap versus expensive valuations; the lower lines show each side separately versus the median valuation. The latest value style drawdown troughed, finally, in late 2020, coincidentally with the US presidential election and the Covid vaccine news. Some observers tie the value style's recovery to prospective changes in interest rates or the ending of lockdowns, while others argue that rising corporate taxes, antitrust regulation, and good old competition may soon challenge the recent winners-who-took-all. Just as it was difficult to explain the value's losses beyond storytelling, it was always difficult to identify one catalyst for its recovery, let alone the timing, and this remains true now.

…

I felt that my first book had given the building blocks but not enough historical or institutional context, nor much discussion on how to put the pieces together. So I began to think about a second book five years ago, partly prompted by polite requests for an update or a sequel. I knew I wanted to go both broader and shorter than in the first book, not easy. I mulled over the book but had no time to write it until Covid-19 lockdowns and the pause in business travel gave a window. I got the opportunity to work part-time, and I took it. This also means that while this book is hugely influenced by my AQR colleagues' work, it is a private effort and the responsibility for errors is all mine. I have so much gratitude toward AQR colleagues, not just for this book's contents but more generally for the common learning experience.

pages: 271 words: 79,355

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

Notes Introduction 1 Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. 2 TCP/IP protocol: Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. 3 ‘US heading anti-jihadist intelligence sharing operation – report’, The Times of Israel, 25 March 2021. 4 ‘YouTube and Netflix are cutting streaming quality in Europe due to coronavirus lockdowns’, CNBC, 20 March 2020. Several experts, like IT specialist Stéphane Bortzmeyer, believe that the networks were in fact far from saturation. See ‘L’Internet pendant le confinement’ [the Internet during lockdown], framablog.org, 21 March 2020. ‘Why the world is short of computer chips, and why it matters’, Bloomberg, 17 February 2021. 5 Better known by its abbreviation ‘www’.

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By the time it came back to port, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing financial recession sent copper prices into a tailspin, severely jeopardising the company. 57 Interview with Bertrand Clesca, 2020. 58 Interview with Laurent Campagne, 2020. 59 ‘YouTube and Netflix are cutting streaming quality in Europe due to coronavirus lockdowns’, CNBC, 20 March 2020. 60 Interview with Laurent Campagne, 2020. 61 ‘Is the internet on the brink of collapse? The web could reach its limit in just eight years and use all of Britain’s power supply by 2035, warn scientists’, The Daily Mail, 2 May 2015. 62 The Shannon Limit was demonstrated in 1948 by the American engineer Claude Shannon.

pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

I’ll explore the effectiveness of different kinds of gamification in later chapters, but to save you the suspense, most literature reviews conclude generic gamification has a limited positive effect at best, and much of that may be due to the “novelty effect” in which any intervention (e.g., joining a gym, taking language classes, wearing a pedometer) alters behaviour in the short term, and which often dissipates or even reverses in the long term.15 As someone with a background in research science who also “does gamification” for a living, I confess I find most academic studies on this subject to be of limited usefulness. Many studies of gamification only compare it to a state of no gamification rather than other activities one might take. For example, one study conducted in 2020 during COVID-19 lockdowns found that playing Animal Crossing and Plants vs. Zombies was correlated with increased wellbeing.16 This led to plenty of “games are good for you” headlines, though it’s unclear whether they’re as good for you as reading a book, watching TV, or taking a walk outside. Some of this is an unavoidable consequence of the poor funding and slow publication times that plague much of academia.

…

Today, we’re constantly reminded video games generate more revenue than movies and, as of 2019, were second only to TV and video in their command of children and teens’ attention.17 Every month brings a new gaming sensation, from Minecraft to Fortnite to Among Us to Roblox; every year brings a brand-new gaming technology, like Twitch streaming, Discord chatting, location-based gaming, and virtual reality. Video games were one of the few industries to expand during COVID-19 lockdowns, and by 2021, US Gen Z consumers aged fourteen to twenty-four counted video games as their top entertainment activity, with 87 percent playing daily or weekly; games were followed by music, browsing the internet, and social media, with TV and movies coming in at a distant fifth place.18 Money and popularity aren’t everything, though.

…

In a generational reversal of the assumption that playing video games is bad for you—and doubly so for children—scientists are now eager to demonstrate video games’ positive effects. One 2007 study found that surgeons who played video games had better manual dexterity than those who did not. Later studies have suggested action games provide moderate cognitive benefits for healthy adults.38 In the repeated COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, the sense of escapism and distraction provided by video games was reframed as being a positive rather than negative outcome, with 27 percent of US residents using games like Animal Crossing and Among Us to stay in touch with each other during the pandemic.39 It’s amusing to see gamers championing glowing results from video game studies while dismissing past and present results that paint their hobby in a poor light.

pages: 290 words: 85,847

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
by Tom Standage
Published 16 Aug 2021

Helsinki has established a 745-mile network of bike paths, which are even cleared of snow in winter; Oslo raised parking charges and tolls to enter the city, established car-free zones around schools, and shifted some city-center deliveries from vans to electric cargo bikes. Together with high levels of investment in public transport, all this has reduced the volume and speed of traffic on city streets, with a resulting fall in deaths and injuries. In 2020 cities around the world, from Paris to Milan to Kampala, took advantage of coronavirus lockdowns to move in the same direction, creating new bike lanes and broadening sidewalks to reclaim street space from cars. Some cities have since made those changes permanent. Collectively, these moves signal an end to the assumption that streets belong chiefly to cars, by tilting the balance back toward other users.

…

THE RISE AND FALL OF CAR CULTURE By spawning drive-ins, fast-food joints, and malls, cars reshaped the physical and cultural landscape of America, and then of many other countries, too. But all of these twentieth-century car-centered institutions are now in decline. Admittedly, the few remaining drive-in cinemas saw a revival of interest during coronavirus lockdowns, and in a neat reversal of history, 160 Walmart parking lots were turned into temporary drive-ins in summer 2020. Drive-ins and parking lots around the world have also hosted socially distanced church services, concerts, theatrical performances, and, in Germany, even a drive-in nightclub. But drive-in cinemas cannot compete with the convenience of online streaming, while dating has moved from the front porch, to the back seat, to dating apps.

pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

The most powerful intervention by far is to invest in affordable (or even free) public transportation, which is more efficient in terms of the materials and energy required to move people around. This is vital for any plan to get off fossil fuels. Bicycles are even better, as many European cities are learning (as I write this, Milan is handing over 35 kilometres of streets to cyclists, in a bid to keep pollution low after their coronavirus lockdown). And for journeys that can’t be made with either, we can develop publicly owned, app-based platforms for sharing cars between us – without the rentier intermediation that has made platforms like Uber and Airbnb so problematic. Step 4. End food waste Here’s a fact that never ceases to amaze me: up to 50% of all the food that’s produced in the world – equivalent to 2 billion tonnes – ends up wasted each year.13 This happens across the supply chain.

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I am also grateful to the students I’ve engaged with while teaching: at Schumacher College, at the London School of Economics, at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, at Goldsmiths and elsewhere. I’ve encountered more than a few classrooms that have expanded my horizons and given me new ways to think and speak. I finished writing this book during the coronavirus lockdown in London. I will always remember it as a strange and eerie time. We all suddenly realized what parts of the economy really matter – and whose jobs we depend on most. For me, this was inescapably clear. My partner, Guddi, is a doctor in the NHS. In those early weeks I would watch her walk out the door each morning on her way to what amounted to a warzone, hoping that my eyes didn’t betray the fear I felt for her.

pages: 368 words: 102,379

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

See also mask shortages; national stockpile; Strategic National Stockpile ASPR’s Critical Infrastructure and Protection division, 29 Emergency Response Framework and, 52–53, 55 FEMA and, 52, 53 HHS office and, 51–52 inventory of stockpile, 51 Kushner and Pence’s plan for, 54–55 Kushner’s shadow task force, 54, 56–59 lack of national strategy for, 61–62 Polowczyk and, 51, 55–56, 57 Project Airbridge, 60–61 Supply Chain Taskforce, 53 Supply Chain Stabilization Task Force, 56 “Supply Chain Taskforce,” 53 surgical masks, 68, 72–73, 92, 129, 130, 142 Symon, Dan, 74–78, 76, 77–78 T Taglianetti, Andrew, 93 tanning beds, 221 TaskRabbit app, 161–162 Tasteless Chill Tonic, 121 taxpayer money for anti-vaccine industry, 224 biotech/healthcare stocks and, 237 Moderna and, 235–236 Stewart’s private jet and, 251 vaccines and, 9–10 Tea Party, 14, 19 Tecnol Medical Products, 24 testing. See also Fillakit LLC company hired for, 9 failure of early, 183 Navarro’s March 2020 memo to Trump and, 82 PCR tests, 182 test media and, 182–183 Texas Abbott, Greg and, 171–180 attitude toward masks in, 157 “bathroom” bill in, 174–175 COVID-19 deaths in, 178, 180 Delta variant in, 259–260 Fillakit LLC and, 186 lockdown, 155, 176–178 mask mandates in, 177 mask repackaging operation in, 155–169 opening economy too soon, 8–9 “Operation Jade Helm 15” and, 173–174 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) fraud scheme in, 197 vaccinations in, 259 weak governor system in, 171–172 Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), 161, 162, 165, 166 Texas State Guard, 174 Thailand, 28 Thompson, Marilyn, 99 3M brokers working with, 127 distributors and, 104 mask production, 42, 46, 52, 117 mask production and, 24 Project Airbridge and, 150 Zelonka, Tim and, 136 3M N95 masks about, 4–5, 68–69 broker’s direct buy from, 127 cost on Amazon, 42 counterfeits, 69 counterfeits/fraudulent, 69 design on, 68–69 found at Home Depot, 33 Kadlec entertaining solicitation about, 47 price of, 42 proof of life videos and, 110, 125–126 Romano, Ronald and, 66–68, 70 Stewart, Robert Jr. and, 3, 4, 5, 211 Three Percenters, 227 Three Seconds Until Midnight (Hatfill), 35, 82 Tokarz, Bernie, 76–77 transgender students, Texas “bathroom bill” and, 174 Treasury Department, 198 treatment anthrax, 7, 18–19 during the Great Influenza, 120–121 hydrogen peroxide, 221–222 of Trump, 225–226 Trump, Donald/Trump administration Abbott, Greg and, 174 Bannon, Steve and, 32 belated action by, 8 Bowen, Mike on, 32 CARES Act and, 86 conference call with governors, 50 conspiracist ideologies during, 219 downplaying threat of coronavirus, 39, 41 hydroxychloroquine and, 123 January 6th insurrection and, 227–228 misleading the public, 42 Navarro, Peter and, 31, 80 Navarro’s memo to, March 1, 2020, 81–82 receiving treatment for COVID, 225–226 Slaoui, Moncef and, 234–235 spending to address the Covid pandemic, 2 on testing, 47 on war against COVID-19, 65–66 The Truth About COVID-19 (Mercola), 222 “The Truth About Vaccines 2020,” 222–223 TTAC Publishing, 224 Tukay, Joseph M.G., 120 Türeci, Özlem, 233 Twitter, 125, 126, 128, 223 Tyson Foods, 10 U UDECM, 214 unemployment, 11, 59, 258 University of Pennsylvania, 231–232, 233 unvaccinated people, 261.

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My colleague Lydia DePillis, a brilliant economics reporter, noticed a $14.7 million contract the VA awarded to an Ohio company named “Aunt Flow,” which sold tampons and other menstrual products that are dispensed in women’s restrooms. It sounded absurd, but DePillis called the company’s CEO and learned the company had done something clever and maybe useful. As its orders slowed due to the pandemic lockdowns, the company converted its own manufacturing facilities in China to produce surgical masks and began selling them to the government and its clients. The company also tried to delve into making N95s—much more complicated. The CEO told us she had to cancel her deal with the VA because the Chinese government seized her shipments that were bound for the United States.

…

His wife, a doctor, took a job at a nearby hospital while he hunted for odd jobs on TaskRabbit, the handyman-for-hire app. He delivered groceries and assembled furniture to help pay the bills until something more permanent came along. Then the pandemic hit, and after weeks of pressure, Texas governor Greg Abbott begrudgingly locked down the state—well, sort of. As the lockdowns eased and the public established new levels of comfort and acceptable boundaries, the TaskRabbit gigs began to pop back up, and thirty-six-year-old Rensko made his own risk calculations and decided to pick up a task from a stranger that he thought entailed a simple delivery.

pages: 285 words: 86,858

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

Or if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC – annual budget $200 million) was given this sort of money and told to spend it on mitigating the impact of global warming? A trillion dollars could really move the dial. That’s what this book is about. We’ve seen in the response to coronavirus that money can be found. And we’ve seen over the months of lockdown and social distancing that civilisational changes can be made. Indeed we’re coming to recognise that they must be made. Writing this I often thought of Lin-Manuel Miranda singing, in Hamilton, ‘I’m not throwing away my shot.’ This, the shock and chance for reset that coronavirus has given us, is our shot.

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We didn’t even hold them steady, we accelerated them. In 1988, the world emitted 20 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide; today, the annual figure is 37 billion. Half of all the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted since the Industrial Revolution has happened in the past 30 years. The coronavirus crisis has not changed things. Lockdown and restrictions on movement had a big impact on our lives and on our travel, but an analysis by Piers Forster and colleagues at the University of Leeds found this will have almost zero impact on eventual temperature rise.2 Carbon dioxide emissions dipped, but not by enough, and not for long.

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So it must be completely stamped out, just as smallpox was eradicated in 1980. The wild polio virus is now endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mainly due to the instability and violence in those countries which prevents complete eradication, and because a pause in vaccination there during the Covid-19 lockdown allowed a resurgence. Nigeria, the only other country where polio was clinging on, was declared free of the virus in 2020. We could incentivise the push to eradication by increasing the funding, safety and resources for staff working in these incredibly challenging areas. In northern Nigeria, at least 67 health care staff working to vaccinate and eradicate polio were killed by gunmen suspected of being members of Boko Haram.12 We will also need to improve the understanding of the safety of the polio vaccine to increase uptake.

pages: 430 words: 111,038

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

These people were obsessed with their own reduced circumstances and talked constantly of the Raj, surrounded by their ‘teak furniture’ and photographs of ‘chaps in helmets’.23 You might wonder, given all these challenges, the pain of departure and repatriation, the dislocation, the desperate efforts to hold on to a sense of identity in foreign climes, the risk of illness and death, why Britons continued to emigrate and travel to empire in huge numbers. In attempting to answer the question, you’ll discover various explanations which are in themselves, I would argue, imperial precedents for modern British behaviour. Take, for instance, the way the desire for adventure drove emigration. I’m writing this in the middle of a coronavirus lockdown, and while some people are predicting that we will never travel as we used to again, I don’t believe a word of it. The first thing we will do the moment we can is see the world beyond our homes. Frankly, I want to go to the island of Run more than ever: if Britons could get there in the seventeenth century, I can get there in the twenty-first.

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Boris Johnson’s announcement at the beginning of the pandemic that thousands might die, led to one FT reader remarking online that his tone was defined by the ‘Etonian mindset that caused famines across the empire’ – ‘these lords and masters are trained to shrug it off with the certainty that they are the stewards of society, born and raised to make tough decisions.’9 Furthermore, every stage of the crisis has been characterized by the idea that Britain is a special case. Initially, when the world was beginning to take the crisis very seriously, Johnson played it down, telling Britons they should ‘be going about their business as usual’ and even boasting about shaking hands with people at a hospital that was treating coronavirus patients. While the rest of Europe went into lockdown, Johnson delayed introducing containment measures, at the same time trumpeting a controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy. There is evidence that we refused to subscribe to European efforts to source ventilators, going our own way, only to face a serious shortage. As Google and Apple combined to develop a global tracing app, we went it alone to develop our own NHS app, with disappointing results.

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Although initially buried in a prison grave, after two years she was dug up, her body boiled of its flesh and her skeleton strung together for exhibition in the Tasmanian Museum, where she remained on display until 1947.25 10. Empire State of Mind One of my last outings before the coronavirus lockdown was a reunion at my old school, Wolverhampton Grammar. For the first time since I left, twenty-five years ago, initially for a bleak summer job in a hospital laundry, and then university, I caught up with the people I spent most of my teenage years with, and it was unnerving. Accepting that the most handsome boy in the year was somehow even better-looking at forty-three than he was at eighteen as I increasingly resembled Salman Rushdie was not great for self-esteem.

pages: 536 words: 126,051

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion
by Dean Burnett
Published 10 Jan 2023

I eventually had to face a hugely inconvenient, but irrefutable, fact: my knowledge about emotions was woefully insufficient for writing a book about them. Unfortunately, I was still contractually obliged to do exactly that. It was a tricky situation. But then, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and the world went into lockdown as the virus tore across the globe. At first, I felt I was well placed to ride things out. I already worked from home, my job wasn’t under threat, my wife and children and I are quite a harmonious group. This will be fine, I figured. This will be fine. Then, in March that year, my father contracted the virus.

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If we’d all been together in person, would the same thing have happened? I doubt it. Face to face, my friends would have had a much clearer idea of how I was feeling, and the intent of my original message would have been much more obvious if it had been conveyed verbally, so included my tone and inflections. But thanks to the pandemic and lockdown, we were stuck with remote, technology-mediated communication, which led to problems. My point is, for all the good it’s done and the power it has, modern technology still struggles with emotions. And because emotions play such an outsized role in human interaction, this can be a significant problem, one that many are keen to see solved.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Retrieved from https://cnsmaryland.org/interactives/spring-2016/maryland-police-cell-phone-trackers/index.html Some of the measures many countries adopted or proposed were deeply unsettling: Capatides, C. (2020, April 2). “Shoot them dead”: Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte orders police and military to kill citizens who defy coronavirus lockdown. Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rodrigo-duterte-philippines-president-coronavirus-lockdown-shoot-people-dead/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7e&linkId=85694802; Gebrekidan, S. (2020, March 30). For autocrats, and others, coronavirus is a chance to grab even more power. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/world/europe/coronavirus-governments-power.html; Gershgorn, D. (2020, April 9).

pages: 200 words: 67,943

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.”

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After a quick check-in, he and the ninety-two others who signed in to the Zoom call that day wrote in silence for the next fifty minutes. The pooled concentration was palpable. Trinetti and Parul Bavishi cofounded the London Writer’s Salon (LWS) on March 23, 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced the world into lockdown. Their aim was to create a space to help writers, published and aspiring alike, stay productive and connected during those uncertain and often lonely times. On day 1, nine writers showed up. By day 5, there were thirty. Today, over 10,000 people write with LWS every day across four time zones (London, New York, Los Angeles, and Melbourne).

pages: 406 words: 88,977

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

Later, studies found that the pattern held across the country: Cities that put multiple measures in place, and did it early, had death rates that were half that of cities that had waited. Compare countries instead of cities, and you’ll get similar results. During the first wave of COVID, Denmark and Norway implemented strict lockdowns early on (when fewer than thirty people in each country had been hospitalized), while the government of neighboring Sweden relied more on recommendations than requirements, keeping restaurants, bars, and gyms open and only encouraging but not requiring physical distancing.

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But the global community has an interest in getting this information, and governments around the world have committed to sharing it as part of the International Health Regulations. The WHO should work with its member states to strengthen these regulations and their implementation. As we’ve learned from COVID, the countries that shared information and acted quickly paid a short-term price—there’s no question that lockdowns and travel bans are painful even when they’re appropriate—but they kept the damage from being as bad as it could have been, for their own people and the rest of the world too. Other groups also have important roles to play. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies should commit to more tiered pricing and second-source deals to make sure that even their most advanced products are available to people in developing countries.

…

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.

pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery
by David Skelton
Published 28 Jun 2021

COVID-19 – A CALL TO ACTION Our national experience during the Covid-19 pandemic has made the necessity for the promised change even more urgent. The pandemic has clearly shone a light on the tilted nature of the economy, and as we have previously discussed, the lowest paid have been more exposed to both the health and financial risks of the virus. Lockdowns have meant that high-income earners have built up savings, whereas those on lower incomes have seen savings disappear and debt grow. The fact that people working in elementary jobs were more than twice as likely to die of Covid was a stark reminder that the UK’s economic divides aren’t merely theoretical.

pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream
by Alissa Quart
Published 14 Mar 2023

“Another government stimulus package is not in the best interests of the people imo,” he tweeted, irksomely, during the first summer of the pandemic, while his companies continued to benefit from the generosity of the government. (Musk also argued against protecting citizens from contagion, saying early during the coronavirus lockdown, “You should be allowed to do what you want,” and insisting that he keep his California plant open during the pandemic, imperiling his workers.) That the rich deserve their money is a fiction that crosses party lines, though—it knows green more than blue or red and adheres to the sort of rich person who claims to believe in good government as well.

pages: 491 words: 141,690

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

People will readily deliver their friends and neighbors to the authorities for daring to walk their dogs. Soldiers and police will be welcomed with open arms to patrol the streets looking for drifters like some sort of dystopian movie. People will anxiously wait to line up for their chip, willing to do just about anything to get some sense of normalcy back in their lives. The Coronavirus lockdowns have shown that people are ready to report each other for the slightest transgressions by justifying that “the government told me it’s the right thing to do”. How Could All of This Have Happened? “Jeff, I’ve been watching some of your walk and talk videos, doing everything possible to wake people up in a world gone mad.

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That is a pretty apt description of the mass human condition, manifested most predominantly in the vast majority refusing to see the true state of affairs on this planet. Sleepwalking. As George Carlin famously said. “It’s called the American dream – because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Bang! Because of worldwide Coronavirus lockdowns, millions of people have been forced out of their jobs and their businesses – over 40 million in the US alone! Small businesses have been buried already, large businesses are starting to stink and economies are flailing helplessly. In March 2020, the world’s seven key western economies, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US, pledged to fight off a world-wide Great Depression by standing united against the Coronavirus economic meltdown.

pages: 112 words: 34,520

Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to Happiness: THE FEELGOOD BOOK OF THE YEAR
by Bill Bailey
Published 14 Oct 2020

To my family and friends, and all those who have shared in these adventures CONTENTS Foreword 1 Crazy Golf 2 A Clear-out 3 Wild Swimming 4 Little Things 5 Music 6 Caring for Plants 7 Restraint 8 Singing 9 Sport 10 Art 11 Personal Reflection 12 Swearing 13 The Unexpected 14 Playing the Gamelan 15 Laughing 16 Equations 17 Paddleboarding 18 Reading 19 Trees 20 Confronting Your Fears (Part 1) 21 Dogs 22 Confronting Your Fears (Part 2) 23 Birdsong 24 Dancing 25 Pleasure 26 Jogging 27 Cycling 28 Being Someone to Rely On 29 Walking 30 Letter Writing 31 Generosity 32 Belonging 33 Being in Nature 34 Speaking Another Language 35 Simplicity 36 Love About Bill Bailey Thank you FOREWORD This book was written during the coronavirus pandemic, largely while we were in lockdown. During this unexpected quiet time at home, I finally got around to archiving my comedy shows, and I was struck, firstly by how much longer my hair was back in the day, and secondly by how much happiness has been a subject that I have explored in my sketches and gigs over many years, to the point that it appears as a constant thread running through it all.

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As the taste-free, low-fun almost-food sticks to the roof of my mouth, I am struck by how readily the memory of my disco knockback came to mind. At least it was just me who witnessed the holly blue getting mugged off, not a disco full of his mates. I wonder if my memories, unreliable at the best of times, appear more intense due to a heightened sense of awareness elicited by this pandemic. Certainly I’ve read many news stories of people experiencing extremely vivid dreams during lockdown. Our sleep patterns are all over the place. I had a dream in which I saw everyone I’ve ever met, while I drank sherry wearing just a towel. Things are not right. We’ve all been forced to spend more time with ourselves, in the company of our own thoughts.

pages: 469 words: 137,880

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
by Harold James
Published 15 Jan 2023

As with wars, Covid initially produced impressive displays of solidarity. Health-care workers, the frontline soldiers in the new conflict, were cheered in many countries. As the war on the coronavirus went on, that solidarity disintegrated, with fierce clashes in many countries between opponents of lockdowns, vaccines, and tests and groups that endorsed official policy. Adding to the confusion was the sharp variance between governments in their handling of Covid, with some imposing very strict lockdowns, while other countries adopted a more laissez-faire approach and shutdowns there followed from the voluntary actions of citizens who tried to reduce their exposure to the virus.

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Each attempt at unwinding produced new shocks, such as the “taper tantrum” of 2013, when the Federal Reserve debated reducing its security purchasing program and interest rates began to rise. Consequently the policy community became hooked on what had been intended as a short-term remedy. The Covid-19 crisis has aspects comparable to previous negative supply shocks. Lockdowns and travel bans interrupted supply chains. Going into the crisis, there was an intellectually dominant interpretation, associated above all with Larry Summers, of the future as lying in a great stagnation with low growth and increased income inequality, as a long-term negative demand shock.

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See United Kingdom (UK) Brown, Gordon, 224, 225 Bruck, Karl Ludwig von, 37 Brüning, Heinrich, 132, 137 Brunnermeier, Markus, 206 –207 bubbles, 167, 206 –207, 236; railroads, 28, 62; silver, 184 Buchheit, Lee, 214 Burns, Arthur, 176 Bush, George W., 221, 222 Callaghan, James, 13, 179 Cameron, David, 228, 291 Canetti, Elias, 108 Canigiani, Gherardo, 292 Carillo, Alejandro, 160 Carleton, William: Black Prophet, The, 29, 40; Squanders of Castle Squander, The, 40 Carter, Jimmy, 13, 176, 178 Carville, James, 215 Cecil, Robert, 147 Centeno, Mário, 278 Chase, Salmon Portland, 67 Chetty, Raj, 24, 294, 304 –305 Chevalier, Michel, 57 China, 3, 159, 216, 222, 282; Belt and Road Initiative, 229; Global Financial Crisis (2007–2008), 225 –226, 227; opening up of, 187–188; productivity of, 207, 212, 229; Qing, 54; technological connectivity in, 284, 286 Chittenden, Russell Henry, 92 Clark, Colin, 143 Club of Rome, 173 –174 Clyburn, Jim, 215 Coburn, Tom, 217–218 Cochrane, John, 301 Coe, Frank, 157 competence of governments, doubts about, 19, 177–181, 281–293 Congress of Industrial Organizations Political Action Committee, 160 Cooke, Jay, 58, 65 –67 Cournot, Antoine Augustin, 73 Covid-19 crisis. See Great Lockdown (2020 –2022) Cripps, Francis, 175 Cuno, Wilhelm, 106 Curevac, 266 Currie, Laughlin, 157 Czechoslovakia, 105 Dallas, Alexander, 42 Danto, Arthur, 24 Darling, Alistair, 220 data, big, 24, 286, 304, 306 De Bleeker, Eva, 266 debts, war, 106, 139–140 Decker, Edward V., 125 deflation, 57, 139, 241 demand shocks, 14 –15, 310; negative, 14, 22; positive, 14; supply and demand, 13 –21.

pages: 172 words: 51,837

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

Zoe Zaczek, ‘Controversial idea to give “immunity passports” to Australians who have recovered from coronavirus – making them exempt from tough social distancing laws’, Daily Mail Australia, 2020 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8205049/Controversial-idea-introduce-COVID-19-immunity-passports-avoid-long-term-Australian-lockdown.html 2. Kate Proctor, Ian Sample and Philip Oltermann, ‘“Immunity passports” could speed up return to work after Covid-19’, the Guardian, 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/immunity-passports-could-speed-up-return-to-work-after-covid-19 3. James X. Li, FDA, 1 April 2020 https://www.fda.gov/media/136622/download 4.

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Well, the assumptions changed. One assumption in the model – probably several assumptions – involved people’s behaviour, and how that affected the spread of the disease. Before lockdown happened, it was assumed that people would still be largely out and about, in contact with each other, and spreading the virus. After lockdown, it was assumed that they would be doing so much less. When they plugged that new assumption into the model, it gave a different number. In fact, the original 16 March paper modelled what would happen if there was something like a lockdown and predicted far fewer deaths than if there was no intervention.

pages: 217 words: 76,056

Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside - Finding Home in an English Country Garden
by Marchelle Farrell
Published 2 Aug 2023

The heavy quiet enfolds me, and my shoulders drop under the weighty hug of reprieve. I sigh into the clear balm of this belated certainty. Stay at home. Along with millions of other British people, we are locked into our houses, the long overdue, utterly shambolic government response to the soaring crisis of lives lost to this new virus, this Covid-19. Lockdown comes as a long exhalation of relief – at least for those of us for whom the idea of home is a sanctuary. For us lucky ones, it is clear what to do now. The anxiety of carrying on as normal, the fear of every interaction potentially being a chain reaction of death, has been wiped clean in one direct mandate at last.

pages: 198 words: 63,612

Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life
by Scott. Branson
Published 14 Jun 2022

Within a capitalist, racist, patriarchal, colonial system, this means that the poor, the racialized, the people who don’t conform to gender and sexual norms, can be treated as disposable. If entire swaths of the population are disposable, then why not dispose of the state? The various global nations’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic has made it even clearer how little value our lives have in relation to keeping the economic wheels turning. From lockdowns that imposed unevenly distributed restrictions on people, to the insistence that certain workers perform their jobs in unsafe conditions, to the utter lack of health infrastructure and economic support to help people survive during this moment, states have clearly failed us.

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Even a liberal political thinker, Hannah Arendt, theorized this as “image making,” in response to the US government and media representation of the war in Vietnam. In her work, this total replacement of facts with an image of the world is a development of totalitarianism or fascism, which will be unrecognizable from earlier iterations. We are living now in an even more developed version of this world—Netflix again is a good example, especially in pandemic/lockdown life for those of us living in a postindustrial state with an internet connection. You can replace your interaction with the world with narratives of it. Your consumption of media even seems to allow you to express your political convictions. And we can find revisionist histories of the world where social problems are neutralized or easily survivable (this is Frederic Jameson’s version of utopia in mass media, where the narrative solves a social problem, ultimately alleviating the viewer from any responsibility of action).

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It permits us to live our desires outside the confines that have predetermined pathways of inclusion and exclusion, both of which are forms of violence. And it permits us to leave when we are done. The Rhythm of Revolutionary Time This book was completed in 2022, a vantage point from which the Covid-19 pandemic appears to have fundamentally altered our experience of time. Lockdown time. Work from home, no childcare time. Timelines of knowledge, misinformation, discovery, waiting for a vaccine, counting deaths. And all the while, essential work time for many—continued service at risk of life. Finally, return to normal time, forget it, it’s over—a version of Trump’s nostalgic fallacy, “Make America Great Again”—in the end, it’s all contradictory time, trying to hold two opposing things in the mind at once.

pages: 248 words: 73,689

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

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. Others will be suffering from ‘Long Covid’, whose lasting effects we are only beginning to understand. The impact of Covid-19 has stretched far beyond lives lost.12 Lockdowns, which were essential to slow the spread of the disease and prevent the collapse of health systems, triggered the most severe global recession since the Great Depression. In rich countries, governments stepped in with economic stimulus packages that dwarfed those put in place during the global financial crisis.

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The burden of such initiatives will fall disproportionately on poor countries, many of whose citizens rely on these practices to survive. If rich countries wish to reduce the risk of future pandemics, they will need to be willing to help poor countries pay for these changes. Preventing outbreaks from spiralling out of control also requires transforming cities from pandemic catalysts to pandemic choke points. Lockdowns are a vital tool for reining in uncontrolled transmission, but experience with Covid-19 shows that they cause immense hardship and economic damage. Contact-tracing technology, which proved woefully inadequate during Covid-19 in all but a few countries, needs to be stepped up in advance of the next pandemic.

pages: 184 words: 60,229

Re-Educated: Why It’s Never Too Late to Change Your Life
by Lucy Kellaway
Published 30 Jun 2021

Or is it the people who are on the receiving end of me? In some ways I’m the highest authority, but equally I’m too close to the subject to be trusted. So I decide to put the question to people who know me best and let them settle the matter. On a whim, during the weird, thumb-twiddling days of the first coronavirus lockdown, when the school is closed and when I have little else to do, I fire off an email to a panel of 15 – my four children, my sister and my ten closest friends – and ask them point blank. Dearest best friends and family, Will you help me? I’m trying to write a book about reinvention and I’m interested in whether it is possible to change who you are as a result of changing your job.

pages: 848 words: 227,015

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Oster wrote in May: Emily Oster, “How to Think Through Choices About Grandparents, Day Care, Summer Camp, and More,” Slate, May 20, 2020, slate.com/technology/2020/05/coronavirus-family-choices-grandparents-day-care-summer-camp.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT costs of lockdowns: Philippe Lemoine, “The Case Against Lockdowns,” Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, October 11, 2022, cspicenter.com/p/the-case-against-lockdowns [inactive]. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT It’s also disputed: Dyani Lewis, “What Scientists Have Learnt from COVID Lockdowns,” Nature 609, no. 7926 (September 7, 2022): 236–39, doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02823-4; Leonidas Spiliopoulos, “On the Effectiveness of COVID-19 Restrictions and Lockdowns: Pan Metron Ariston,” BMC Public Health 22, no. 1 (October 1, 2022): 1842, doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14177-7.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a compromise approach: Between 2020 and 2022, Sweden had the lowest all-cause excess mortality in the OECD. And New Zealand, although it had some problems once it opened up, had about one-third of the COVID death rate of the United States. See Eugene Volokh, “No-Lockdown Sweden Seemingly Tied for Lowest All-Causes Mortality in OECD Since COVID Arrived,” Reason.com, January 10, 2023, reason.com/volokh/2023/01/10/no-lockdown-sweden-seemingly-tied-for-lowest-all-causes-mortality-in-oecd-since-covid-arrived/; “COVID—Coronavirus Statistics,” Worldometer, worldometers.info/coronavirus. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Still, Luck had earned: Seth Wickersham, “Andrew Luck Finally Reveals Why He Walked Away from the NFL,” ESPN, December 6, 2022, espn.com/nfl/insider/insider/story/_/id/35163936/andrew-luck-reveals-why-walked-away-nfl.

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Men struggle to make adult friendships, and poker provides a means for male social bonding that appeals to a broad cross section of men, but women aren’t always invited to the party. When a record number of (mostly male) poker players arrived to play the WPT event at the Seminole Hard Rock in April 2021 in the shadow of the COVID-19 lockdowns, I wondered how many of them simply missed being in the company of their buddies. Because here’s one stereotype that bears out both in my own life and in empirical research: women, on average, are more likely to form bonds by talking, while men are more likely to form bonds by doing things together.

pages: 211 words: 78,547

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

The Trump administration was forever dogged by petty scandals, and members of the administration came and went with comical regularity, most of which were low-stakes, mere embarrassments. But toward the end of his tenure, the United States was engulfed in a singular crisis. The Covid pandemic had its genesis in 2019 (thus Covid-19), but bloomed into a full-blown global emergency in March 2020. As large-scale lockdowns were established in the United States, it became clear to many Americans that their basic way of life would be deeply disrupted. Being forced to stay home for long periods made an already internet-addicted country turn even more deeply into its smartphones.

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DEMANDS ARE ASSEMBLED The idea of defunding the police has already attracted more debate than I can summarize, and I will deal with it in more depth later. For now, it’s sufficient to say that through the tangled and chancy process through which broad social movements operate, defunding the police became the central demand of the Black Lives Matter protests. Protests still simmered across the country, sometimes in defiance of Covid lockdowns. It had become clear by midsummer that some kind of central demand was necessary for the movement to make progress. “Defund the police” was, at least, an effective sound bite. Unfortunately, there was little consensus about what exactly it meant. Some insisted that the purpose of Defund was not to shutter police departments entirely but rather to reallocate some police resources to other agencies and purposes.

Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: Everything I Know Now About Autism and Asperger's That I Wish I'd Known Then
by David William Plummer
Published 14 Sep 2021

Not only does she perceive a value or utility in learning everything there is to be learned about other people, but she also puts that information all to good productive use when some school or community event needs to be organized. People like my wife seem to have an incredibly strong social sense and drive, and in fact, will actually crave such interaction if they are denied it too long. As I write this section, we are in the midst of the 2020 Coronavirus lockdowns. If these are trying times for individuals with autism, primarily due to their difficulty in accepting 303 change, then they are also a very trying time for those neurotypical people who could accurately be described as “social butterflies.” Even before the lockdown, by the end of the day if my wife has not had a specific need to go out and interact with anyone, I am convinced she will formulate one and run to the store simply to get out of the house and see other people –– the more she knows whoever it is she sees, the better.

pages: 82 words: 24,150

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

Deaths around the world continue to mount, and while many countries are managing safely to reopen their economies by stepping up testing and tracing measures, others are ending lockdown without any plans whatsoever. Until a vaccine is found, we cannot dismiss the possibility that the world will face further waves of the virus that will require a recommencement of lockdown measures. What’s more, the virus is now spreading to new parts of the global economy. As Kim Moody pointed out in an essay for the journal Spectre,2 the coronavirus initially spread through the veins and arteries of the world’s trade system: it began in Wuhan, a global centre of commodity production, before making its way through commercial hubs in East Asia, commodities exporters in the Middle East and Latin America, and the centres of global consumption in Europe and North America.

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Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook now make up a fifth of the entire value of the S&P 500 Index, and Jeff Bezos is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.16 Part of the reason these companies’ stocks are doing so well is that their business models, to varying extents, render them immune from the impact of the virus-induced lockdown. Given that they provide many of their services and sell many of their products online, most have not seen a fall in sales. In fact, some of these firms have seen a spike in demand as housebound consumers flock online to work, consume and entertain themselves. Amazon has taken on 175,000 extra staff to cope with the rising number of orders.

pages: 705 words: 192,650

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail
by Nick Wallis
Published 18 Nov 2021

He did, however, tell Jones, ‘The judiciary criminal procedure rule committee could consider making changes … [and] I look forward to taking the matter up with the Ministry of Justice and the Lord Chief Justice.’ DOCUMENT SHREDDING On 22 March I made my way up to London for the first day of the appeal process hearing, again in Court 4 of the Royal Courts of Justice. Although Britain’s latest wave of coronavirus was subsiding, the lockdown was still in full effect and strict social distancing rules remained in place. Through some fairly intense lobbying, I had managed to secure myself a place in the well of the court rather than up in the gods, or worse, listening in via the court’s industrial tech-core white noise generator, which doubled as a comms link.

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She said she’d call me back with more information. She didn’t.1 ____________________ 1 In June 2021, seven months after it was submitted, the Ombudsman told me it was still deciding whether or not to investigate the JFSA’s complaint. PRESUMPTIONS ABOUT MACHINES AND AI With Christmas out of the way, and January’s Covid lockdown keeping many people at home, the appellants’ barristers got to work on how they would present their clients’ cases to the Court of Appeal. Between them, Flora Page, Paul Marshall and Lisa Busch had got limb 2 on the table without any prospect of delaying a result. Now it was up for grabs, Lisa began to collaborate with Tim Moloney.

pages: 556 words: 95,955

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted
by Daniel Sokatch
Published 18 Oct 2021

Tag Meir hosts solidarity meetings and events that bring Jews and Arabs together: marches, candle lighting during Chanukah, and joint iftars.* We operate student chapters at several universities. The students engage in Tag Meir activities, like giving out dates to break the Ramadan fast, helping out families of foreign workers, and assisting elderly people during the coronavirus pandemic. During the first COVID-19 lockdown, we handed out tens of thousands of masks in Bnei Brak.** Our representatives visit sites of hate crimes as promptly as possible to stand in solidarity with the victims and to offer emotional, financial, and moral support. For example, in Sakhnin, in northern Israel, two large Christmas trees outside one of the largest churches in the city were set on fire.

pages: 199 words: 62,204

The Passenger: Paris
by AA.VV.
Published 26 Jun 2021

The European bourgeoisie, especially in France, felt the need for a new type of establishment, one open to all – or almost all – that was pleasant enough and not expensive and was governed by few rules. It has always been important to have a place to meet strangers in a context where it is acceptable to strike up a conversation (the absence of which has been acutely felt during Covid-19 lockdowns). It is essential for work, for business, for conversation, to keep the more casual of our friendships afloat and – above all – it is vital in the pursuit of love. Restaurants were invented because people needed a place to go on a date and decide whether or not to make love afterwards. The very idea of a date is largely inconceivable without the restaurant.

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But everywhere in the beautiful neighbourhoods the desire remained the same: to put an end to the privileges of the rich, even if it meant losing a limb. ‘Bring France up to Paris’ and set it on fire. On social media, a call went out to ‘fetch Emmanuel Macron’. (See ‘The Avenue of Revolt’ on page 27.) In March 2020, during the first Covid-19 lockdown, the anger at Parisians departing for the countryside to avoid being crammed in with three other people in the forty square metres of space that the average Parisian occupies certainly reached its apogee, and articles by some bourgeois writers – who claimed, like Marie Darrieussecq in Le Point, that they had to ‘hide their car with its Paris registration plates in the garage’ so as not to be attacked – only fanned the flames of further mocking and more urges to kill someone on Twitter.

The Trauma Chronicles
by Westaby, Stephen
Published 1 Feb 2023

Sadly, there was not enough liver left and he died despite the heroics; but I used the method later, successfully, to benefit injured patients in Oxford. After the success of Fragile Lives and The Knife’s Edge I needed encouragement to write a third biography. Yet with a leading psychologist expressing enthusiasm about the story lines what else should I do during the Covid lockdown? The theme is about making things better. When my medical career began in the 1970s, the severely injured were simply conveyed by ambulance to the nearest district general hospital with a casualty department. There was no pre-hospital care and the patients were generally received by recently qualified doctors who were ill-equipped to manage multiple injuries.

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A short, and as it turned out, an eventful trip. It was mid-January when I received a polite follow up call from the conference organisers who were curious to know whether I had been ill? I hadn’t but my wife and son certainly had two weeks after I arrived home. By then, Covid-19 had its name and would become familiar to virtually every person in the world. China had ordered a draconian lockdown of Hubei Province enforced by police and the military. I received pictures of the vast conference hall, which was now home to several hundred makeshift hospital beds. Moreover, Wuhan built a huge new Covid isolation hospital in just two weeks and were soon running fifty ECMO systems continuously for their sickest patients.

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

Withdrawal from the World Health Organization,” Politico, May 29, 2020. 13.Susan Jakes, “Beijing Hoodwinks WHO Inspectors,” Time, April 18, 2003. 14.Wright, “The Plague Year.” 15.Mackenzie, The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened. 16.Nicholas King, “The Scale Politics of Emerging Diseases,” Osiris 19, (2004): 62–76. 17.Will Feuer, “World Health Organization to Send Delegation to China to Help Combat Coronavirus Outbreak,” CNBC, January 28, 2020. Chapter 4: The Outbreak We Didn’t Want to See 1.Michelle L. Holshue et al., “First Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus in the United States,” New England Journal of Medicine 382 (2020): 929–36. 2.Peter Robison, Dina Bass, and Robert Langreth, “Seattle’s Patient Zero Spread Coronavirus Despite Ebola-Style Lockdown,” Bloomberg Businessweek, March 10, 2020. 3.Holshue et al., “First Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus in the United States.” 4.Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, “Woodward Book: Trump Says He Knew Coronavirus Was ‘Deadly’ and Worse than the Flu While Intentionally Misleading Americans,” Washington Post, September 9, 2020. 5.Wright, “The Plague Year.” 6.University of Washington Medicine, “Paul S.

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We are always faced with making sufficient decisions based on insufficient information. If we had waited until all the answers were available, the work on smallpox eradication would never have started—selecting the target helped develop the appropriate tools and strategy.” 21.Amanda Watts, “Health Official’s Advice on Coronavirus Response: ‘Speed Trumps Perfection,’” CNN, March 13, 2020. 22.James Glanz and Campbell Robertson, “Lockdown Delays Cost at Least 36,000 Lives, Data Show,” New York Times, May 22, 2020. 23.According to the New York Times, from February 29 to June 1, 2020, 203,792 COVID-19 cases were diagnosed and reported among residents of New York City, including 54,211 (26.6 percent) in persons known to have been hospitalized and 18,679 (9.2 percent) in persons who died.

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Ranks 43rd Worldwide in Sequencing to Check for Coronavirus Variants Like the One Found in the U.K.,” Washington Post, December 23, 2020. 35.William Wan and Ben Guarino, “Why America Is ‘Flying Blind’ to the Coronavirus Mutations Racing Across the Globe,” Washington Post, January 29, 2021. 36.Caitlin Rivers and Dylan George, “How to Forecast Outbreaks and Pandemics,” Foreign Affairs, June 29, 2020. 37.Adam Rogers, “It’s Time for a National Pandemic Prediction Agency,” WIRED, February 3, 2021. 38.Dan Diamond and Nahal Toosi, “Trump Team Failed to Follow NSC’s Pandemic Playbook,” Politico, March 25, 2020. 39.Scott Gottlieb et al., “National Coronavirus Response: A Roadmap to Reopening,” American Enterprise Institute, March 29, 2020, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/national-coronavirus-response-a-road-map-to-reopening/. 40.Rev.com, “Donald Trump Coronavirus Task Force Press Conference Transcript March 30,” March 30, 2020. 41.Kathryn Watson, “Trump Announces CDC Recommends Cloth Masks in Public but Says He Won’t Wear One,” CBS News, April 3, 2020. 42.Lynne Peeples, “Face Masks: What the Data Say,” Nature, October 6, 2020. 43.Christopher Leffler et al., “Association of Country-Wide Coronavirus Mortality with Demographics, Testing, Lockdowns, and Public Wearing of Masks,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 103, no. 6 (2020): 2400–11. 44.Wei Lyu and George L. Wehby, “Community Use of Face Masks and COVID-19: Evidence from a Natural Experiment of State Mandates in the US,” Health Affairs 39, no. 8 (2020). 45.Scott Gottlieb, “Some Masks will Protect you Better than Others,” The Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2020. 46.Sacramento Bee, “Campaign Against Gauze Masks Is Without Facts,” November 5, 1918. 47.Megan Garber, “Atlas Coughed,” The Atlantic, October 9, 2020. 48.Kelly Mena and Veronica Stracqualursi, “Trump Wears a Mask during Visit to Wounded Service Members at Walter Reed,” CNN, July 11, 2020. 49.Michael D.

pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime
by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden
Published 24 Oct 2022

Quoting Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband, he wrote, “There is no pandemic exception to the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights.” He shared an article from WND—formerly WorldNetDaily, a far-right news and opinion website known for promoting conspiracy theories—with the headline “Coronavirus Could Be ‘Exterminated’ If Lockdowns Lifted.” He supported President Donald Trump’s decision to keep houses of worship open during the pandemic and defended him against critics. “How are the same people who say Trump oversteps his bounds and authorities by sending feds to help stop violence in cities say that Trump didn’t do enough to ‘stop COVID’?”

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Colonial boosted IT spending by 50 percent from 2017 to 2021. But when the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and oversees pipeline safety, contacted Colonial in 2020 to schedule a voluntary cybersecurity review, the company begged off. Its excuses were that it was undergoing a COVID-19 lockdown and moving to a new headquarters. No TSA assessment took place until it was too late. * * * Just before 5:00 a.m. on May 7, 2021, a Colonial employee found a ransom note on the company’s network. DarkSide had frozen the company’s billing and administrative systems and stolen personal information such as health insurance data and Social Security numbers.

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“If I ever become famous, Chris is going to be my PR person,” Justin replied. “Even in retirement you found [a] way to embarrass me … I’m just fortunate to have a career I enjoy, encourages learning, and facilitates continuing education.” Mark Phelps became preoccupied with politics. The pandemic and the 2020 presidential campaign led him to embrace alt-right advocacy. He stewed over lockdowns and mask mandates, which he described to Facebook friends as “baby steps to tyranny.” “This thing is not as bad as it is made out to be! Let’s get back to normal!” he wrote in July 2020. In another post, he expressed frustration that lockdown restrictions infringed on his personal liberty.

pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future
by Geoffrey Cain
Published 28 Jun 2021

“In this kind of world,” she remembered, “you become more and more defensive, like you don’t want to talk to anyone, you don’t want to go out and meet people, and you trust no one.” City streets slowly emptied out, since no one wanted to risk going outside and being harassed by the police. That year “essential travel” to school, work, the grocery store, or to visit family soon became the only justifiable reasons to be outdoors. Xinjiang was in a kind of coronavirus-style lockdown, except the virus was excessive state control. One day, Maysem drove with her parents to the gas station. Armed guards stood outside and watched them as they disembarked, looking for any sudden moves or suspicious behavior, though it was never clear what behavior might be deemed suspicious.

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Jay Greene, “Microsoft Won’t Sell Police Its Facial-Recognition Technology, Following Similar Moves by Amazon and IBM,” Washington Post, June 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/11/microsoft-facial-recognition/. 21. Javier C. Hernández, “China Locks Down Xinjiang to Fight Covid-19, Angering Residents,” New York Times, August 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/world/asia/china-xinjiang-covid.html. 22. Dake Kang, “In China’s Xinjiang, Forced Medication Accompanies Lockdown,” Associated Press, August 31, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/309c576c6026031769fd88f4d86fda89. 23. Bloomberg News, “Huawei Sees Dire Threat to Future from Latest Trump Salvo,” June 8, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-07/huawei-troops-see-dire-threat-to-future-from-latest-trump-salvo. 24.

pages: 344 words: 104,522

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

First, it wrongly conflates empirical fact-finding with normative policy-making. Facts are important inputs to making sound policy decisions, but facts and policy judgments are not the same thing. It’s one thing for someone to wrongly assert that bandanas were more effective than N95 masks in preventing person-to-person transmission of the coronavirus. It’s another matter entirely to treat anti-lockdown arguments as though those arguments themselves are incorrect “facts.” Whether a lockdown of certain businesses to prevent the coronavirus from spreading is the right policy isn’t a matter of “fact” or “science.” It’s a policy judgment, and the best policy may vary depending on what the business is, where it is, and myriad other factors.

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They appointed themselves as the sole arbiters of truth in science and silenced dissent, just as the CCP does in China. They banished century-old newspapers. They interfered in our elections in unprecedented ways. During widespread state-imposed lockdowns during the pandemic, YouTube (owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet) banned videos that were critical of COVID-19-related policies, including content posted by medical professionals arguing that lockdowns were excessive or unnecessary. Its stated justification? To remove “medically unsubstantiated” content in favor of facts from “authoritative” sources. According to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”2 In early 2021, YouTube did the same thing by censoring the Senate testimony of a doctor who made the medical case for ivermectin, a little-known tropical medicine, to treat severe COVID-19 patients, with no explanation other than to say it violated its misinformation policy.

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The idea cleanse is now complete—all the while unnoticed and barely detectable as users mindlessly scroll down the page.4 Of course, the main objective of these large technology titans wasn’t really the pursuit of science at all. It was partly about financial self-interest. Large publicly traded technology companies, as of this writing, have added over a trillion dollars of market capitalization since the start of the pandemic in early 2020—an order of magnitude more than the GDP of most nations in the same period. Why? Because lockdowns meant more people decided to get their groceries on Amazon rather than go to the local store, because more people were able to meet via Zoom rather than travel to a conference, and because more people chose to subscribe to Netflix rather than go to a movie theater.

pages: 278 words: 82,771

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money
by Owen Walker
Published 4 Mar 2021

He was lucky in the past, but not this time. And we’re the ones that are suffering.’ What has been especially galling for Snelson and Hiscock is the daily reminder of the fortune Woodford amassed while mismanaging their money. Just a few streets from Snelson’s B&B in Salcombe, which she struggled to keep going through the coronavirus lockdown, is the luxury six-bedroom holiday home Woodford bought for £6.4 million in cash in 2017. Since then Woodford has added an expensive hot tub and bought a huge yacht in the bay. ‘The worst thing is living here and knowing he has that multi-million-pound house just minutes away. I pass it every day,’ Snelson adds.

pages: 385 words: 112,842

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

Then the company expanded its delivery area to neighborhoods adjacent to campus. In the early months of the pandemic, Starship also rapidly stood up new delivery services not attached to any college at all, for example in Tempe, Arizona. In all the dozens of locales it operates in worldwide, Starship, like all delivery services, saw huge spikes in demand during pandemic lockdowns. And the company had an added advantage: “contactless” delivery. At its root, all of this is made possible by an autonomous driving system not unlike the one that keeps TuSimple’s massive trucks from creaming other vehicles on the road, only vastly simplified. If TuSimple’s trucks are the equivalent of a human—with our giant, sophisticated, calorie-devouring brains—then Starship’s robots are more like a cockroach.

…

But the tension between productivity and safety in the company is resolved within a system of incentives that is markedly different from Amazon’s. Jenny, for one, is no stranger to huge workloads, especially during peak times. “Peak” used to describe the holiday rush of packages, but from the moment pandemic lockdowns began in the United States in March through the 2020 holiday season, which one FedEx executive described as “peak on top of peak,” this period of furious activity became the new normal for the entire logistics industry. Despite the increased workloads, Jenny tells drivers there’s no reason to stress: they’re getting paid by the hour, after all.

pages: 391 words: 112,312

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

His ex-wife described him in a request for a protective order as “reckless when drunk.” Fox was a leader of a militia called the Michigan Three Percenters—a reference to their belief that only 3 percent of American colonists took up arms against Britain in the Revolutionary War. Michigan is a hotbed of such groups. They were infuriated by Whitmer’s Covid restrictions, but even before the lockdown they were prone to anger. Fox had been kicked out of another militia, the Michigan Home Guard, for having “rage issues.” One of the conspirators complained, “I’m sick of being robbed and enslaved by the state,” after receiving a ticket for driving without a license. In June, at a gun rights rally at the state capitol in Lansing, Fox met with members of another militia, the Wolverine Watchmen.

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Total deaths increased by 15 percent, making 2020 the deadliest year in recorded U.S. history. The figure that will haunt America is that the U.S. accounts for about 20 percent of all the Covid fatalities in the world, despite having only 4 percent of the population. At the beginning of the pandemic, China’s unprecedented lockdown, compared to the initial halting reaction in Italy, suggested that autocratic systems had an unbeatable advantage in dealing with a contagion like that of SARS-CoV-2. Over time, however, democratic regimes found their footing and did marginally better than authoritarian ones. Advanced countries performed better than developing ones, but not by as much as might have been expected.

pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

When I asked her about 5Rights, she pointed out that over a billion underage young people are online every day, for hours every day, and treated by the platforms they use as if they are adults. Content is easy to access, hard to monitor. Online grooming is a particular threat. For example, during the 2020 Covid lockdown, in the UK (just the UK here, folks) around 9 million attempts to view child-abuse images were blocked in one month alone. Kids are tech savvy but tech vulnerable. 5Rights wants to see kids protected in the digital world just as they are in the physical world. In the physical world we do make a distinction between children and adults – a distinction hard-won during the Industrial Revolution.

pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin
Published 12 Jul 2021

The former’s interests do not align with the latter’s interests or our interests in preserving our republic. For example, we witnessed how Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, etc., teamed up in a brazen effort to destroy the upstart Parler, censor former president Trump, cover up the Hunter Biden scandal pre–general election, enforce coronavirus lockdowns and ban scientific/expert opinions that differed from that of government bureaucrats, and generally use suppression techniques to stigmatize and silence speech and debate they did not and do not support as political and policy matters. We also witnessed hundreds of corporations collude against the Republican legislature in Georgia and its efforts to judiciously reform the state’s election system—as they worked with the Democratic Party and its efforts to establish one-party rule there.

pages: 311 words: 90,172

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

HelloFresh, which very few US investors know about because it is headquartered in Berlin, Germany, and trades on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Yet throughout the debacle of Blue Apron, HelloFresh has built up the world’s largest meal-kit delivery business, generating almost $4.5 billion in revenue in 2020 (growing over 100% year-over-year, thanks in large measure to Covid-19-related lockdown restrictions), with over 5 million customers worldwide (as of the end of 2020), including over 2.5 million in the United States. HelloFresh is profitable and has seen its stock rise 400% over 2018–2020, reaching a market cap of almost $12 billion as of early 2021, approximately 6x the value of Blue Apron at its IPO.

…

As it turned out, Netflix was able to successfully implement its price increase. And the launch of Disney+ didn’t have a sustainably negative impact on Netflix’s subscriber growth. Netflix shares traded up solidly on its September quarter EPS results, thanks to much stronger than expected international sub growth. And then the Covid-19 lockdowns helped generate Netflix’s two strongest subscriber adds quarters ever in the March and June quarters of 2020. And the stock achieved new highs that it largely maintained by the end of the year. Consumers were apparently willing to sign up for more than one streaming service—given the low subscription costs (four cups of coffee) and the exclusive, differentiated content on each service.

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These personalizations—these product improvements—started to add up, and in the July quarter of 2020, Stitch Fix added slightly more new customers (104,000) than it had added in the July quarter of 2019. And in the October quarter of 2020, Stitch Fix added 241,000 new customers, more than it had ever added in any one quarter. It wasn’t Covid-19 relief that drove these new customers. Many parts of the United States were going back into lockdown mode as Covid-19 cases once again surged. Instead, it was the cumulative impact of these product innovations that improved success rates, retention rates, and overall customer satisfaction. Further, revenue growth reaccelerated, and the company guided to a recovery to 20%+ revenue growth for the fiscal year.

pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics
by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth
Published 15 Jun 2020

Finally, we have outlined how the challenge of a data monopoly, which is owned by all, can be shared and returned to rightful ownership. We can all benefit not just from the innovation, but from the economic value creation. Armed with these proposals, our politics can be changed. If it doesn’t, we should all get angry. Postscript: angrynomics in a pandemic In late March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic pushed the world into lockdown just as the proofs of this book landed on our desks. We immediately wondered, as the pandemic began to unfold, if what we had to say was still of relevance. We are convinced that it is. The key themes of this book are that any society encountering patched-up macroeconomic crashes (like 2008), the ever-increasing daily stressors of an aging society beset with rapid technological change, and rising inequality, was one that would produce an angry anti-system politics.

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Meanwhile, those denying the pandemic or weaponizing it for politics seem to be losing their standing. So far, so good. But given that the underlying stressors we’ve discussed in this book are still there we need to consider how they interact with the actions taken to halt the pandemic. Indeed, with unemployment rocketing up everywhere, that anger, under lockdown for the moment, is likely to come back with some new targets as a result of this crisis. An early example of this was the anger of Bernie supporters in the US asking why the Federal Reserve can always find a few trillion dollars to support financial markets whenever it’s needed, but their asks, for student debt forgiveness and universal healthcare, are always “unaffordable”.

…

As we move forward under lockdown the wisdom of the immigration restrictions popular with populists will be tested as much needed food for cities lies unpicked in the fields due to a lack of immigrant labour combining with the lockdown. And if the health services of the developed economies survive this onslaught there will be justifiable anger over how ill-prepared we were to confront this pandemic. Angrynomics, like economics, may be under lockdown, but it has not disappeared. The challenge for policy now is to use this moment to address not just the immediate needs of the pandemic, but the underlying fractures we identify in this book. The good news is that some of this is actually happening. Perhaps for once we will actually turn this crisis into an opportunity.

Paint Your Town Red
by Matthew Brown
Published 14 Jun 2021

But just because governments have attempted to exploit philanthropy in the cause of further rolling back the state, this is not to say that there is no public interest in volunteerism; it is merely that it is not sufficient in the absence of deeper levels of support and a state oriented towards empowering citizens. One very recent example of central government’s inconsistent attitude to an empowered and socially-minded citizenry was the vast numbers of people who volunteered to join community test and trace initiatives during the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK. This outpouring of community spirit, with around a million people volunteering to support the NHS within a few weeks, was typically squandered by the government in preference to outsourcing important public health work to companies like Serco or others of dubious provenance and with close ties to MPs.

pages: 898 words: 236,779

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

In 2018, Amazon reportedly tried to “win favor in Beijing” in an effort to grow its cloud computing and e-commerce business, a part of which involved securing a license to sell Kindle devices and e-books in the country.73 As a concession to the Chinese government, Amazon agreed to create a so-called China Books selling portal on the company’s US-based Amazon.com e-commerce site, featuring 90,000 publications for sale.74 While many titles were apolitical, some amplified government propaganda, featuring titles such as “Incredible Xinjiang: Stories of Passion and Heritage” or “Stories of Courage and Determination: Wuhan in Coronavirus Lockdown.” The deal can be described as a classic win-win collaboration: the China Books project helped Amazon resolve the licensing problems it had encountered when selling e-books in China and, at the same time, gave the Chinese government the kind of visibility it was seeking in the US. To fend off criticism of its collaboration with China’s propaganda apparatus on the China Books project, Amazon emphasized how the company, as a bookseller, ought to provide access to “diverse perspectives,” including books that “some may find objectionable.”75 Like most other US tech companies, Amazon has sought to navigate the Chinese regulatory environment by partnering with local companies and thus shielding itself from direct contact with the country’s censorship and propaganda apparatus.

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According to reporting from November 2021, the tech crackdown had “wiped out more than $1 trillion worldwide from the market value of Chinese companies.”187 DiDi alone lost $38 billion in market value from its peak on the day of its IPO to four weeks after its listing.188 Holding back the industry may further drag down the Chinese economy, which is already facing multiple challenges, including the aftermath of extensive COVID-19 lockdowns, the US–China trade war and related sanctions, and the debt crisis in real estate. The heavy-handed regulation of the tech sector is now further destabilizing the wider economy and endangering the prospects of the country’s future economic growth.189 How this recent turn in Chinese tech regulation will affect the country’s digital economy in the long term remains to be seen.

pages: 290 words: 80,461

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

So, he put on his chappals and walked down to the post office to send a telegram saying so, using as few words as possible, because telegrams weren’t cheap and were charged by length. Over the next few weeks, many more telegrams arrived from Italy, begging for a ticket back to Bombay. After ignoring many of them, Babuji finally relented. His son, my uncle, returned to Bombay, where he lived out his days. Fewer than sixty years later, each week of pandemic lockdown was punctuated by the demanding squeaks of my toddler: ‘I want talk Nani right now!’ The child of a pandemic, there were eighteen months of her life when she couldn’t see her grandparents in person, so her demands to speak to her grandma were swiftly obeyed. With the swish of a finger on a touchscreen, a call flew through the air to the other side of the planet, to which my mum responded.

pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World
by David Sax
Published 15 Jan 2022

It sets the standard for ruthless price matching and convenience, pioneering one-click purchasing (a process it has patented), free delivery and returns, automated reorders (for, say, that coveted toilet paper), and a subscription model (Prime) that not only lowers costs for members, making them more loyal and eager to buy from Amazon, but locks in the revenue to pay for it. The ability to buy everything you could ever need on Amazon has been available for several years, but the pandemic’s initial lockdown on analog brick-and-mortar commerce pushed millions to fully embrace it for the first time. People who had never bought anything online bought stuff on Amazon, and those who were already Prime members bought even more. The future that Bezos imagined had truly arrived. But as the clicks proliferated into a chorus of ringing doorbells and the revving of delivery van engines down every street, the limits of commerce’s digital future came into focus.

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“I put it right up there with my first MacBook as one of the two biggest things that let me grow this business,” Harris said. “Shopify changed how easily I could control what I was presenting to the world for my business.” When the pandemic led to a sudden explosion in pajama orders, Harris had no trouble scaling her business. Shopify dramatically changed during the pandemic, as global demand for online retail followed the closure of physical stores and lockdowns. Whereas its growth previously came from largely online merchants, like This Is J, the company was now deluged with new accounts from existing brick-and-mortar retailers that needed to get online yesterday in order to stay in business today. “We just dropped all our plans and immediately began putting out things to really help this moment,” said Dan Debow, vice president of product at Shopify, who is based here in Toronto.

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They’re the most important cultural element of every city and country.” Laurie Cadwell, who owns Big City Burrito in Fort Collins, Colorado, switched from Grubhub to Noco.Nosh (a local precursor of Loco.Coop that Sewell helped set up) a few months before the pandemic. The move was easy, and as Big City Burrito delivery sales took off during Colorado’s lockdowns, so did her profits. “I don’t understand why any restaurants went with big 3PD apps,” she said, noting that she wasn’t idealistic or altruistic in her motivations. “I didn’t care about community. I just wanted to survive. We made money. We got a distribution from Noco.Nosh.

pages: 363 words: 98,496

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy
by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel
Published 2 May 2022

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Early in the pandemic: David Yaffe-Bellany, “U.S. Businesses Are Fighting Insurers in the Biggest Legal Battle of the Pandemic,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 2, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-11-02/should-insurers-have-to-compensate-businesses-for-coronavirus-lockdowns. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In the UK, Lloyd’s members: Lucca de Paoli and Jonathan Browning, “Insurers Face More Covid Payouts as U.K. Court Appeal Fails,” Bloomberg News, Jan. 15, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-15/insurers-face-covid-payouts-as-appeal-of-u-k-court-ruling-fails.

pages: 326 words: 91,532

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

They work so well, in fact, that modern economies need payments as much as they need water, power and energy. Without smooth-functioning payments, financial markets, commerce, employment, even unemployment, would all be compromised. Look at who your country identified as key workers during the Covid-19 lockdown and you’ll probably find payments staff are listed. Unless you live off-grid in splendid and completely self-sufficient isolation, you need to be able to pay and (most of us at least) need to be able to get paid. If access to the payment system is critical for everyone, then our modern, monetary-based societies have first to ensure that they have a good system and, second, that everyone has access to it.

…

Thieves take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities as they look for potential matches online, and then lure them into sophisticated fraud schemes. According to Interpol, which issued a warning on dating app fraud in early 2021, this part of the cybercrime industry has thrived on the back of Covid-19 lockdown loneliness. The way it works is like this: first the criminals establish artificial romances with their targets through dating apps. Once communication is regular and trust is established, the criminals start sharing financial tips with their victims and encouraging them to join an investment scheme with pyramidic levels of status, dependent on the amount they invest.

pages: 307 words: 93,073

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

Within three days, writes historian Martyn Bennett, Chamberlain resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Winston Churchill. More recently, in January 2022, then prime minister Boris Johnson was facing calls from the media and the opposition to resign over a series of parties allegedly held in Downing Street in violation of COVID lockdown rules. In a debate in Parliament, David Davis, a backbench Conservative MP and former government minister, gave a withering speech. And how did he end it? I will remind him of a quotation altogether too familiar to him of Leo Amery to Neville Chamberlain, “You have sat there too long for all the good you have done.

pages: 416 words: 124,469

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy
by Christopher Leonard
Published 11 Jan 2022

* * * That month, millions of traders on the retail platform Robinhood helped drive up shares in a video-game rental company called GameStop. The company’s rising share value was puzzling when compared against its underlying economic health—the storefront business was suffering massive losses of customer traffic during the coronavirus lockdowns, and was arguably being made technologically obsolete by Internet streaming. Its stock was jumping by double digits. During a news conference in late January, Jay Powell was asked repeatedly about the possibility that the Fed was fueling an asset bubble. Inside the FOMC meetings, the Fed’s own experts talked repeatedly about the ways that quantitative easing boosted all asset prices, along with the stock market.

pages: 309 words: 81,243

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

Fuller and Manjari Raman, “Dismissed by Degrees,” Harvard Business School, October 2017, https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/dismissed-by-degrees.pdf. CHAPTER 4: HOW SCIENCE™ DEFEATED ACTUAL SCIENCE 1. Adam Gabbatt, “US anti-lockdown rallies could cause surge in Covid-19 cases, experts warn,” TheGuardian.com, April 20, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/20/us-protests-lockdown-coronavirus-cases-surge-warning. 2. Michael Juliano, “Some LA parks are closing until further notice after a busy weekend on the trails,” Timeout.com, March 22, 2020, https://www.timeout.com/los-angeles/news/some-l-a-parks-are-closing-until-further-notice-after-a-busy-weekend-on-the-trails-032220. 3.

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And the same public health professionals who decried anti-lockdown protests, who urged Americans to do their part to socially distance, who cheered as businesses were told to close and schools to board up, ecstatically endorsed the mass gatherings. Apparently, the virus was itself woke: it would kill Republicans who opposed economy-crippling lockdowns, but would pass over anyone chanting trite slogans about defunding the police. Politicians from the Left—devotees of wokeism—appeared in the midst of mass protests personally. Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) attended a civil rights march in Highland Park with hundreds of others, standing “shoulder-to-shoulder with some march participants.”

pages: 940 words: 16,301

Routes to Rejoin
by Stay European
Published 3 Oct 2021

The cause of trade problems, shortages and other issues has been difficult to prove, with the media often pinning the blame on catch-all phrases such as “caused by the effects of Covid and Brexit”. As the Institute for Government report ‘The End of the Brexit Transition Period’ points out: “Where disruption has occurred, it has not always been easy to distinguish whether it has been caused by Brexit or Covid. Covid has also delayed some of the most obvious impacts of the Brexit deal – at least until lockdowns ease and borders re-open.” Let’s assume, and unfortunately this may be optimistic, that by the end of 2021 we have seen the last wave of the pandemic (at least in Britain). This means we begin 2022 with a population once more ready to travel, hoping to live, work and study across Europe in much the same quantities as we did before our lives were frozen by the pandemic in March 2020.

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Brexit is ‘going OK’ only and precisely to the extent that it still has not happened yet. The end of the transition period on 31 December 2020 was the clearest moment so far when a large number of new rules (though far from all of them) came into effect. But it arrived almost a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, nine months since the first UK lockdown and only days before the third (!) national lockdown on 6 January 2021. People are, for the most part, not travelling at the moment, or travelling as little as they can. Far from looking for opportunities to work around Europe, those who can are still working from home. The dramatic (though highly necessary) loss of freedoms during the pandemic has extensively disguised the loss of European freedoms as a result of Brexit. 57 It is a similar story in the economy, where the drastic fall in GDP as a result of coronavirus has masked the expected fall from Brexit.

pages: 350 words: 115,802

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy
by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud
Published 17 Jan 2023

And as soon as we reached out to Paul Lewis, the Guardian’s investigative editor, in late April, he began gathering a small team to join us for the meeting in Paris. Part of the allure, Paul later admitted, was the chance to get out of London, where he had been stuck during the yearlong Covid pandemic. Not that our city was great fun at that point. President Emmanuel Macron had just extended France’s third Covid lockdown, which meant all bars, restaurants, museums, and theaters remained closed. Streets were eerily quiet during the day and ghostly after 7 p.m., the hour of the officially enforced curfew. All of the partners and potential partners who first gathered on the afternoon of May 11, 2021, had submitted negative results from their recently completed PCR tests.

pages: 525 words: 166,724

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15
by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson
Published 25 Sep 2023

The FBI swooped down on Vallejo and other Oath Keepers. Agents fanned out across the country to arrest hundreds of others involved in January 6 and crack down on extremists. The raids and prosecutions gutted the ranks of such groups and weakened—at least temporarily—their ability to use violence to achieve their political ends. But as COVID lockdowns ended and Americans began to gather once again, another pervasive and stubborn danger resurfaced with a vengeance: mass shooters. 30. BEYOND THE TALKING POINTS I don’t think you get the toothpaste back in the tube. —Democratic representative Mike Thompson on banning AR-15s The AR-15, created by Eugene Stoner in the 1950s to aid American soldiers, had by the early 2020s become fused in the public mind with the slaughtering of American civilians.

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Parade participants and onlookers waved Old Glory as marching band music resounded down the street. The event was more than just a Norman Rockwell ritual; it was a reclaiming of normalcy, an effort—replicated across the country that July Fourth—to reestablish community after the grueling years of COVID-19, lockdowns, political tensions, and unrest. One could only imagine that Eugene Stoner would have been gratified by the scene. Preserving this America was what he thought his work was all about. Sixty-two years earlier to the day, the Air Force General Curtis LeMay had picked up Stoner’s gun to shoot watermelons.

pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
by Sally Adee
Published 27 Feb 2023

To Mollie Weisenfeld and Georgia Frances King for executing the most enormous trust fall. To Carrie Plitt for seeing the outlines of the book long before I ever did. I cannot get over the generosity of the scientists and researchers who answered my emails and phone and Zoom queries. They spent hours with me through Covid lockdowns and electoral chaos to explain wildly difficult concepts, talk me through controversial history, and help me keep my focus. Alphabetically: Dany Adams patiently read draft after draft, and sent diagrams and markups, and ironed out my misunderstandings. Debra Bohnert, thank you so much for our wonderful conversation—I hope the story does the man justice.

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
by Elle Reeve
Published 9 Jul 2024

His name was Eduardo Rendon, and I stood at the base of the tree, shouting my interview questions up at him, as “Don’t Stop Believing” played on the speakers around us. During the pandemic, he said, “I redpilled myself, basically.” Most of the people I interviewed on January 6 were first redpilled by the Covid lockdown, then blackpilled by the conspiracy theories they’d found to explain it. Their beliefs were on a spectrum, but no matter where they fell on it, they thought outsiders had been brainwashed and radical action was necessary. Jim Berghoff, an older man with a silvery beard who’d come from Saginaw, Michigan, was reluctant to talk to CNN, but he seemed like he felt a sense of duty to speak up for what he thought was right.

pages: 202 words: 62,397

The Passenger
by The Passenger
Published 27 Dec 2021

If not for the tireless work of a local historian, Catherine Corless, and the courage of families and survivors speaking out, the truth might never have been known. The state was forced to launch an investigation not just into Tuam but into the wider system of mother-and-baby home institutions across the country. The deeply flawed final report, published in 2021 during a pandemic lockdown, with survivors not even being given a hard copy to read before a rushed state apology, found that more than nine thousand children died in these institutions and more than a hundred thousand women and children were kept behind the walls of these so-called ‘homes’. For people my age it was the latest horror in a litany of brutal truths emerging about how Church and state treated people whom legislation and doctrine made vulnerable and marginalised; this was the Ireland of the very recent past, and these institutions were still operating during our lifetimes

pages: 405 words: 113,895

The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels
by Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans
Published 11 Mar 2024

In many cases, families are sundered by the government, through incarceration or the foster care system. When the state permanently severs parent-child relationships, the law renders estrangement legally binding. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these trends toward disconnection. Surveys taken before and after the pandemic showed that social distancing and lockdowns led to community distrust and isolation even after lockdowns ended, especially for the middle-aged and elderly, who were already vulnerable. At precisely the moment when we could have collectively benefited the most from social support, the number of social interactions plummeted.

…

Relatives of migrants swallowed in the killing wasteland of the Sonoran Desert or of those “disappeared” by authoritarian regimes, like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, ache for the chance to claim the remains of their loved ones but are denied burial rites. The U.S. military still spends millions of dollars every year to retrieve the remains of soldiers killed in foreign wars so families have something tangible to mourn. During pandemic lockdowns, social distancing rules restricted funeral size and practices. Americans unable to bury their loved ones were suspended in a liminal space of grief. If denying families a burial causes deep personal pain, denying a funeral to those without family exacts its own social cost. When we dispose of the unclaimed out of the public eye, locate their gravesites in inaccessible areas, or either fail or refuse to mark a mass burial with a ceremony—the default in most cities in the United States—we erase these deaths and lives and the vital lessons they offer.

pages: 362 words: 116,497

Palace Coup: The Billionaire Brawl Over the Bankrupt Caesars Gaming Empire
by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes
Published 16 Mar 2021

There was a question, once again, about whether the big banks would fulfill their lending commitments to ensure the deal could be funded. Several state regulators also were taking a hard line on the competition effects of the merger. Still, even as casinos across America were largely shuttered by the coronavirus lockdowns, the nearly $10 billion in deal financing, as well as state regulatory approvals, finally came through, and the deal closed in July 2020. Canyon Capital, the LA-based hedge fund that had bet big on both gaming and the bankruptcy of Caesars, would net over $1 billion in profits by remaining patient in its Caesars trade.

pages: 370 words: 112,809

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

In 2016, life imitated art when a man in Hong Kong created a robot based on the image of Scarlett Johansson, raising questions about our rights to our image and persona. Celebrity or not, should others be allowed to use your likeness, your face and character, to create smart machines? In 2020, amid the loneliness of coronavirus lockdown, some users admitted to being attracted to Alexa. One relationship expert attributed the attraction to Alexa’s “sexy voice with low tones to it.” It does go both ways: the woman in Alexa’s Super Bowl ad was very obviously lusting after Michael B. Jordan, even if she was only hearing his voice.

pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

Question: “Does your business intend to use increased home-working as a permanent business model going forward?” Data are employment-weighted. Source: ONS Business Insights and Conditions Survey data, reported in Haskel (2021). But the experience of home working suggests that while remote working will increase after COVID-19 lockdowns end, the office is not dead yet. A large survey of UK businesses conducted by the Office for National Statistics showed that only a minority of firms were looking to increase home working on a permanent basis (figure 6.1). Moreover, the survey found only one sector where firms thought that productivity had increased rather than decreased from home working: the information and communication sector (figure 6.2).

…

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that even the world’s richest economies are not immune to natural forces. Indeed, the damage caused by the pandemic is linked to the complexity and sophistication of the economy. Our large, dense cities, our complex international supply chains, and the unprecedented interconnectedness of our global economy allowed the virus to leap from country to country and increased the cost of the lockdowns needed to control it. Even fifteen years ago, a pandemic outbreak in a remote area of China would be at most a minor news story for the rich world. Now, thanks to globalisation, supply chains, and the internet, we seem to be increasingly exposed to the mere flap of a butterfly’s wings on another continent.

pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

Not all are hand workers in a literal sense, nor the factory workers of old, but all do essential jobs, and in the United Kingdom and United States at the height of the crisis it was males, especially older ethnic minority males, in those frontline jobs who were twice as likely to die from Covid-19 as the wider working population. The pause for reflection that the lockdown imposed on normally hectic, achievement-orientated societies and individuals may leave the deepest traces of all. Many of us, perhaps especially the privileged and highly educated, have been forced to reconsider what we value most deeply and, having looked up from our busy, mobile, existences, often met a neighbor for the first time and actually felt rooted in a physical community.

…

This has contributed to a devaluing of the private realm and the traditional caring functions for the young and elderly, mainly carried out by women. The proportion of families in which one parent stays at home full-time when the children are young is one-quarter in the United Kingdom and only slightly higher in the United States.2 (The unexpected and prolonged refamiliarization with the private realm as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown came as an unwelcome shock to many people.) In recent decades education systems have expanded, the years people spend in school have increased, and a quasi-meritocratic education system—above all in the modern university—has become the main distributor of status and position. It is true that some of the richest and most powerful modern businesspeople, such as Bill Gates, dropped out of higher education, but the ethos of these “cognitive entrepreneurs” is certainly not hostile to the increased status of “nerdy” cognitive aptitudes—in fact, quite the opposite.

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It would, in short, need to be plural rather than singular—a ‘multiversity,’ rather than a university.”18 Massive open online courses—so called MOOCs—have not taken off as some people expected outside niche areas; it seems that people like human contact when learning. But some combination of online and classroom is likely to prove increasingly popular, and one of the home-working success stories of the Covid-19 lockdown was higher education, with many courses moving online. And the spirit of the old autodidact, who just had an urge to read up on everything about, say, botany, has not disappeared even in a more educated society. There will always be a substantial minority with a thirst for knowledge for its own sake, as can be seen from the reach of intellectual popularizers like Brian Cox and Martin Rees in the United Kingdom, Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond in the United States, and Yuval Noah Harari across Europe and North America.

pages: 361 words: 117,566

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth
by Dan McCrum
Published 15 Jun 2022

Marsalek, hands full with the special audit, had no idea how the FT had even identified the woman’s company and its use for porn. ‘They really want to turn off our lights, don’t they?’ said Dagmar Schneider when he briefed her. He remained relentlessly positive and was, to the outside observer, calm and relaxed when at Wirecard. But at the end of March the mask briefly slipped. With the Covid lockdown in force, Colin invited Marsalek over for a barbecue. He arrived late with three friends: his personal-life assistant and travel companion, Sabine; a Russian diplomat; and Martin Weiss, an Austrian former spook who became a Marsalek henchman. The atmosphere was Dionysian. The visitors had sunk plenty of vodka before they arrived, and were animatedly discussing politics.

pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World
by Tom Burgis
Published 7 Sep 2020

What money he was managing to bring in came from ‘like-minded Kazakhs who share my political goals of overthrowing the dictatorial and undemocratic regime of Kazakhstan’. Those Kazakhs risked imprisonment for supporting him, Ablyazov wrote, and Nazarbayev’s surveillance was as constant as ever. So Ablyazov’s backers avoided communicating with him by phone or email and instead came to see him in France. Ablyazov told the judge the coronavirus lockdown had prevented his benefactors bringing him money. ‘I have no funds of my own,’ he wrote, not even enough to hire a lawyer. In Geneva, Iliyas Khrapunov was spending so much time fighting the Kazakhs’ lawsuits that he was practically a self-taught lawyer himself. Judges in Switzerland ruled Kazakhstan’s request for legal assistance in pursuit of Iliyas’s parents unlawful.

pages: 445 words: 135,648

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

ABC11 Eyewitness News, January 10, 2020. https://abc11.com/snapchat-tinder-lawsuit-aaliyah-palmer/5836719/. Brown, Myles. “Why Lisa Ann Prefers Having Sex with NBA Players.” GQ, February 14, 2015. www.gq.com/story/sex-athletes-nba-porn-star. Bruni, Frank. “We’re Not Wired to Be This Alone.” New York Times, April 1, 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/coronavirus-lockdown-loneliness.html. Burleigh, Nina. “Sexting, Shame and Suicide.” Rolling Stone, September 17, 2013. www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sexting-shame-and-suicide-72148/. Burnett-Zeigler, Inger E. “Young Black People Are Killing Themselves.” New York Times, December 16, 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/opinion/young-black-people-suicide.html.

pages: 575 words: 140,384

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO
by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Published 1 Nov 2022

Fellow members of the tribe offered their congratulations. “Scary for us to have you there,” Netflix’s Hastings wrote on Twitter. “But great for the world that HBO will be strong.” On May 1, 2020, Kilar took the reins of WarnerMedia at a particularly challenging time. Much of the country was in pandemic lockdown, hoping to slow the spread of COVID-19. Most of WarnerMedia’s thirty thousand–plus employees were working from home. Movie theaters were shuttered. Production of films and TV shows were at a standstill. Sports leagues were on hiatus. And HBO Max was set to debut before the end of the month. That spring, WarnerMedia launched a new advertising campaign to try to clarify the coming changes to the reformulated, hypermaximized HBO.

pages: 246 words: 82,965

The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000-Mile Horseback Journey Into the Old West
by Will Grant
Published 14 Oct 2023

The hard muscling of the Pony Express Trail faded from their shoulders and their hindquarters. Winter rolled into northern New Mexico, and hardly a day passed that I didn’t look up at the snowy mountains around town and be glad I wasn’t camped there. Spring brought strong westerlies that blew juniper pollen in yellow clouds, and along with the wind came the coronavirus pandemic and global lockdown. Claire pulled hard shifts in the hospital emergency room while I sat at my desk all day. I hardly left the house or the corrals. In the evenings, I’d go to the horses. I seldom rode either Chicken Fry or Badger, though whenever coyotes needed chasing out of the barnyard, Badger was the horse for the job—still the best at fast work and tight handling.

pages: 516 words: 116,875

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

Their view was that there is discrimination, although this is accompanied by a simultaneous recognition that it must be tackled. There was recognition that in some places communities live in fear. According to the Office for National Statistics, a significant minority (4.2 per cent of men and 7.9 per cent of women) suffered domestic abuse. This increased during the Covid lockdown. Domestic violence murders were at a five-year high in 2019.44 Hate crime is in sharp focus, too. Many people with disabilities, in particular those with learning disabilities, say bullying and discrimination are part of everyday life, according to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).45 This translates into the structure of our society, too, as the current disability employment gap is 15 per cent.46 Based on the same CPS report, homophobic and transphobic crime prosecution and conviction rates were also up in 2018/19.

pages: 384 words: 121,574

Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption
by Patrick Alley
Published 17 Mar 2022

The next thing to do was to target the ad to the sections of society most likely to get inflamed. ‘If you type, for example, Manchester, the Ad Manager auto-suggests relevant interest categories, like Manchester United or Manchester Metropolitan University,’ Naomi explained. Based out of their homes during the Covid lockdown, Rosie, Naomi and Nienke shared their screens as they planned their strategy, much like real-life promoters of violence might do in the locked-down digital age. They decided to begin with a location. Around two-thirds of the killings during the Troubles had taken place near the graffiti-strewn ‘Peace Walls’ that divide many of the Republican and Loyalist areas in cities like Belfast: names like the Falls Road and the Shankill Road are indelibly stamped in the memory of those who lived through the Troubles.

The Mini Rough Guide to Helsinki
by Rough Guides
Published 9 Nov 2023

Post-war years Finland evolves from an agrarian country to an industrial one. 1952 Helsinki hosts the XV Olympic Games, postponed from 1940 by WWII. 1955 Finland becomes a member of the United Nations. 1970s onwards Alvar Aalto initiates a modern style of architecture. 1 January 1995 Finland joins the European Union. 2002 The euro replaces the Finnish mark. 2015 The city celebrates the 150th anniversary of Sibelius’s birth. 6 December 2017 Finland celebrates one hundred years of independence. 2020 The Covid-19 pandemic causes travel bans and a two-month long lockdown in Finland. 2021 The new Covid-19 vaccine sees widespread uptake in Finland, with the highest number of vaccinated people recorded in Helsinki and Uusimaa. 2023 Finland joins NATO after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Out and About Helsinki is on an oddly shaped peninsula, nibbled at by the Gulf of Finland, which convolutes itself into numerous inlets, bays and harbours around the edges of the city.

pages: 302 words: 92,206

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

Huge thanks also to the excellent teams at Allen Lane and Flatiron Books, especially to my fabulous editors, the brilliant Laura Stickney and Lee Oglesby, who provided essential advice and helped shape the book. Thanks also to Sam Fulton, Jane Birdsell and Richard Duguid. I wrote it during the Covid pandemic with its lockdowns, home-schooling, and other ruinous obstacles, an ordeal only made possible through the love and friendship of family and friends, including Jolyon Goddard, Rowan Hooper, Olive Heffernan, Sara Abdulla, John Witfield, Charlotte and Henry Nicholls, my Sisters of the Pen: Jo Marchant and Emma Young, my parents Ivan and Gina, my brother David, and my raisons d’être Nick, Kipp and Juno.

pages: 277 words: 81,718

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

ie=UTF8&node=14917073031. 21 ‘CMA issues directions to NatWest about bundling products’, Gov.uk [website] (31 August 2022), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cma-issues-directions-to-natwest-about-bundling-products. 22 ‘FTC takes action against Amazon for enrolling consumers in Amazon Prime without consent and sabotaging their attempts to cancel’, Federal Trade Commission [website] (21 June 2023), https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/06/ftc-takes-action-against-amazon-enrolling-consumers-amazon-prime-without-consent-sabotaging-their. 23 Quoted in Stefania Palma and Patrick McGee, ‘Amazon “tricked and trapped” customers with Prime service, FTC claims’, Financial Times (21 June 2023), https://www.ft.com/content/a0a3791d-71d6-42f8-9da2-49c7c2dde78f. 24 Ben Stevens, ‘PerfectHome ordered to pay £2.1m back to customers by FCA’, Retail Gazette [website] (21 March 2018), https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2018/03/perfecthome-ordered-pay-2-1m-back-customers-fca/. 25 David Curry, ‘Candy Crush revenue and usage statistics (2023)’, Business of Apps [website] (9 January 2023), https://www.businessofapps.com/data/candy-crush-statistics/. 26 ‘Consumer “inertia” boosts subscription firms’ revenues by 200%’, Pymnts [website] (9 October 2023), https://www.pymnts.com/subscription-commerce/2023/study-consumer-inertia-boosts-subscription-firms-revenues-by-200/. 27 ‘Half a billion pounds spent on subscriptions that rolled over without people realising during the cost-of-living crisis’, Citizens Advice [website] (1 December 2022), http://tinyurl.com/4k8yxpns. 28 ‘Introducing Snapchat+’, Snap [website] (29 June 2022), https://newsroom.snap.com/en-GB/snapchatplus. 29 Quoted in ‘Over 2 million have problems cancelling subscriptions on credit or debit cards’, Citizens Advice [website] (8 March 2016), https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/cymraeg/amdanom-ni/about-us1/media/press-releases/2-million-have-problems-cancelling-subscriptions/. 30 ‘Financial Lives 2022: key findings from the FCA’s financial lives May 2022 survey’, Financial Conduct Authority [website] (26 July 2023), https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/financial-lives/financial-lives-survey-2022-key-findings.pdf. 31 ‘UK households waste almost £170 on average each year on unused subscriptions’, Swansea Bay News [website] (27 June 2022), https://swanseabaynews.com/2022/06/27/uk-households-waste-almost-170-on-average-each-year-on-unused-subscriptions/. 32 ‘The money statistics December 2023’, The Money Charity [website], https://themoneycharity.org.uk/money-statistics/; ‘Household credit: a visual summary’, Bank of England [website] (31 January 2023), https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/visual-summaries/household-credit. 33 ‘The money stats – October 2022 – rising household bills drive financial resilience epidemic for UK consumers’, The Money Charity [website] (27 October 2022), https://themoneycharity.org.uk/the-money-stats-october-2022-rising-household-bills-drive-financial-resilience-epidemic-for-uk-consumers/. 34 Quoted in Vicky Shaw, ‘Scale of problem debt at “epidemic levels”, says Archbishop of Canterbury’, Independent (21 March 2018), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-debt-levels-archbishop-of-canterbury-credit-cards-cap-a8266131.html. 35 Welby and Barlow quoted in Vicky Shaw, ‘Problem debt is at “epidemic levels” – the help that’s out there’, Daily Mirror (17 May 2018), https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/problem-debt-epidemic-levels-helps-12224220. 36 ‘Financial Lives 2022: key findings from the FCA’s financial lives May 2022 survey’. 37 Martyn James, ‘How to cancel subscriptions and save a fortune’, Times (12 December 2023), https://www.thetimes.co.uk/money-mentor/coronavirus-crisis/consumer-rights/how-to-cancel-subscriptions-and-save-a-fortune. 38 ‘Barclaycard data shows lockdown has made us a “subscription society”’, InsightDIY [website] (26 August 2020), https://www.insightdiy.co.uk/news/barclaycard-data-shows-lockdown-has-made-us-a-subscription-society/8832.htm. 39 ‘Household debt’, OECD [website], https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm. 40 Jake Attfield, ‘Shame, upbringing and burdening others: why do 29 million UK adults feel uncomfortable talking about money despite feeling worried about it?’

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As a result, Tesla has decided to switch its battery cells factory from Germany to Texas.43 Waste and local authorities Local government represents a big government buyer, spending more than £100 billion a year, and as with central government they have become very dependent on US-owned suppliers. Responsible for waste and recycling, they outsource much of their waste management to private companies who are reliably profitable: as they say in Yorkshire, ‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass.’ During the Covid-19 lockdown US private equity groups emerged as the most active dealmakers. In March 2020, KKR, one of the biggest and oldest of the pack of private equity companies, spent £4.2 billion buying Viridor, based in Taunton, Somerset.44 This waste disposal company ‘covers the entire waste value chain’ and has contracts with 150 local authorities and 3,000 employees.

pages: 475 words: 134,707

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

Twitter limited the public’s exposure to the president’s messages, saying it “violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence.” Zuckerberg’s inaction led to virtual walkouts by Facebook employees unable to align themselves with a company policy that seemed to appease racist rhetoric. The backlash against Zuckerberg was a return to an old refrain. Our enthusiastic embrace of social media during the pandemic lockdown of 2020 was a 180-degree reversal from 2019, in the weeks and months before COVID hit. Before the pandemic, social media was a pariah. The #deletefacebook movement was gaining steam. The Cambridge Analytica scandal had forced Mark Zuckerberg to testify on Capitol Hill and in front of the European Parliament.

pages: 321 words: 105,480

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

We’re in the moment; you’re capturing it, you’re ruining it, they said. Back in my day we used to talk to people. His hesitancy was partly due to the entrenched British sense of shame and a reluctance to look silly in public—which is coincidentally the act that the TikTok feed prizes most. The pandemic lockdown of 2020 changed everything. Kabvina’s apartment, on the fourteenth floor of the first high-rise built in Manchester, which has a pool, gym, and sauna on the eighteenth floor, provided a perfect studio for his evolving shoots. The floor-to-ceiling windows made for ideal lighting, without the need for electric spotlights.

pages: 126 words: 31,039

The Mini Rough Guide to Vienna (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 1 Jun 2023

Emperor Ferdinand replaced by Franz Joseph (1848–1916). 1873 World Fair celebrates Vienna’s grandeur. 1914–18 Defeat in World War I ends Austrian Empire. 1934 Austrian Nazis assassinate Chancellor Dollfuss. 1938 German annexation (Anschluss) of Austria. 1939–45 World War II: Allied bombs devastate city. 1955 Austria granted neutrality. 1995 Austria enters European Union. 2005 Austria celebrates Jubiläumsjahr, the 50th anniversary of the State Treaty and 60th of the Second Republic. 2015 New laws ban foreign funding for mosques and imams. 2020 Covid-19 pandemic takes hold in Austria and lockdown measures are implemented; Conservative-Green coalition formed for the first time. 2023 Vienna celebrates the 150th anniversary of the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair. OUT AND ABOUT Nearly all Vienna’s major attractions are packed into the Innere Stadt (Inner City). This means that places such as the Stephansdom (St Stephen’s Cathedral), the Hofburg (Imperial Palace), the Burgtheater (National Theatre), Mozart’s house, the Staatsoper (State Opera) and the shopping areas around Kärtnerstrasse and the Graben are all within walking distance.

pages: 199 words: 63,724

The Passenger: Berlin
by The Passenger
Published 8 Jun 2021

It’s also a café and bar that sells basics such as newspapers and cigarettes and offers postal services. The Späti is a unique institution highly prized by night owls and the disorganised, of which the city is full. Some years ago shops were ordered to close on Sundays (although this was put on hold during the Covid-19 lockdowns; they’re obviously ‘essential’), and, while Spätis are supposed to observe this ordinance, they often ignore it, which has given rise to some debate about this iconic and apparently indispensable component of Berlin’s identity. They began in the 1970s in the GDR to meet the needs of factory workers on night shifts who had to shop at unusual hours.

pages: 296 words: 96,568

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

For example: how much virus was circulating (the more virus circulating, the higher the risk of catching Covid and so the greater the benefit of a vaccine); what age groups were being considered (the older the person, the higher the risks from Covid and so the greater the benefit of a vaccine); and were there alternative vaccines available to use (is the decision this vaccine or no vaccine, or is it this vaccine or another vaccine)? Both the UK and the EU regulators said that the risk–benefits were hugely in favour of continuing to use the vaccine. SARS-CoV-2 had dealt the world a terrible blow, with millions of deaths so far and continuing misery for those suffering from long Covid that we were only just starting to understand, and vaccines were our way out. Lockdowns could reduce infections but came with their own costs to people’s health and well-being. Case numbers were still rising in Europe, Latin America and South Asia, Covid was still killing one in every 150 people infected, and the vaccines that protected against it were doing vastly more good than harm: the day after the MHRA announced that nineteen people had died from rare blood clots in the UK that might have been due to vaccination, the latest analysis showed that vaccination in the UK was saving hundreds of lives every day.

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The vaccines being offered have been produced with enormous care and attention to safety; tested to establish the risk–benefit ratio in tens of thousands of people; and will continue to be monitored for rare side effects. Doing nothing is a decision too, and one that can have consequences, just as much as a positive action. Getting yourself vaccinated will protect you and those around you from falling ill with Covid-19, and is the best means we have to bring an end to lurching from lockdown to economic failure via overwhelmed health services. My advice would be to accept a Covid-19 vaccine as soon as you are offered one. That’s what I did. CATH CHAPTER 10 Vogue Robert Peston, ITV News at Ten, 15 July 2020: ‘What I’ve learned is that this very important peer review of the work that’s going on at Oxford, backed by the pharmaceutical giant [AstraZeneca], shows response from antibodies and so-called T cells or killer cells that we all have has been as good as the researchers could possibly have hoped.

…

Also thanks to Leo for the line about fame, and for looking at legal things for me whenever I’ve asked; Bernie for some (virtual) normality; Flo and the crew at my favourite pub (@magdalen_arms) for takeaway negroni and all the pies and pasta; and the staff at Ellie’s school for key worker provision when I really needed it. On top of a pandemic, I had personal struggles this year. The Banging Lockdown Clams (love you ladies) and the Real Oxford Crewp kept me fed and sane: to Sally, Mark and Lili, Ola, Rob, Stephanie, Matthew, Emma and Ellie, Gabi and Ruairidh, Cath and Pete, Kirsty and Gary, Hayley and Evan, my gratitude and my thanks. That we Zoomed and walked and drank and laughed and sometimes cried, kept my head above water and my focus on reality when I ever tended to despair.

pages: 569 words: 165,510

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

Prestwick Airport outside Glasgow had reportedly been contacted by the U.S. military. The White House denied the reports, and Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, in any case quashed the possibility, saying that the president would not be welcome, as Scotland and the rest of the UK were in full pandemic lockdown. Trump never made it to Turnberry in January 2021. But if he had, he would have brought himself back to where he started out, talking about America’s “Brexit moment” in the summer of 2016. It would also have been strangely appropriate for him to claim the “American throne” from his Scottish golf course.

pages: 562 words: 177,195

Flight of the WASP
by Michael Gross

Their books are all in the bibliography and endnotes that follow, and anyone who wants to dig deeper into these families would do well to start there. I am fortunate to have a group of personal friends and publishing professionals whom I depend on. My wife, Barbara Hodes, shared an office with me throughout the COVID lockdown and the creation of this book. My debt to her is enormous. I’ve been represented by my agent, Dan Strone at Trident Media Group, since 2003, and he has been a constant source of encouragement and wisdom. I thank his assistants Tess Weitzner and Claire Romine, too. Flight of the WASP is dedicated to Barbara, to Christine Biddle and her mother, and to a handful of other WASPs who have been friends for many years—and in several cases are members of families discussed in these pages.

pages: 371 words: 109,320

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

‘Lamestream’ was used increasingly as a term of sneering contempt by the alt-right: it implied a failed attempt by fundamentally dishonest big media outlets to be blandly mainstream in an attempt to appeal to, and probably mislead, everyone. It became a favourite insult of Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska, in her abortive run for vice president in the 2008 election. LSM was, of course, an irresistible word for Donald Trump as he repeatedly promoted the idea of a giant media conspiracy against him. Near the start of the Covid-19 lockdown in the US, on 25 March 2020 he contemptuously tweeted:‘The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!’

pages: 297 words: 84,447

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet
by Arthur Turrell
Published 2 Aug 2021

Sibylle steadily ascended the ranks, becoming head of theory (a position for which seriously strong mathematical ability is required), then a director, and finally, in 2011, the scientific director. “I saw how important good management is and how much it takes to secure a sufficient budget,” she tells me digitally as we cope with a coronavirus-induced lockdown. “By being the director I have many opportunities to influence our big projects and I can change those things I only complained about earlier.” Although she describes herself as a very impatient person, Sibylle is understated; the consummate professional scientist giving both sides of the argument and being honest about any limitations.

pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb
Published 14 Sep 2021

The total amount of venture capital investment was reduced from over $40 billion in 2008 to less than $30 billion a year later, affecting startups raising money in 2009 and 2010. More starkly, those startups had to take investments at lower valuations. Pre-money valuations dropped from an average of $40 million for a series C round in 2007 to about $25 million in 2009. Similarly, the coronavirus-related lockdown in 2020 temporarily reduced investment activity by about 25 percent, but it quickly bounced back to normal and then increased even higher afterward. Overall, booms and busts in the economy, including in the stock market, have an impact both on the amounts invested by VC firms and on valuations, with later-stage startups getting hit harder.

pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
by Amanda Montell
Published 14 Jun 2021

And the linguistic red flags had always been there: By glorifying the police in the names of its Hero WoDs, CrossFit had been telling on itself all along. Hundreds of gyms disaffiliated with the brand, big activewear companies pulled their contracts, and Glassman stepped down as CEO. A few months after Glassman’s fall from grace, it was SoulCycle’s turn for a scandal. In late 2020, things were already going south for the company due to COVID-19 lockdowns forcing location closures left and right, when multiple damning exposés surfaced online: According to reporting from Vox, underneath all the motivational Soulspeak, studios across the country harbored long track records of toxicity. Cults of personality formed around certain “Master” instructors, who took advantage by creating hierarchies of favorite and least favorite clients, giving private “off-the-clock” rides, and allegedly sleeping with some students.

pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

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

One model suggested that school closures might have to reduce COVID-19 cases by more than 25 percent to make up for the loss of health-care workers in terms of a net reduction in COVID-19 mortality.2689 This may be achievable for pandemic influenza,2690 a disease in which children may play a critical role in community transmission,2691 but children don’t appear to be the main drivers of the transmission of COVID-19.2692 Until an effective vaccine is widely available, likely not until 2021 at the earliest,2693 population lockdowns can help rob the virus of susceptible hosts. Once such measures are relaxed, though, the disease could come roaring back.2694 In the pandemic of 1918, for example, some U.S. cities experienced a second peak in mortality following the lifting of social-distancing measures.2695 By periodically pressing the brake with flattening-the-curve strategies like shelter-in-place ordinances to slow community transmission, the hope is that we can turn the initial tidal wave of cases into a series of smaller successive waves our health-care capability can more safely ride out.2696 If not, more intensive care units in U.S. hospitals may become overwhelmed just as they did in Italy,2697 and doctors will have to make triage decisions as to who lives and who dies.

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[accessed 2020 Mar 31]; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/climate/climate-pollution-coronavirus-lungs.html. 2717. Chen K, Wang M, Huang C, Kinney PL, Anastas PT. 2020 Mar 27. Air pollution reduction and mortality benefit during the COVID-19 outbreak in China. medRxiv.org. [accessed 2020 Mar 31]. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.23.20039842. 2718. He G, Pan Y, Tanaka T. 2020 Apr 1. COVID-19, city lockdown, and air pollution: evidence from China. medRxiv.org. [accessed 2020 Apr 6]. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.29.20046649. 2719. Booth CM, Matukas LM, Tomlinson GA, Rachlis AR, Rose DB, Dwosh HA, Walmsley SL, Mazzulli T, Avendano M, Derkach P, et al. 2003. Clinical features and short-term outcomes of 144 patients with SARS in the greater Toronto area.

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Branswell H. 2005. Flu pandemic could trigger second Great Depression, brokerage warns clients. Canadian Press, August 17. 3116. Council on Foreign Relations. 2005. Q&A with Laurie Garrett. Foreign Affairs, May 25. www.foreignaffairs.org/background/pandemic/Garrett2. 3117. International Monetary Fund. 2020 Apr. World economic outlook. Chapter 1. The great lockdown. Washington(DC): IMF; [accessed 2020 Apr 18]. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/04/14/World-Economic-Outlook-April-2020-The-Great-Lockdown-49306. 3118. Osterholm MT. 2005. Preparing for the next pandemic. New England Journal of Medicine 352(18):1839–42. content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/352/18/1839. 3119.

pages: 227 words: 67,264

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak
by Rosie Wilby
Published 26 May 2021

‘Yeah…that…and it’ll mean that you’ll wash your hair and put makeup on.’ During my final months of writing this book, the UK is plunged into lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. The changes to society and how we can interact are unprecedented. Early suggestions from sociologists are that the pandemic has completely reshaped our close relationships. In every country that has had a lockdown, divorce rates have surged. Perhaps that is no surprise. Divorces normally peak just after holiday seasons at Christmas and summertime when people have had no escape from one another. Meanwhile, video dating is becoming a new trend among singletons, with camera shunning, call screening and falsely blaming a poor internet connection becoming the latest forms of ghosting.

pages: 304 words: 95,306

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

Can we do that again?” he asks. The whole interview takes 20 minutes, and then there’s some downtime while the crew take some technical shots where Hugh and I chat, off the record. I’m shocked by how much of a surprise this has come to even the journalists covering the story – the rapidity of the pandemic, the need for lockdown, the lack of preparedness. I think Hugh is genuinely rattled. I need to remember that everybody is experiencing this as a normal person first, even journalists. “Don’t you trust Chris Whitty?” Hugh asks me (as I imagined he might). “I think he’s the best possible person for the job right now, but to think his decisions are being taken in isolation is naive, in my opinion.”

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We need to do the same urgently. Whether it’s the second wave of COVID-19, a new coronavirus, or another pandemic in the near future, this will happen again unless we learn the lessons that we are being presented with right now. Everything we did before the pandemic seemed alarmist, inflammatory. Voices calling to heed the WHO guidance, calling for an earlier lockdown, people like Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, and Lord Ashcroft, former director of Public Health England, were sidelined as dissenters and sensationalists. That must’ve been difficult to take – I know because I got more than a few of those accusations myself, for speaking out in public.

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We need to demand that same integrity, that same credulity from those in power – so far, we have consistently chosen the opposite, and that has led us to disaster. We must learn from the pandemic – all of this cannot be for naught. The pandemic isn’t over. The first wave has passed, the waters are receding. The virus hasn’t gone away, and as we come out of lockdown with such a high case number, we shouldn’t expect it to simply disappear by itself. It will only be by the actions of the public, everyday people like yourself, that we can hope to control it, to prevent a second or even a third wave. The basic advice will always be the same: avoid unnecessary gatherings, wash your hands, work from home if you can.

pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

He had organized a declaration by some scientists arguing that lockdowns and school closures would be more harmful than helpful, a controversial view that turned out to have some validity. When Weiss uncovered how Bhattacharya had been suppressed, Musk texted him, “Hi. Can you come this weekend to Twitter headquarters so we can show you what Twitter 1.0 did?” Musk, who had espoused similar views on COVID lockdowns, and Bhattacharya spoke for almost an hour. * * * The Twitter Files highlighted an evolution of mainstream journalism over the past fifty years. During Watergate and Vietnam, journalists generally regarded the CIA, military, and government officials with suspicion, or at least a healthy skepticism.

pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

“Environmental groups essentially have had the field to themselves,” the memo complained, and—based on an overwhelming scientific consensus—“have conducted an effective public relations program to convince the American public that the climate is changing, we humans are at fault, and we must do something about it before calamity strikes.” Legitimate arguments against regulation (or pandemic lockdowns) usually focus on economic costs, that some rule or law is too expensive given its benefits. But opposing emission limits “solely on economic grounds” isn’t enough, the memo explained, because that “makes it too easy for others to portray the United States as putting preservation of its own lifestyle above the greater concerns of mankind.”

pages: 337 words: 87,236

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

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.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

Bristol: Bristol University Press. Wright, O. (2021) Coronavirus: How the UK dealt with its first Covid case. BBC News. 29 January. www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-england-55622386 234 References Xue, B. and McMunn, A. (2021) Gender differences in unpaid care work and psychological distress in the UK Covid-19 lockdown. PLoS ONE, 16:3, 1–15. doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0247959 YouGov Poll (2022) Should we change our current British voting system? YouGov. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/ should-we-change-our-current-british-voting-system Young, C. (2017) The myth of millionaire tax flight: How place still matters for the rich.

pages: 306 words: 82,909

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

All of these hacks are intended to subvert the phone systems in order to exchange information without paying for the privilege. Homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic brought out the hacker in many students. One student renamed himself “Reconnecting . . .” and turned his video off, so it looked like he was having connectivity problems. In March 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, the Chinese city of Wuhan went into lockdown. Schools started holding classes remotely, and students tried to flood the DingTalk homework app with one-star reviews, hoping that it would be removed from app stores. (It didn’t work.) Systems tend to be rigid and rule-bound. Systems limit what we can do, and, invariably, some of us want to do something else.

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In Europe, this hack was first devised by economist John Law to help Louis XV of France pay for his wars. This is an example of a beneficial, and now normal, hack. The ability to print money can be essential during economic crises. It’s how the US government funded the interventions that calmed markets in 2008–2009, and limited the economic fallout from the pandemic and lockdowns in 2020. And it’s part of how the US government funded massive military mobilizations that helped to win World Wars I and II. But when governments become reliant on printing money to service foreign debt, things can go really bad. While hyperinflation is rare, it can cause incredible damage incredibly quickly.

pages: 424 words: 114,820

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

He talks about what he sees as the fundamental changes and the future from a university perspective preparing people for employment. ‘Higher education has been transforming dramatically in the past 10 years due to factors such as Brexit, student expectations (now described as customers), technological change, the move to an aggressive competitive marketplace – and more recently Covid-19. Economic downturn, global lockdowns, a drive for remote and flexible working, demands for value for money, and a demand for greater connection between education and employment are just some of the forces that are dramatically disrupting the sector.’ He goes on to say: ‘Students and their parents in the UK still see universities as the main means of securing future employment, and this means that employability and the student experience is more important than ever.

pages: 326 words: 88,968

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

Wealth inequality and economic immobility are serious concerns, worsening by the year. 2019 saw the beginning of large and sometimes violent demonstrations erupt from Santiago to Tehran. In the United States, long considered the gold standard of economic opportunity, about a quarter of Americans live below the poverty threshold.25 Even before the devastating effects of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, the United States had already slipped to position number 27 in the global ranking of social mobility.26 Nobody should be surprised that the 2020 killing of George Floyd by police sparked such emotion among those fed up with economic and social injustice. Imagine, though, when one hundred years old is considered no more than “middle-aged.”

pages: 327 words: 90,013

Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn
by Nick Kostov
Published 8 Aug 2022

Thankfully, Josh was incredibly generous with his time, and always made himself available to boost our morale and polish our drafts. As we labored with the scope and complexity of the Ghosn story, we were able to count on two people in particular who had our backs: Now our former colleague, David Gauthier-Villars stepped in to help us bring structure and clarity to the book, one chapter at a time. Under COVID-19 lockdown in Istanbul, David pulled off Ghosn’s greatest trick: forging an alliance between Paris and Tokyo that got results. From Los Angeles, Domenica Alioto also stepped in, moving into her signature “hyperdrive mode” to help us tie the whole book together in a short amount of time. Her care and sensitivity for human characters and attention to detail were priceless.

pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

At Glencore thanks to Charles Watenphul for arranging the visit to Mutanda and for help over the years. Elisabeth Caesens was always generous with her time on all things DRC, as was Nicholas Garrett. Jeremy Wrathall was extremely generous with his time and showed me around Cornwall, just before the first Covid-19 lockdown. For expert advice and feedback thank you to Joe Lowry, Anneke Van Woudenberg, Hans Melin, Steven Brown, Jim Lennon and Adrian Glover. Any mistakes are all mine of course. There are others I can’t name who have helped me understand battery materials and I thank them. Apologies if I’ve left anyone out.

pages: 289 words: 95,046

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

CHAPTER 2 RUIN PROBLEMS Nassim Taleb squinted at a chart on the screen of his Apple MacBook. It was January 2020, and he was working from Universa’s Miami office. He’d learned of a disturbing feature of the novel coronavirus that was sweeping through Wuhan, China. At the time, Covid-19 had killed a few hundred people. Thousands more had become severely ill. Beijing had implemented a sweeping lockdown on the region. It all seemed so very far away. Few believed serious measures were required outside China. U.S. President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissed the virus as another seasonal flu that would fade away with the spring.

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Over Negronis and pasta, they swapped ideas about what the best response would be. Spitznagel feared government overreach. “Governments have a tendency to make problems worse,” he said. Taleb, noting that the virus’s R0 was well above one, said the risk of the pandemic getting out of control was extremely high. That meant extremely strong action by the government—shutting borders, imposing lockdowns, etc.—was necessary. The stock market, meanwhile, continued to float on calm waters. The VIX fear index neared its all-time low mid-February. Not everyone was complacent. A pair of new clients, increasingly nervous about the pandemic, decided to invest.

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Two or three out of every one hundred people who got the disease died. He awoke from his nightmare in a cold sweat. The billionaire hedge fund manager started obsessively following news about the disease. He became particularly concerned when he learned that five million people had fled Wuhan, where the virus originated, before the city went into lockdown. It’s not contained. Many infected with the disease didn’t know they had it. These asymptomatic carriers were spreading it to nearly everyone they encountered. This could spread everywhere. Most people didn’t understand. They didn’t grasp the frightening math of the exponential.

pages: 432 words: 106,612

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
by Robin Wigglesworth
Published 11 Oct 2021

I have also learned an enormous amount from working with or admiring from afar financial journalists like John Authers, Gillian Tett, James Mackintosh, Philip Coggan, and Jason Zweig, as well as industry experts such as Deborah Fuhr, Ben Johnson, Eric Balchunas, and David Nadig. They are all titans upon whose shoulders I nervously perch. But someone closer to home deserves the biggest acknowledgment. In the middle of the coronavirus-induced lockdown, my daughter wrote a riddle and proudly presented it to me. Scrawled on the page, it said, “What works and works and is never finished?” To my horror I realized that the answer was me. I’m one of the lucky people who truly loves their job. Unfortunately, that can come at a cost to those around me.

pages: 89 words: 27,057

COVID-19: Everything You Need to Know About the Corona Virus and the Race for the Vaccine
by Michael Mosley
Published 1 Jun 2020

via%3Dihub 34 http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-12-19-new-mers-vaccine-clinical-trial-starts-saudi-arabia 35 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/coronavirus-vaccine-update-oxford.html 36 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/ 37 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/coronavirus-vaccine-update-oxford.html 38 https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa152/5814216 39 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-vaccine-covid.html 40 https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331976/WHO-2019-nCoV-Ethics_criteria-2020.1-eng.pdf?ua=1 41 https://www.bdi.ox.ac.uk/news/digital-contact-tracing-can-slow-or-even-stop-coronavirus-transmission-and-ease-us-out-of-lockdown 42 https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-usa-cost/ This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. It is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not engaged in rendering medical, health, or any other kind of personal professional services in the book.

pages: 309 words: 97,320

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

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. Towards the end of this book, when the Covid-19 lockdown began and I had my daughter at home all day, it would have been easier to take another break from writing. But, thanks to the commitment of my amazing husband, who took the reins on childcare at the weekends, I was able to continue pushing through the words to complete my first draft. This gave me such joy (and a break from the endless hours of entertaining my daughter) and a big boost to know I had the space to think during such unprecedented times.

pages: 361 words: 100,834

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

To learn how we map the Earth’s interior almost a century after Lehmann’s monumental discovery, I speak with seismologist Paula Koelemeijer of the University of Oxford (and her adorable four-month-old, who insists on participating in the conversation). Koelemeijer’s research focuses on the Core–Mantle Boundary, but she’s interested in interdisciplinary topics ranging from Mars’s interior to the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on anthropogenic seismic noise to the seismic vibrations of elephants. She truly knows what’s hot in the seismology world! Koelemeijer tells me that for decades following the discovery of the Earth’s inner core, seismologists used the same method as Lehmann – combining arrival times from seismic waves around the globe – to add more details to the basic inner core–outer core–mantle–crust model.

pages: 254 words: 75,897

Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors: 50 Places That Changed British Politics
by Matt Chorley
Published 8 Feb 2024

pages: 307 words: 88,085

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

To begin the process of understanding how the grand economic shift towards new capitalism began to reshape our hearts and souls via the rise of a new mental health ideology, I think it is fitting to look first at the most administered mental health treatment over the last thirty-five years: the blockbuster bestselling class of psychiatric drug we all know as the antidepressant. 2 THE NEW CULTURE OF PROLIFERATING DEBT AND DRUGS In April 2020, the UK economy was experiencing its most significant recession in the history of modern capitalism. As COVID-19 infections soared, the entire country was eventually confined to lockdown, with the wheels of commerce and community life juddering to a sudden halt. Offices, shops, restaurants, gyms, schools, hotels and tourist sites all lay empty, with hundreds of billions in revenue being consequently lost within a few weeks, forcing the economy to roll and pitch from one disastrous economic metric to another.

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While suffering afflicted many during lockdown, others, less exposed to its various stresses, began to flourish in unexpected ways, which was the side of the story that new capitalism, judging by the coverage, was far less likely to report. In fact, when YouGov undertook the largest survey into the national outlook, only 9 per cent of people reported wanting life to return to ‘normal’ after the pandemic was over,17 while research conducted at University College London showed that lockdown was enjoyed by a full third of the British population.18 Our COVID confinement, it seems, had brought deep questioning of our pre-COVID neo-liberal lives. Many people were relieved to be temporarily away from jobs they disliked or found dissatisfying and unengaging.

pages: 557 words: 154,324

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

Renewables’ cost structure, it will become clear, is terrifically important: it plays a hugely significant role in shaping investment decision making in the sector, in ways we shall explore closely in subsequent chapters. Consider, for instance, what happened when global supply chains buckled in 2021 as they failed to respond elastically to the resurgence in global economic activity associated with countries beginning to re-emerge from COVID-19 lockdowns. By the end of that year, the IEA reported, the prices of polysilicon, steel and aluminium – all materials that are indispensable for solar or wind technologies – had risen by approximately 200, 70 and 40 per cent respectively compared to the end of 2020.10 Needless to say, turbine and panel manufacturers passed on as much of these cost increases to their customers in the generation business as they possibly could, resulting in price rises for such equipment of 10 to 20 per cent.

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While the exact outcomes would be different, the brief Texas electricity crisis of February 2021, in surfacing this complex but crucial interplay between the respective dynamics of price, profit, power and place, proved a potent harbinger of what was to come. II By early 2021, of course, the world was already one year into dealing with COVID-19. Whereas the Texas crisis was precipitated in part by a local surge in energy demand, the pandemic itself was notable for the opposite. As societies and economies went into varying degrees of lockdown, energy demand was widely, though not evenly, suppressed. Globally, primary energy consumption fell by as much as 4 per cent in 2020 – the largest fall in decades. If this represented an energy crisis, it was generally not one for electricity generators, still less for renewables generators more specifically, except perhaps to the extent that lockdowns impinged on the ability of contractors to start, progress or complete new renewable energy developments.

pages: 399 words: 107,932

Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM
by Sarah Berman
Published 19 Apr 2021

“It has taken me three years and a substantial amount of space from your manipulation to realize that the shame that has been weighing so heavily on my shoulders is not mine to carry,” Nicole said. “It’s yours.” APPENDIX LETTER TO RANIERE Hi Keith, I’m reaching out in the fourth month of COVID-19 lockdown at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center; I hope this letter makes it to you. I’m Sarah Berman, a reporter and editor based in Vancouver. I’ve been following NXIVM and the charges against you since 2017. I’d like to offer a chance to respond to questions that I think only you can answer.

pages: 392 words: 109,945

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
by Carl Zimmer
Published 9 Mar 2021

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 7:53–62. Russell, Michael J. 2019. “Prospecting for Life.” Interface Focus 9. doi:10.1098/rsfs.2019.0050. Rutz, Christian, Matthias-Claudio Loretto, Amanda E. Bates, Sarah C. Davidson, Carlos M. Duarte, Walter Jetz, Mark Johnson et al. 2020. “COVID-19 Lockdown Allows Researchers to Quantify the Effects of Human Activity on Wildlife.” Nature Ecology & Evolution. doi:10.1038/s41559-020-1237-z. Sagan, Carl, and Joshua Lederberg. 1976. “The Prospects for Life on Mars: A Pre-Viking Assessment.” Icarus 28:291–300. Samartzidou, Hrissi, Mahsa Mehrazin, Zhaohui Xu, Michael J.

pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux
by Richard Rumelt
Published 27 Apr 2022

Yuan’s team powered through this crux through a combination of focusing top-notch engineers on all the friction points—and on insisting that the product “make customers happy.” Zoom was free for up to one hundred attendees for forty minutes. Because it was free and easy to use, and because it was, by definition, a communication device, it began to spread like wildfire. With the COVID-19 lockdowns, Zoom traffic increased by 3,000 percent in May 2020. To “Zoom” became a verb. Students Zoomed to school. The product’s security was criticized, the Zoom team made fixes, and public health experts began to worry about the effects of back-to-back Zoom meetings on locked-down people. As much of the world moves past the COVID-19 emergency, the obvious challenges for Zoom are a reduction in video meetings combined with jealous competition from Google, Microsoft, and others.

pages: 312 words: 108,194

Invention: A Life
by James Dyson
Published 6 Sep 2021

Now, it will be a headquarters open all hours for Dyson engineers and scientists to focus on power electronics, energy storage, sensors, vision systems, embedded software, robotics, AI, machine learning, and connected devices. St James Power Station Architect’s drawing, Maple Tree Construction work on the power station slowed during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns, delaying our move. Our factories had to stop work, too, and our stock around the world ran down rapidly. We first saw the effects of lockdown in China as early as late January 2020 and could see the recession looming large on the horizon. We knew what we had to do: change everything. Over the past three years we had already been striving to sell more products direct to customers ourselves, either online or through Dyson Demo stores.

pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

Virtual weddings and funerals, which have been regular occurrences since the 1990s, were thought of as utterly absurd by most people—more of a punchline than something rather poignant. It’s difficult to imagine what could have more rapidly changed our perceptions of virtual worlds than time spent at home during the various COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Millions of skeptics have now participated in (and enjoyed) virtual worlds and activities such as Animal Crossing, Fortnite, and Roblox as they sought out things to do, attended events once planned for the real world, or tried to spend time with their kids indoors. Not only have these experiences helped to destigmatize virtual life for society at large, they may even lead to another (older) generation participating in the Metaverse.* The compounding impact of two years inside was profound.

pages: 381 words: 113,173

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

In its early years Facebook was in the eyes of many an archetypal Internet-era company, one that stayed lean and moved fast. But as it aged and became Meta, it bulked up and slowed down. By 2021 it was being described by New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose as a “lumbering bureaucracy.” Its growth and valuation soared during the COVID pandemic, but as the lockdowns eased and people around the world returned to in-person interactions, it became clear that Meta had become far too large. In layoffs announced in late 2022 and 2023, the company cut about a quarter of its workforce. In letters and all-hands meetings accompanying these reductions, Zuckerberg stressed that they weren’t just about reducing costs—they were also intended to dismantle the bureaucracy that had been built up.

pages: 231 words: 71,299

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
by Talia Lavin
Published 14 Jul 2020

The most popular name for it is “the Boogaloo,” a reference to a widely panned 1984 sequel to a breakdancing movie, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, only the sequel in question here is to the Civil War. In the late spring of 2020, the term Boogaloo experienced an explosion of popularity, as a series of far-right protests against coronavirus quarantine and lockdown orders by state governments spread across the United States. The protesters were a loose coalition of heavily armed white nationalists, antivaccine activists, conspiracy theorists, and members of the antigovernment militia movement. As the watchdog group the Tech Transparency Project reported, a large network of Facebook pages dedicated to the Boogaloo—and variants like “big luau,” “boog,” and “big igloo,” designed to evade moderators—shared extremist content, including a report on how to disrupt US government supply lines and assassinate government officials.

pages: 357 words: 107,984

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

In late March those funds came under extreme stress, raising serious concerns at the SEC. But the announcements of the other corporate-bond backstops had eased a wave of redemptions hitting the mutual funds. The Fed never had to pull the trigger on a separate mutual-fund bailout. By April, there was no telling whether subsequent virus waves would force rolling lockdowns and lead to rising corporate defaults and missed mortgage payments. Whereas March 23 proved to be the bottom for the stock market, “we had no idea that that was the bottom,” said Lehnert. “We had no idea. We just had this sense that we were one step ahead of a really serious financial-market disruption that would be even worse for the economy than what we were already seeing.”10 Brainard, who had navigated the messy politics of bailouts after the 2008 crisis, felt confident that the Fed could get financial markets functioning effectively in part because the nature of the current crisis was different.

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Trump, who had largely placed the onus for managing the national response on governors, was urging the nation to reopen for commerce. The president was also dismissive of wearing masks, something the CDC had been recommending since April 3 as a simple intervention that could slow the spread of the virus without lockdowns. Mnuchin, on the other hand, had been among the first to speak up about the need to follow health precautions at crowded meetings inside the Situation Room. “Look, are we going to live by the guidelines we’re putting out?” They needed either to spread out or to wear masks, he said. In a meeting in a dining room behind the Oval Office in July, Kudlow tried to convince Trump that his mask-related culture war was damaging medically and politically.

pages: 352 words: 98,424

Cathedrals of Steam: How London’s Great Stations Were Built – and How They Transformed the City
by Christian Wolmar
Published 5 Nov 2020

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

Condi Rice started me on this journey in graduate school. The only experience more rewarding than having her as a doctoral advisor is coming back to Stanford and working with her as a dear colleague. My thanks to the extended Mallery and Zegart clans, two incredible families. The COVID-19 pandemic brought unexpected lockdown with my kids, Alexander, Jack, and Kate Mallery. Experiencing daily life in close quarters with two displaced college students and a teen daughter has been a rare gift—from our serious national security dinner conversations to the daily ribbing about my office wall notes looking like Carrie Mathison in her craziest moments.

pages: 329 words: 100,162

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

Studies show that social-networking usage “is linked to increased social comparison and negative affective states such as envy and jealousy,”130 and that these feelings are amplified when you’re just passively scrolling. Social media is no longer something we can just opt in to—for most millennials who grew up with the internet, and certainly Gen Z, it’s become a natural extension of our lives. And with the spread of COVID-19 and mandatory lockdowns across the planet, it’s all but replaced IRL social interactions. We use it to seek out information, to form our identities—“often more favorably than off-line,” notes Dr. Daria J. Kuss, a psychologist and program leader of the cyberpsychology department at Nottingham Trent University.

…

In this country, at least, how you feel about an issue supersedes any scientific facts, and some people have simply chosen not to believe in the virus, dismissing the advice of epidemiologists as political spin. At the end of the summer, WeWoreWhat’s Danielle Bernstein revealed she had been diagnosed with COVID. She’d been on public lockdown for less than two weeks when anonymous call-out accounts began buzzing that maybe she’d made the whole thing up to cover for her lack of Fashion Week appearances. (She later donated plasma live on her Instagram, firmly proving the haters wrong.) When she finally left her house after testing negative, her first public appearance was a photoshoot for her new swim line.

pages: 362 words: 103,087

The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters
by Eric J. Johnson
Published 12 Oct 2021

Not only does actively trading securities present complexity, but the stakes can be large. If the instructor is not up to the job, the chooser can make big mistakes. In fact, a choice engine might make it faster and easier to make big mistakes, especially if you are a new investor operating in a complex and volatile market. The advent of the pandemic and lockdown saw an enormous growth in retail investing. Whether people were bored at home or attracted by the volatility of the market, many retail brokers saw millions of new accounts opened in the first half of 2020. Traders on one such firm, Robinhood, drove many market trends in late 2020 and early 2021.

pages: 420 words: 94,064

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

Even the rebound from the 1987 stock market crash, in which most of the damage to stock prices was done in a single day, took 31.4 months, according to Silverblatt. Up until early 2020, mainly older, whiter, richer people viewed the general level of stocks as important. The rise of Robinhood and the shift to commission-free trading by all its competitors in late 2019 had led millions of young people to open new brokerage accounts before the pandemic. The onset of lockdowns would turbocharge that trend as young people looking for something to do had, unexpectedly, some extra cash in their pockets and time on their hands. These new traders might have had smaller bankrolls on average than their parents, but they made up for it by being far more engaged. Between November 2018 and the end of 2020, for example, data collected by JMP Securities shows that average daily website visits to Schwab, the original discount broker with an older clientele, rose by just over 20 percent.

…

The share of household wealth made up by stocks was about two and a half times as high for those above age fifty-five or with incomes above $100,000 compared with those younger than thirty-five or with incomes less than $53,000, according to Pew Research.[3] In 2020 the median net worth of Americans aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, including any home equity, was barely $7,500. When the government pumped cash into the economy, this was the group most likely to receive stimulus checks on the basis of income limits, but it also was far less likely than older, upper-middle-class Americans to have jobs that could be done remotely as the pandemic forced the country into lockdown. And even if they were fortunate in that way, they probably weren’t working from the comfort of a home they owned. A study by the Stanford Center on Longevity showed that barely a third of millennials owned their own home at age thirty whereas nearly half of baby boomers were homeowners back when they were the same age.

Belgium - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
by Bernadett Varga
Published 14 Aug 2022

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

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power
by Rose Hackman
Published 27 Mar 2023

Among them: Ongoing female homicide numbers show three women are killed every day in the United States by boyfriends, husbands, or ex-husbands, and five every day by men they know.7 Homicide stands as the fourth leading cause of death for girls and women one to nineteen years old, and the fifth leading cause of death for women twenty to forty-four.8 Unlike male victims of homicide, who are mostly killed by members of the same sex, 98 percent of killers of women are men.9 Nor was the femicide problem getting any better. Although gender-specific homicide data hadn’t yet been released by that point for the time in question, people were reporting from all parts of the country that COVID-19-induced lockdowns had caused women to be stranded in domestic situations without escape, and to desperate effect. The links between this femicide crisis and emotional labor became clear to me on two fronts: first, in revealing just quite how dangerous women being trained into being mood managers and the passive bearers of men’s pain in romantic relationships can become, and, second, beyond grappling with the disquieting reality that the man a woman has intimately laid next to is statistically the most likely person to be her killer, emotional labor presented itself at the root of the motivation behind these gendered killings.

pages: 595 words: 143,394

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

But Some Things Haven’t,” CNN, January 24, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/24/asia/china-sars-coronavirus-intl-hnk/index.html. 174. Kim Hjelmgaard et al., “This Is What China Did to Beat Coronavirus. Experts Say America Couldn’t Handle It,” USA Today, April 1, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/04/01/coronavirus-covid-19-china-radical-measures-lockdowns-mass-quarantines/2938374001/. 175. Hilary Brueck et al., “China Took at Least 12 Strict Measures to Control the Coronavirus. They Could Work for the US, but Would Likely Be Impossible to Implement,” Business Insider, March 24, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-coronavirus-quarantines-other-countries-arent-ready-2020-3. 176.

pages: 444 words: 124,631

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay
by Jonathan Shapiro and James Eyers
Published 2 Aug 2021

‘The wedge between retailers and consumers should be as low as it can be, and new technology should be reducing transaction costs. I get worried when I see technology is increasing them,’ he said.21 In the United Kingdom, consumer advocates were also getting on Afterpay’s back. As the coronavirus and prolonged lockdowns amid Brexit confusion crippled the British economy, the Financial Conduct Authority said in September 2020 that its interim chief executive, Christopher Woolard—who had taken over from Andrew Bailey when he became governor of the Bank of England, replacing Mark Carney—would review the regulation of consumer credit.

…

If Lowe was alert but not alarmed by the coronavirus in early February, by the end of the month he had a greater sense that he, along with the entire public service, was about to face his greatest test. Lowe and treasurer Josh Frydenberg had flown to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for a G20 meeting held over two days from 22 February. There, International Monetary Fund officials informed them that the virus had spread to Iran, South Korea and Italy, and the following day those countries had gone into lockdown. That three geographically distinct countries could be quickly infected left Lowe in little doubt that the world was on the cusp of a major episode for which it was not well prepared. That evening, he told Frydenberg that the virus was ‘coming to Australia, and was going to be a very big deal’.1 If hedge funds and large institutions were growing deeply concerned, the broader share market wasn’t showing it.

pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George Packer
Published 14 Jun 2021

Democracy’s survival depends on what happens inside our skulls, where anything is possible. The destruction of a shared reality does more damage than economic decline or impeachable acts. The scientists were right about this: there was no way to save lives and jobs except by ending the pandemic, and no way to end it except by a fast and hard lockdown. The way of “freedom”—letting people decide for themselves whether or not to wear masks inside crowded bars that were allowed to stay open—made the tragedy far worse in places like South Dakota, which should have benefited from a sparse population and ample warning. But a yearlong pitched battle between experts and populists during a once-a-century pandemic was a different kind of tragedy.

pages: 651 words: 162,060

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

What’s tremendously important about clean air and climate change mitigation benefits is that they complement each other extremely well, and policies should attempt to maximize both simultaneously. Clean-air benefits occur rapidly since air quality responds quickly to emissions changes, as we saw in the blue skies that appeared following Covid-19 lockdowns in normally smoggy cities such as New Delhi, Guangzhou and Cairo. In contrast, climate change mitigation benefits typically take a long time to occur as the climate system responds at a slower pace, but they are crucial in the long term. Similarly, the spatial extent of these two environmental changes is complementary.

pages: 384 words: 105,110

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Published 14 Sep 2021

See for instance the account of young children in the South Pacific by researcher Mary Martini, as recounted in Gray, P., 2013. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-reliant, and Better Students for Life. New York: Basic Books, 208–209. 15. This manuscript went to press after more than a year of COVID-19-driven lockdowns, which meant no school, and no recess, for many children for a very long time. Compared to that, any form of play between children would be an improvement. 16. In contrast to most authoritative parenting books, this one is excellent: Skenazy, L., 2009. Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry).

pages: 295 words: 81,861

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

While the companies claimed to support efforts to establish more bike lanes and other infrastructure, they seemed to do little to change the existing mobility calculus and instead relied much more on effectively taking sidewalk space for themselves without permission. In San Francisco, the city even seized improperly parked scooters for a time. The ineffectiveness of micromobility companies was put on full display after the initial wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. With cities in various stages of lockdown and people needing to socially distance from one another, many cities closed streets or converted on-street parking to sidewalk extensions. As the summer of 2020 approached, there were bicycle shortages around the world as the number of cyclists soared and many cities added temporary bike lanes that gave way to permanent changes.

pages: 712 words: 212,334

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Published 12 Apr 2021

A particular thanks to my sister, Beatrice, and my brother, Tristram. Even as we live far-flung lives with our own careers and families, I am who I am today because of the childhood we shared, and I love and admire you both, and your families, beyond measure. This book is dedicated to you. I wrote the manuscript during COVID, on lockdown with my wife, Justyna, and our sons, Lucian and Felix. It’s strange to say, but I learned something about adaptability by watching my children recalibrate, in real time, to the catastrophe unfolding around them. We were fortunate, all things considered, and the small ways in which the pandemic tested us are not worth mentioning, in light of what others experienced.

pages: 252 words: 71,176

Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them
by G. Elliott Morris
Published 11 Jul 2022

pages: 919 words: 252,171

The Rough Guide to Portugal (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 1 Mar 2023

António Salazar makes his mark as an impressive Finance Minister 1932–68 Salazar rules Portugal as a virtual dictator 1939–45 “Neutral” Lisbon becomes a hotbed of wartime spies, including Ian Fleming 1950–65 Salazar funds the construction of the Lisbon metro and a bridge over the Tagus 1960s–1973 Portuguese troops increasingly sent abroad to contain uprisings in its colonies 1974 The Carnation Revolution overthrows the old regime late 1970s Thousands of refugees flood into Portugal from its former colonies 1986 Political stability is ensured with entry into the European Community Early 1990s European funds transform the country’s infrastructure 1998 Lisbon hosts the successful Expo 98, which spawns a new district and bridge over the Tagus; Portuguese author José Saramago wins the Nobel Prize for Literature 1999 Portugal gives up its last colony, Macau 2004 The Euro football championships are hosted in a series of state-of-the-art stadiums 2007 The Treaty of Lisbon is signed in Belém, forming the constitution for the EU 2009 National superstar Cristiano Ronaldo becomes the world most expensive footballer when he is sold by Manchester United to Real Madrid for £80 million 2010 Portuguese artist Paula Rego is made a British Dame 2016 Portugal wins the UEFA European Championship 2017 Complaint to the EU over Spain's plan for nuclear waste storage is dropped 2018 President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa blocks the “gender change bill”, which would have made it easier for teenagers to change their gender and name in documents 2019 Portugal beats the Netherlands to win the Nations League final football tournament 2019–20 Portugal is hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Very strict lockdowns and other restrictions imposed, and there is a significant economic impact. 2022 Tourism in Portugal on the rise as the country recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic. Cultura Castreja The end of the Neolithic era, around 1000 BC, saw the development of northern Portugal’s Cultura Castreja, based around fortified hilltop towns – called citânias – and villages (castros).

pages: 308 words: 97,480

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet
Published 21 Mar 2023

pages: 259 words: 84,261

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

From initially hiding the facts and downplaying the risks, the big guns swayed their pendulums all the way to the other extreme and this response in turn created challenges that may end up having a much wider negative impact than the pandemic itself. How much of this could have been avoided by being better prepared? Under economic pressure, however, everyone wants things to remain as normal. The reality of how our economies function means that no threat, including a global pandemic, is big enough to disrupt the machine of capitalism. A few months after the initial lockdowns, in another panicked reaction, we were forced to lean in the other direction again and go back out into the world to spend, even though the threat was clearly not yet over. This only resulted in another wave of lockdowns that were even harsher than the initial wave.

…

They will try to act in ways that will either get other AI beings to retaliate, thus multiplying the threat, or at the very least, leave a memory in the minds of future AIs that humans can’t be trusted. We are likely to initially dismiss the threat under the pressure of, well, you know, money. Then overreact again, in a panic. We overreact and then . . . We take risks Throughout 2020 and 2021 new strands of the virus periodically appeared to threaten the progress of easing lockdowns throughout the world. One of the additional risks of exposing an enormously transmissible virus to a global population is that with each new infection comes another opportunity for the virus to mutate. Daily infection and death rates have seen reactionary, sometimes early and sometimes late pendulum swings in the rules governing populations throughout the world.

pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

Thus, a central bank could substantially reduce deflationary risks by resorting to such measures to escape the liquidity trap that results when it runs out of room to use traditional monetary policy tools. CBDC accounts would have been useful when the US Congress introduced a massive stimulus bill in March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic sent the country into lockdown and the economy nosedived. The legislation, which carried a price tag of about $2 trillion, included Economic Impact Payments of up to $1,200 per individual, subject to certain income thresholds. Two weeks later, tens of millions of Americans received direct payments from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

pages: 472 words: 145,476

The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul
by Isabel Kershner
Published 16 May 2023

In his late thirties, he described listening to traditional trials as a child, feeding the family’s sheep before school, and shepherding them on weekends. His own children, he said, were attached to screens, a measure of the rapid modernization of Bedouin society. I reconnected with Hawashleh on Zoom at the height of the coronavirus epidemic. She was back at work after being temporarily laid off during the lockdown. Working remotely, in her case, was not really an option. The government had poured millions of shekels into programs in the Negev, she said, “but we don’t see or feel the effects of those millions. If we are talking specifically about education, a lot of those programs don’t work.

…

He was disowned by the most radical sects of ultra-Orthodoxy for being a Zionist after he accepted the honor of lighting a torch at Israel’s fifty-fifth Independence Day ceremony and after his son joined an IDF combat unit. Generally disliked by many Haredim, he was not welcome in the neighborhoods where he had grown up, but he garnered the sympathy of many ordinary Israelis in January 2021 after he lost both his parents to COVID-19 within days of each other. He publicly accused the rabbis who had enabled the flouting of lockdown regulations of having blood on their hands. The allegations of sexual depravity stretching back years were only made public with the subsequent announcement that he was to be awarded the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement, the most prestigious honor the country could offer.

…

Even Nahal Oz, the kibbutz within Palestinian mortar range on the border with the Gaza Strip, quickly found sixteen families to replace those who had left the kibbutz in trauma after the fifty-day war in the summer of 2014. Some kibbutzim, like Maayan Zvi, were selling plots to outsiders who built homes there and paid for kibbutz services but had no stake in the community assets. Others took in new blood as full kibbutz members. The coronavirus pandemic only added to the demand, with low infection rates inside the kibbutzim, which offered a respite from urban restrictions and lockdowns. Some registered a 100 percent increase in inquiries. The only thing preventing even greater expansion, according to Meir, the Kibbutz Movement secretary, were limits placed by the government on new zoning and building permits. * * * — For Maayan Zvi, the billionaires down the hill in Maagan Michael, just visible from Shoshana Haber’s picture window, would serve as a constant reminder of what went wrong and what could have been.

pages: 338 words: 101,967

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth
by Noa Tishby
Published 5 Apr 2021

pages: 223 words: 60,936

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

He espoused an open-door policy where anyone could drop by his desk to pose a question or ask for help. He viewed his job as an iterative process of responding to his team’s needs as they came up in real time. AppFolio Goes Remote Like so many companies across the world, AppFolio’s entire existence abruptly and dramatically changed in 2020. When COVID-19 put the United States on lockdown overnight, AppFolio’s sudden shift to remote work posed a direct challenge to the company’s agile in-person practices of teamwork. Although Hawkins and his team initially faced the change with optimism, one week in a remote format had taken an immediate toll. As Hawkins put it, “We hit the ground running.

pages: 535 words: 103,761

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation
by Frank Furedi
Published 6 Sep 2021

Their leaders advocate ‘technoscientific means to achieve happiness, a total control of emotions, and an improvement of human character’.755 Moral neuroenhancement, unlike previous forms of moral engineering, ‘operates by altering brain states or processes directly’, through the application of drugs or the use of brain modulation techniques.756 Although occasionally there are outcries against the influence and power of experts, technocratic and therapeutic governance itself is rarely a focus of political dispute. During the coronavirus pandemic the different sides of the argument over the efficacy of lockdown and quarantine measures sought to legitimate their argument by justifying it on the ground of their mental health impact. All sides of the debate appeared to have internalised the fundamentals of the therapeutic ethos but drew different political conclusions from it.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Yet the government’s bungling of the outbreak in Wuhan led some Chinese citizens to wonder if the incident would prove to be “China’s Chernobyl,” akin to the 1986 nuclear disaster that exposed the hollowness of the Soviet system. For CCP leaders, the lack of faith in the government was a potential contagion even worse than the virus itself, and the government launched a crackdown on information mirroring the physical lockdown to contain the coronavirus. Chinese propaganda organs went into overdrive, trumpeting the benefits of China’s model of pandemic response. While the pandemic posed a risk domestically, it was an opportunity internationally for China to step into a global leadership role.

pages: 371 words: 137,268

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

The US has seen a significant growth in corporate landlords: corporations like asset manager Blackstone that buy up swathes of real estate before renting homes out and hiking up rents.28 Many of these companies used the pandemic to undertake mass evictions of vulnerable tenants, despite the imposition of a federal evictions moratorium. The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis found that four corporate landlords had filed at least fifteen thousand evictions in the midst of the lockdown—often using intimidation and illegal tactics to force tenants out.29 The committee found that one corporate landlord—the Siegel Group—distributed copies of a court order wrongly suggesting that the evictions moratorium was not being enforced by the courts.

…

When the world economy was plunged into uncertainty in March 2020, many of Greensill’s clients found themselves struggling to repay their loans. Greensill had lent billions to the GFG Alliance, run by the steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta, which was not exactly in rude health before the pandemic hit.70 When global production collapsed during the Great Lockdown, GFG found itself struggling to survive. At the same time, the pandemic led to a dash for cash, and investors started pulling their money out of Credit Suisse’s funds. Credit Suisse was ultimately forced to close the four funds lending to Greensill, which collectively contained about $10 billion of Greensill’s debt, leaving investors unable to access their money.

pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

In 2015, when the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans who had used smartphones to apply for jobs—perhaps the most essential online activity of all—they struggled with a number of tasks, from navigating websites not optimized for mobile to entering large amounts of text and submitting required files. Smartphones simply make poor substitutes for home broadband; those who are compelled to rely on them are at a significant disadvantage. The COVID-19 crisis greatly magnified those disadvantages. As lockdowns and social distancing pushed more of people’s lives online, a decent home internet connection became all the more essential. In response, the many millions of Americans without one flocked to the parking lots of schools, libraries, and other institutions that continued to offer free Wi-Fi.

pages: 208 words: 57,602

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

I spent much of 2019 reporting on these changing attitudes, being careful to keep an open mind to the possibility that these fears were exaggerated. After all, unemployment in the United States was still near a record low, and while corporate executives were chattering among themselves about AI and automation, there wasn’t much obvious evidence that it was taking a toll on workers yet. Then Covid-19 arrived. In the spring of 2020, much of the United States entered shelter-in-place lockdowns, and my phone began lighting up with calls from tech companies telling me how the pandemic was affecting their plans for automation. The difference, now, was that companies wanted to publicize their efforts to automate jobs. Robots don’t get sick, after all, and companies that could successfully replace humans with machines could continue making goods and providing services even while the virus was raging.

pages: 546 words: 164,489

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey Into Space
by Stephen Walker
Published 12 Apr 2021

pages: 341 words: 107,933

The Dealmaker: Lessons From a Life in Private Equity
by Guy Hands
Published 4 Nov 2021

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

As that great champion of Dionysus, Friedrich Nietzsche, declared in one of his characteristically cryptic aphorisms, “Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? It is almost the history of ‘culture,’ of our so-called higher culture.”9 This book was mostly written in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, which has provided dramatic confirmation of the ineliminable role of alcohol in our lives. One of the big debates early in the pandemic, when governments were imposing lockdowns, was what counted as an excepted “essential service”? There was wild and bizarre variety in the answers to this question across the United States. Some states declared golf courses exempt, others gun shops. One thing that every jurisdiction recognized, however, and that never seemed up for debate, was that liquor stores are essential.

pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz
Published 3 May 2021

The Ages of Globalization
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Published 2 Jun 2020

Endogenous Growth and Kondratiev Waves The Diffusion of Industrialization in Europe The Great Global Divergence The Asian Drama: China, India, and Japan Europe Swallows Africa Anglo-American Hegemony The Thirty-Year European Bloodletting The American Century Decolonization and the Onset of Global Convergence Some Lessons from the Industrial Age 8 The Digital Age (Twenty-First Century) The Digital Revolution Convergent Growth and China’s Surge to the Forefront The Challenges of Sustainable Development The Challenge of Inequality The Challenge of Planetary Boundaries The Risks of Conflict Some Lessons from the Digital Age 9 Guiding Globalization in the Twenty-First Century Sustainable Development Social-Democratic Ethos Subsidiarity and the Public Sphere Reforming the United Nations Ethics in Action for a Common Plan Acknowledgments Data Appendix Notes Further Readings Bibliography Index Preface The COVID-19 epidemic hit as this book was going to press. A most global phenomenon—a pandemic disease—was suddenly provoking the most local of responses: quarantines, lockdowns of neighborhoods, and the closure of borders and trade. In just three months, the virus spread from Wuhan, China, to more than 140 other countries. In the fourteenth century, the bubonic plague spread the Black Death from China to Italy in the course of some sixteen years, 1331 to 1347.

pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans
by Eben Kirksey
Published 10 Nov 2020

pages: 451 words: 125,201

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

Since that point, because of globalization, most countries have been becoming more culturally Western over time.119 If this process continues, there will eventually be even greater homogenisation across cultures. One way of gauging the current diversity of cultures is to consider the range of responses countries made to the COVID-19 pandemic.120 There was, of course, some diversity, from the ultrastrict lockdowns in China to the more moderate response in Sweden. But the range of responses was far more limited than it could have been. For example, both the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were designed by mid-January 2020 over the course of a few days.121 Not a single country allowed human challenge trials of the many vaccines developed in 2020, where willing volunteers would be vaccinated and then deliberately infected with the coronavirus in order to very quickly test the vaccine’s efficacy.

pages: 276 words: 59,165

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change
by Ronald Cohen
Published 1 Jul 2020

pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

So long as there are tourists looking for a bargain or business travel departments looking to cut down expenses, hoteliers will want robot cleaners, receptionists, doormen, and concierges. All those jobs may become as obsolete as elevator operators. The coronavirus pandemic has created even more pressures to reduce human interactions in service industries. Lockdowns of indefinite duration made the case for robotics better than any business guru. When warehouse operators, meat packers, and farmworkers fear catching a deadly virus at work, robotization of their roles may appear outright humanitarian (if paired with some plausible promise of basic income provision and future jobs).

pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

“Prevalence of Chronic Pain and High-Impact Chronic Pain among Adults—United States, 2016.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 67 (36): 1001–6. Dhaval, D., A. I. Friedson, D. McNichols, and J. J. Sabia. 2020. The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19. Bonn: IZA Institute of Labor Economics, Discussion Paper No. 13670. Trussell Trust. 2020. Lockdown, Lifelines, and the Long Haul Ahead: The Impact of Covid-19 on Food Banks in the Trussell Trust Network. https://www.trusselltrust.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/09/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-food-banks-report.pdf. Notes 1. Jerome Powell, “New Economic Challenges and the Fed’s Monetary Policy Review,” presented at “Navigating the Decade Ahead: Implications for Monetary Policy,” an economic policy symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, WY, August 27, 2020. 2.

pages: 334 words: 103,106

Inheritance
by Leo Hollis

pages: 651 words: 186,130

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

When the coronavirus pandemic took hold, I watched those same Russian accounts retweet Americans who surmised Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon or an insidious plot by Bill Gates to profit off the eventual vaccine. And as the world stood still waiting for that vaccine, Russian trolls worked overtime to legitimize the vaccination debate, just as they had during the worst of Ukraine’s measles outbreak one year earlier. They retweeted Americans who challenged official Covid-19 statistics, protested the lockdowns, and doubted the benefits of wearing a mask. And when thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest the murders of African Americans at the hands of police, I watched those same Russian accounts retweet Americans, including the president, who dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as a Trojan horse for violent left-wing radicals.

pages: 541 words: 135,952

Lonely Planet Barcelona
by Isabella Noble and Regis St Louis
Published 15 Nov 2022

Public Holidays New Year’s Day (Any Nou/Año Nuevo) 1 January Epiphany/Three Kings’ Day (Epifanía or El Dia dels Reis/Día de los Reyes Magos) 6 January Good Friday (Divendres Sant/Viernes Santo) March/April Easter Monday (Dilluns de Pasqua Florida/Lunes de Pascua) March/April Labour Day (Dia del Treball/Fiesta del Trabajo) 1 May Day after Pentecost Sunday (Dilluns de Pasqua Granada) May/June Feast of St John the Baptist (Dia de Sant Joan/Día de San Juan Bautista) 24 June Feast of the Assumption (L’Assumpció/La Asunción) 15 August Catalonia’s National Day (Diada Nacional de Catalunya) 11 September Festes de la Mercè 24 September Spanish National Day (Festa de la Hispanitat/Día de la Hispanidad) 12 October All Saints Day (Dia de Tots Sants/Día de Todos los Santos) 1 November Constitution Day (Dia de la Constitució/Día de la Constitución) 6 December Feast of the Immaculate Conception (La Immaculada Concepció/La Inmaculada Concepción) 8 December Christmas (Nadal/Navidad) 25 December Boxing Day/St Stephen’s Day (Dia de Sant Esteve) 26 December Safe Travel Spain has been particularly hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in cities such as Madrid, Barcelona and Zaragoza, with tight lockdown restrictions in place on and off throughout 2020 and 2021. At the time of writing, however, Spain had one of the world’s highest COVID-19 vaccination rates, and required proof of full vaccination (or a recent negative test) for anyone wishing to enter the country.

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

pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

By the following summer, Evergrande, the country’s largest developer, with debts of around $300 billion, was on the verge of failure. Housing sales collapsed. The ‘bubble that never pops’ had popped. Bursting property bubbles are usually accompanied by deflation. In the West, on the other hand, the pandemic brought a gust of inflation. Global supply chains snapped as countries locked down. And once lockdowns were lifted, the United States and other Western countries faced labour shortages. Wage growth picked up. The price of a barrel of oil, which had briefly turned negative in April 2020, now surged past $75 and continues rising. Natural gas prices climbed too.

…

Carroll would have understood that when the price of time is set at nothing or turns negative, and central banks print money without limit, finance becomes absurd. The autists on WallStreetBets found the situation intensely amusing. Serious investors, such as Klarman, found it deeply worrying. THE COVID TRANSITION The novelist Michel Houellebecq claimed that the ‘banal virus’ would change nothing. ‘We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world. It will be the same, just a bit worse,’ a pessimistic Houellebecq announced on French radio. It was true that Covid aggravated existing ills. In the financial world shutdowns were accompanied by more money-printing, more debt and even lower interest rates.

pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back
by Jacob Ward
Published 25 Jan 2022

pages: 444 words: 117,770

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

China is quickly catching up with Russia; others from Turkey to Iran are developing their skills. (The CIA, too, is no stranger to info ops.) Early in the COVID-19 pandemic a blizzard of disinformation had deadly consequences. A Carnegie Mellon study analyzed more than 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 at the height of the first lockdown. Eighty-two percent of influential users advocating for “reopening America” were bots. This was a targeted “propaganda machine,” most likely Russian, designed to intensify the worst public health crisis in a century. Deepfakes automate these information assaults. Until now effective disinformation campaigns have been labor-intensive.

pages: 297 words: 83,528

The Startup Wife
by Tahmima Anam
Published 2 Jun 2021

Sharma runs out of things to say, they cut back to Cyrus and Stephen. There’s a photo montage of Cyrus—Cyrus being greeted by a raptuous crowd, Cyrus shaking hands with Bill Gates, radiating his confident CEO smile, Cyrus glowing as if he’s been dipped in caramel. Then, for a little while, the virus story takes over. Pictures from Wuhan, where the streets are empty and everyone is under lockdown. Time moves slowly and it’s two a.m., then three. Jules and Gaby sit quietly on the sofa, their eyes glued to the TV, while Ren and I monitor the platform. Suddenly, the broadcast ends and cuts to commercial. I have this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

pages: 381 words: 120,361

Sunfall
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 17 Apr 2019

The whole point of the Lockdown is that they would have to do something before then. After Lockdown, no one can interfere.’ Shireen had already considered this. It was what scared her more than anything else. She tried to keep the desperation out of her voice. ‘But … what if they have something in place, some virus maybe, that only activates after Lockdown? And what if the Mag-8 Mind is infected or compromised, like the CERN Mind in the summer? Then there’d be nothing to stop it and we’d be helpless.’ This time Marc shook his head. ‘Even if we could stop Ignition after Lockdown,’ he said, ‘and I have no idea what would be needed to do that, short of ordering a missile strike against Mag-8, then even that wouldn’t be enough.’

pages: 168 words: 32,806

Copenhagen Like a Local
by DK

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.

pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

After The Daily Beast and The Wall Street Journal reported that he was souring on Trump, some assumed he judged Trump’s coronavirus response to be an indictment of his presidency, and that perhaps Thiel would embrace more centrist politics. But this wasn’t true. Thiel agreed with Trump that concerns about COVID were overblown, telling friends he thought the lockdowns were “crazy” and overly broad. Nor was Thiel’s inner circle moderating—if anything, they seemed disappointed that Trump had surrounded himself with centrist types and hadn’t pushed for the hard-right populism that Bannon and others had initially promised. After Trump’s Supreme Court pick Neil Gorsuch sided with liberals and moderates in ruling that gay and transgender workers were deserving of civil rights protection, Blake Masters, the Thiel adviser who’d cowritten Zero to One, complained that the party had betrayed conservatives.

pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

Doctors reported more and more patients refusing lifesaving treatments based on something they’d seen online, much as Brazilian families tormented by Zika had done just one year earlier, and often citing the same conspiracies. Trump, both driving and driven by the online rage that suffused his base, encouraged every step, pushing phony Covid cures and pledging to “liberate” states with lockdown measures. “More evidence of a Plandemic,” a California man texted his cousin in October, linking to a TikTok video, in the sort of exchange that had become routine in American life. “Don’t hug any of the vaccinated, symptoms are directly related to vaccine shedding,” the cousin responded, referring to a Facebook-propagated conspiracy.

pages: 221 words: 59,755

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Published 15 Mar 2021

And, yes, this is likely to lead to all sorts of dreadful consequences. But people are ingenious. They come up with crazy, big ideas, and sometimes these actually work. * * * — During the first few months of 2020, a vast, unsupervised experiment took place. As the coronavirus raged, billions of people were ordered to stay home. At the peak of the lockdown, in April, global CO2 emissions were down an estimated seventeen percent compared with the comparable period the previous year. This drop—the largest recorded ever—was immediately followed by a new high. In May 2020, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere set a record of 417.1 parts per million.

pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

According to the World Bank, nearly 70 million people were thrown back into extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic. Hunger increased rapidly and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that between five and seven million children may be hampered in their physical development due to pandemic-related malnutrition.3 And how much did this global lockdown reduce 2020’s global carbon emissions? By about 6 per cent. It is the largest reduction ever but nowhere close to what would be needed. If we were to meet the Paris Climate Agreement by 2030 just by doing and travelling less, we would need to suffer a pandemic like this every year for the next decade, without allowing us to have any recovery between the pandemics.

pages: 565 words: 134,138

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
Published 25 Feb 2021

pages: 390 words: 120,864

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

* * * When Covid-19 spread across the world, lots of people thought—amid all the tragedy and horror—that there might at least be one good outcome. Many people (not all) were freed from the daily commute and from the pressure to be seen at their desks all the time. So it was assumed that there might be a little space created for more rest. But work hours actually went up during Covid—in the first month and a half of lockdown alone, the average U.S. worker clocked in three extra hours a day. In France, Spain, and Britain, people worked two hours more a day on average. It’s not totally clear why. 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.

pages: 263 words: 77,786

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

—Dan Schulman, CEO, PayPal Starbucks turned fifty during the pandemic, and it had some special challenges. With thousands of stores in China, it was hit before America had truly woken up to the fallout. Yet when I asked CEO Kevin Johnson whether the crisis had made the company stronger, he replied, “Absolutely. We are more resilient and stronger today than we were pre-pandemic.”27 In the US, it managed to thrive through multiple lockdowns by convincing millions to preorder drinks on its app and drop by stores to pick them up. By the middle of 2021, its same-store sales had fully recovered in its key markets of the US and China. Going forward, Johnson believes, people will return to in-store service.

pages: 743 words: 193,663

Moon Portugal
by Carrie-Marie Bratley
Published 15 Mar 2021

From Spain: There are two overnight sleeper trains: the Lusitania Hotel Train (www.cp.pt), linking Madrid’s Chamartin Station to Lisbon in about 10 hours, and the Sud Expresso (www.cp.pt), which connects Lisbon to San Sebastian in Spain and Hendaye in southern France in about 11 hours. In Northern Portugal, a high-speed train, the Celta IC (www.cp.pt), links Porto to Vigo in 3.5 hours. Coronavirus in Portugal At the time of writing in February 2021, Portugal was significantly impacted by the coronavirus, but the situation was improving. Periodic lockdowns over the course of 2021 appeared to be causing a noticeable improvement. However, smaller local businesses have been hard hit by the pandemic, as was the country’s tourism scene, particularly in the Algarve, where the unemployment rate skyrocketed. The country’s counties were classified into categories of level of risk (by number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants), with containment measures varying accordingly.

Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity
by Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm
Published 18 May 2022

Finally, he would like to thank his wife, Inés, for her patience and love. Torben would like to express his profound gratitude to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where he spent an invaluable year as a fellow working on this book. The in-person experience was upended by COVID, but Claudia Rizzini and Rebecca Haley worked tirelessly to create a vibrant and supportive virtual community. Thanks to the lockdown, Torben’s wife, Charla, probably heard more about this project than she would have cared to, but her questions and feedback made it better. Our children – Lea on Philipp’s side and Esben and Isabelle on Torben’s – and their generation will have to navigate dramatic social and economic change caused by the information revolution and climate change (among other factors) that will rival the upheavals of past revolutions.

pages: 201 words: 60,431

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb
by Dorie Clark
Published 14 Oct 2021

But to create the kind of interesting, meaningful lives that we all seek, they’re essential—and it’s time to embrace them. On February 28, 2020, my email pinged. “I’m delighted to report that we would love to publish the book,” my editor wrote. The Long Game was on. The very next day—March 1, 2020—the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed in New York City, where I live. During the early days of lockdown, a colleague messaged me about my book project. I had set out to write about the importance of being a long-term thinker in a short-term world. But in light of Covid, he wondered, wasn’t long-term thinking a little passé? The real issue, he said, was “what’s likely to change unexpectedly and bite any long-term thinking in the ass.”

pages: 489 words: 106,008

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

Could Have Saved 36,Lives If Social Distancing Started 1 Week Earlier: Study,” National Public Radio, May 21, 2020, https://npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/21/860077940/u-s-could-have-saved-36-000-lives-if-social-distancing-started-1-week-earlier-st; James Glanz and Campbell Robertson, “Lockdown Delays Cost at Least 36,000 Lives, Data Show,” The New York Times, May 20, 2020, https://nytimes.com/2020/05/20/us/coronavirus-distancing-deaths.html. avoided 83 percent of deaths: Glanz and Robertson, “Lockdown Delays Cost at Least 36,000 Lives, Data Show.” “the impossible but inevitable city”: Arjen Boin, Christer Brown, and James A. Richardson, Managing Hurricane Katrina: Lessons from a Megacrisis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), 4.

pages: 265 words: 75,202

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

In fact, a study has identified that human connections are one of the reasons why people in Blue Zones—five areas around the world, including Okinawa, Japan, and Sardinia, Italy—live a longer and better life.1 Human connections, in this context, include a sense of belonging, putting family first—parents, partners, and children—and supportive social circles. Okinawans, for example, have something known as moais, which are groups of close lifelong friends. The basic need for human connection became strikingly apparent during the Covid-19 crisis. Besides the explosion of virtual connections through technology during self-isolation and lockdowns, people in places like China and Italy took to singing and playing music from their balconies to remind everyone around them that they were not alone and ease the sense of solitary confinement, which has a significant impact on mental health.

pages: 353 words: 97,029

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration
by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Published 16 Feb 2023

Tsunamis are fat-tailed, but if you build well inland or erect a high enough seawall, you eliminate the threat. Earthquakes are also fat-tailed, but build to an earthquake-proof standard, as we did with the schools in Nepal, and you are covered. Other tails require a combination of measures; for a pandemic, for instance, a blend of masks, tests, vaccines, quarantines, and lockdowns to prevent infections from running wild.25 That’s black swan management. For big projects, black swan management typically requires a combination of measures. I started this book with one: “Think slow, act fast.” We saw that delivery is when things can go horribly and expensively wrong.

pages: 521 words: 118,183

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

China, in particular, has risen to the forefront of the front-end, with Xi Jinping vowing to “retak[e] the Internet battlefield.”150 Content farms based in mainland China and Malaysia have pushed pro-Chinese narratives on subjects from Taiwanese independence to the coronavirus.151 There is evidence of concerted campaigns on Reddit to “down-vote” negative stories about China in general and Huawei in particular.152 In June 2020, Twitter took down 150,000 accounts amplifying Chinese disinformation, including tweets touting Beijing’s response to COVID-19.153 Other tweets falsely warned of a nationwide American lockdown,154 while a doctored Facebook video attempted to fuel divisions over racial justice protests.155 China’s “spectrum of capabilities, and the expansion of influence activity beyond its borders, has begun to invite comparisons to Russia,” the Stanford Cyber Policy Center reports.156 Other authoritarians aren’t far behind.

pages: 309 words: 86,747

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

And the more you are able to add value to others, the more meaningful your life becomes. 8 The Ripple Effect Unlocking Mattering All Around You When people asked me how I felt about turning fifty, I said: grateful. I’ve had very close friends who didn’t get that opportunity. Getting older is a gift I never want to take for granted, so I was going to celebrate it, even if COVID-19 concerns kept the guest list on the shorter side. After two years of lockdowns, my friends commented that my birthday party felt like a coming-out party for all of us. My parents were there. My in-laws were there. A few close friends surprised me by flying in. I was also in for the surprise of my life. A couple of weeks earlier, unbeknownst to me, Caroline had secretly emailed my friends explaining our family tradition of saying one thing you love about the birthday person.

pages: 688 words: 190,793

The Rough Guide to Paris
by Rough Guides
Published 1 May 2023

Paris was – as is so often the case – the focal point for the protests. Eventually Macron had to make some concessions but even these weren’t enough and the protests continued until March 2020 and the arrival of Covid-19. France was badly hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and the government imposed very tough restrictions on daily life. A very strict two-month lockdown was imposed from mid-March to mid-May 2020. During this period almost all businesses were closed, schools shut and people were forbidden from leaving their homes aside from essential reasons. A huge police presence enforced these draconian rules and tens of thousands were fined for minor infractions such as walking too far from their house, being away from home for more than an hour without good reason or not filling in the paperwork required each and every time a person did leave home.

pages: 453 words: 122,586

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market
by Nicholas Wapshott
Published 2 Aug 2021

pages: 382 words: 105,657

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
by Peter Robison
Published 29 Nov 2021

At least twice, ambulances appeared in the huge open bays of the Everett factory taking away workers who’d fallen sick; their sections were cleaned and work continued. Auto plants in Detroit closed on March 18. Everett remained open. Boeing finally said it would shut the plant five days later, a day after a fifty-seven-year-old worker there died from the coronavirus and his family sent out a plea for its closure over Facebook. In April, at the height of lockdowns around the world, passenger traffic fell a stunning 95 percent from the same month a year earlier. Airlines parked two-thirds of their global fleet, the brightly painted planes stretching for miles in neat formation in one desert storage yard in California.

pages: 558 words: 175,965

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach
by Ashlee Vance
Published 8 May 2023

Customers can simply add the tech and science bits that make their payloads special and plop them into Rocket Lab’s satellite platform. This has increased the company’s revenue and profits by moving it into the more lucrative satellite business and helping set it up as a one-stop space shop. Rocket Lab has not managed to launch rockets every three days as Beck desired. Covid slowed the company down with New Zealand having one of the strictest lockdowns, and, well, it’s just really hard to launch tons of rockets. Nonetheless, Rocket Lab is the only company that has neared SpaceX’s pace and has a similar track record of successful launches. In July 2022, Rocket Lab carried a payload to the moon on behalf of NASA.

Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe
by Johnjoe McFadden
Published 27 Sep 2021

pages: 569 words: 156,139

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

pages: 400 words: 121,988

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets
by Donald MacKenzie
Published 24 May 2021

The the Rough Guide to Turkey
by Rough Guides
Published 15 Oct 2023

Mosaic in Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep Shutterstock Timeline c.10,000 BC Hunter-gatherers build the temple complexes at southeast Anatolia’s Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe c.2900 BC Foundation of Troy at the mouth of the Dardanelles, northwest Anatolia c.1650 BC The Hittites establish an imperial capital at Hattuşaş, in central Anatolia c.1200 BC Troy sacked by the Greeks at the end of the Trojan War c.900 BC The Urartian kingdom emerges in the Lake Van basin c.725 BC Under King Midas, the western Anatolian kingdom of Phrygia reaches its peak 546 BC Lydian King Croesus defeated by the Persians 334 BC Alexander the Great defeats the Persians at the battle of Granicus, northwest Anatolia 89 BC Mithridates of Pontus rebels against the Romans for the first time AD 330 The inauguration of Constantinople as a new capital of the Roman Empire 391 The Christian Byzantine emperor Theodosius the Great proscribes paganism 527–565 The reign of Justinian, the greatest Byzantine emperor after Constantine c.1000 The first Turks begin to appear in Anatolia 1054 Separation of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches 1071 The Byzantines lose disastrously to the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert 1204 Decline of the Byzantine Empire is hastened by the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade 1243 The Mongols crush the Seljuk Turks at the battle of Köse Dağ in central Anatolia c.1299 Osman Bey proclaims independence from the Seljuk Turks 1362 Ottoman sultan Murad I takes Adrianople (present-day Edirne), which becomes the new capital 1402 Tamerlane’s Mongols defeat Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara – a major setback for the Ottomans 1453 Mehmed II takes Constantinople, to mark the end of the Byzantine world 1481 Jews expelled from Spain are given sanctuary by the Muslim Ottoman Turks 1514 Selim I defeats the Persians at the Battle of Chāldirān (Çaldıran Muharebesi) on the Ottoman–Persian frontier 1516 Selim I captures Cairo and Mesopotamia, and the Ottomans are seen as upholders of the Islamic caliphate 1529 The unsuccessful siege of Vienna is a rare setback for the Ottoman war machine 1536 European influence in Ottoman affairs, which will ultimately prove disastrous, begins with a treaty between the Ottomans and the French 1566 Ottoman decline is symbolized by the accession of Selim II 1571 Ottoman military might is questioned, following the naval defeat at the Battle of Lepanto 1683 The second siege of Vienna ends in humiliating defeat for the Ottomans 1830 Greece wins independence from the Ottoman Empire 1839 The Ottoman Empire attempts to modernize with the Tanzimat reforms 1853–56 The Ottomans and their allies, France and Britain, prevail against Russia in the Crimean War 1877 The Ottomans lose a great deal of territory in the Caucasus and Balkans to imperial Russia 1878 Abdülhamit II suspends the constitution of 1876 and embarks upon a period of repressive, despotic rule 1889 The formation of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) marks the start of Turkish nationalism 1895–96 Massive pogroms against the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian minority 1908 The Young Turk revolution leads to the restoration of the constitution of 1876 1912–13 The Ottoman Empire loses most of its remaining European territory in the First Balkan War 1914 The CUP triumvirate that now effectively rules the Ottoman Empire decides to ally with Germany in World War I 1918 The Allies occupy Istanbul after the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I 1919 French troops occupy southeast Anatolia, Italians the western Mediterranean region, and Greek troops land at İzmir 1919 Atatürk lands at Samsun on the Black Sea, marking the ‘official’ start of Turkish War of Independence 1920 The British formally occupy Istanbul in March 1920 August sees the signing of the controversial Treaty of Sèvres, which carves up the Ottoman Empire 1921 An invading Greek army is turned back by Atatürk’s right-hand man, İsmet İnönü 1922 The Turks win a decisive victory over Greek troops at the Battle of Dumlupınar (Başkumandanlık Meydan Muharebesi) in August 1923 The Treaty of Lausanne recognizes the boundaries won by the Turkish nationalists in the Turkish War of Independence 1923 In October, Ankara becomes the capital of the new Turkish republic 1924 The caliphate is abolished and all Ottoman royalty are sent into exile 1925 The first of the Kurdish revolts that still bedevil Turkey begins 1929 Turkey’s change from the Arabic to the Roman alphabet is made law 1934 Atatürk dies of liver failure in Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul 1938 The former French-mandated province of Hatay becomes part of Turkey 1942 Turkey introduces a tax on wealth unfairly targeting non-Muslim minorities 1945 Neutral for most of World War II, Turkey finally declares war on Germany 1950 Turkey’s first truly free elections see the Atatürk-founded Republican Peoples Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi; CHP) replaced by the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti; DP) 1955 Government-instigated riots against the Greek minority in Istanbul leave thousands of shops and businesses in ruins 1960 The elected government is toppled in the country’s first military coup 1963 Turkish workers win the right to strike 1964 Sectarian strife between Greeks and Turks on Cyprus almost leads to war between Greece and Turkey 1969 Right- and left-wing extremists clash with depressing frequency across the nation 1971 The so-called ‘memorandum coup’ brings martial law to the country 1974 Turkey invades Cyprus in response to a Greek military coup 1978 Civil unrest across Turkey continues, with right-wing extremists and left-wing Alevis clashing in Maraş 1980 Fed up with years of unrest, the Turkish public watch with relief as the military take power again 1982 A new constitution is overwhelmingly approved by an undemocratic vote that also sees General Kenan Evran become president 1983 The charismatic Turgut Özal and his moderate Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi) wins the first elections since the coup 1989 Turkey welcomes 300,000 Bulgarian Turks forced out of Bulgaria 1990 Özal’s Turkey offers support to the US against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait 1991 Turkey’s first openly Islamist party, the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi; RP), comes fourth in the elections 1993 Özal, now president, dies of a heart attack, though conspiracy theorists cry foul 1993 Respected journalist Uğur Mumcu is killed in a car bombing 1995 Turkey enters into a customs union with the EU 1995 The pro-Islamist Refah government is forced from power in the so-called ‘soft coup’ 1998 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, arguably Turkey’s most successful politician since Atatürk, is elected mayor of Istanbul 1999 A catastrophic earthquake in Istanbul claims the lives of more than 20,000 people 2002 The pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) sweeps to power in the national elections, with 34 percent of the vote 2004 Greek Cypriots reject the Annan plan for the reunification of Cyprus in a referendum 2005 Formal accession talks for Turkey’s long-awaited EU membership finally begin 2007 Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink is shot dead by ultranationalist Ogün Samast in Istanbul 2007 The AKP increase their majority in national elections in July 2009 Nine Turkish citizens are killed when Israeli commandos attack the Mavi Marmara, sparking a row between Erdoğan and Israel’s Shimon Peres in Davos 2011 The AKP wins a record third general election 2011 So-called ‘Arab Spring’ casts Turkey as icon of democratic stability in a region swept by turmoil 2012 With refugees streaming into southeast Turkey, the Kurdish community across the border in Syria approaches effective autonomy 2013 The protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park demonstrate government unpopularity among many sectors of Turkish society 2014 May’s mining disaster at Soma, where over three hundred miners died, highlights Turkey’s atrocious record of workplace safety 2015 A two-year ceasefire with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan; PKK) breaks down 2015 November snap elections confirm the AKP as the nation’s government for a fourth time 2016 ISIS suicide bomber kills ten tourists in an explosion in Sultanahmet, Istanbul 2016 After the failed coup attempt of 15 July, a sweeping crackdown on suspected plotters begins 2016 First of several Turkish incursions in Syria begins with Operation Euphrates Shield (Fırat Kalkanı Harekâtı) 2017 Constitutional referendum on instituting an executive system narrowly passes 2018 Erdoğan and his People’s Alliance (Cumhur İttifakı) are declared winners in crucial snap elections 2019 Turkey notches more the forty million foreign visitors, the highest number for any year to date 2020 After almost ninety years as a museum, Hagia Sofia decreed as an active mosque 2021 A year after Covid-19 restrictions first announced, Turkey introduces its strictest lockdowns to date 2021 Largest forest fires in Turkey’s history ravage the Mediterranean coastal region 2022 Turkey opposes, then accedes to Finland and Sweden’s bid to join NATO as the war rages on in Ukraine The earliest cultures Discoveries in the heart of modern Turkey – the region known historically as Anatolia or Asia Minor – at numerous cave sites provide evidence of Palaeolithic human occupation.

pages: 404 words: 126,447

Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire
by Hans Gremeil and William Sposato
Published 15 Dec 2021

By the end of that fiscal year, on March 31, 2020, Nissan booked its first net loss in eleven years, the worst loss since Ghosn’s first year at the company in 1999. By early 2020, Nissan’s earnings were being throttled by the COVID-19 pandemic, as dealerships worldwide closed their doors and customers from Beijing to Los Angeles were forced to stay at home under lockdown. Looking ahead, Nissan forecast its worst-ever operating loss in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2021. But the reality was Nissan’s business was already in brisk decline before the pandemic. Operating profit margin stood at a robust 6.3 percent in March 2017, when Ghosn made Saikawa sole CEO.

pages: 1,236 words: 320,184

Lonely Planet Turkey
by Lonely Planet

The AKP’s dominance was considerably weakened in the 2019 Turkish local elections with the CHP, the main opposition party, taking power in five of Turkey’s six largest cities. Throughout 2020 and 2021, as the pandemic deepened Turkey’s economic problems, criticism continued to grow. Both the government’s COVID response (in particular the decision to exempt foreign tourists from restrictions during national lockdowns) and its reaction to the İzmir earthquake in October 2020 and the forest fires and Black Sea flash floods of July and August 2021, angered many Turks. Whether any of this signals a shift in Turkey’s next national government parliamentary elections, remains to be seen.