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Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

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.  

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

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.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

‘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.

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

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

., “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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., "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.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

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.

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

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’.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

,” 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.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

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.

…

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.

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

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.

…

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.

…

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.

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

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.

…

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.

…

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.

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help by New Scientist, Helen Thomson

Abraham Wald, Black Lives Matter, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Flynn Effect, George Floyd, global pandemic, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lock screen, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, TED Talk, TikTok, ultra-processed food, Walter Mischel

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.

…

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.

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives by Chris Bruntlett, Melissa Bruntlett

15-minute city, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, global pandemic, green new deal, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, Lyft, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, post-work, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, social distancing, streetcar suburb, the built environment, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey

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.

…

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.

…

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.”

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

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.

…

, 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.

…

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!’

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

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

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.

…

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.

…

“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.

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

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

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.

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

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.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

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.

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

Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, cognitive bias, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, Future Shock, global pandemic, global village, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, lockdown, nowcasting, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Slavoj Žižek, social distancing, South China Sea, zoonotic diseases

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.

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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.

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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.

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

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

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.

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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.

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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.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

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.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

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.

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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.

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City by Jack Brown

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Etonian, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, knowledge economy, lockdown, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, post-war consensus, quantitative easing, remote working, Richard Florida, sceptred isle, superstar cities, working-age population, zero-sum game

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.

Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic by Michael Smith, Jonathan Franklin

airport security, Boeing 747, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Port of Oakland, Snapchat, social distancing, Suez canal 1869

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.

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

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.

…

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.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

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.

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

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

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.”

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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.”

The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, car-free, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, coronavirus, COVID-19, driverless car, experimental subject, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, Sidewalk Labs, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, twin studies, Wall-E, washing machines reduced drudgery

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.

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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.

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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.

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

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

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.

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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.

Deadly Quiet City: True Stories From Wuhan by Murong Xuecun

Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, global pandemic, lockdown, megacity, Ponzi scheme, QR code, social distancing, TikTok

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.

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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’.

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

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

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.

Cyprus - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Constantine Buhayer

banking crisis, British Empire, business climate, centre right, COVID-19, financial independence, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, lockdown, low cost airline, offshore financial centre, open economy, Skype, women in the workforce, young professional

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.

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

Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, butterfly effect, carbon tax, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Emanuel Derman, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, hindcast, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, implied volatility, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kim Stanley Robinson, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, negative emissions, paperclip maximiser, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, random walk, risk tolerance, selection bias, self-driving car, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Great Resignation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trolley problem, value at risk, volatility smile, Y2K

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.

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

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.

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

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

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!

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

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

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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., “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’?”

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

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.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic by Rachel Clarke

Airbnb, Boris Johnson, call centre, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disruptive innovation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, social distancing, zero-sum game

., ‘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.

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

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

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).

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

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

“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.

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

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.

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

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.

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

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.

…

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%.

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

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.

…

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.

…

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.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

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.

…

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.

…

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.

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

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

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.

…

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.  

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

“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.

…

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.

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, game design, global pandemic, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, lockdown, non-tariff barriers, open borders, post-truth, reserve currency, Robert Mercer

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.

…

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.

…

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.

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

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

‘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.

…

., ‘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).

…

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.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

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.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

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.

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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.

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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.

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

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.

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“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.

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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.”

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

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

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.

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

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

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.

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

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

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.

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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?

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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.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

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.

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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.

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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).

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

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

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.”

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

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.

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

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

., 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.

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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.

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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.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

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.

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

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

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.

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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.

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

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

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.

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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.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

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.

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion by Dean Burnett

airport security, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, call centre, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, COVID-19, double empathy problem, emotional labour, experimental economics, fake it until you make it, fake news, fear of failure, heat death of the universe, impulse control, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, neurotypical, New Journalism, period drama, pre–internet, Snapchat, social distancing, theory of mind, TikTok, Wall-E

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

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

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).

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

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.

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

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

“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.

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

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.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

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.

Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to Happiness: THE FEELGOOD BOOK OF THE YEAR by Bill Bailey

coronavirus, COVID-19, happiness index / gross national happiness, lockdown, social distancing, Stephen Hawking

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.

…

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.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

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.

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

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.

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, lockdown, Martin Wolf, stakhanovite, wage slave

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.

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

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, coronavirus, epigenetics, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, neurotypical, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), side project, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, wikimedia commons

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.

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

Asperger Syndrome, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Dominic Cummings, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, lockdown, paper trading, social distancing, Wayback Machine, work culture

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.

The Trauma Chronicles by Westaby, Stephen

Albert Einstein, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, James Dyson, lockdown, Nelson Mandela, social distancing, Stephen Hawking

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.

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

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, indoor plumbing, Live Aid, lockdown, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, one-state solution, Salesforce, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, traveling salesman, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

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.

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

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.

Uncontrolled Spread by Scott Gottlieb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, fear of failure, global pandemic, global supply chain, Kevin Roose, lab leak, Larry Ellison, lockdown, medical residency, Nate Silver, randomized controlled trial, social distancing, stem cell, sugar pill, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

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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., “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.

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

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.

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

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

“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.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

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.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

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.

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

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brexit referendum, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, fixed income, G4S, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, liquidity trap, lockdown, mass affluent, popular capitalism, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Winter of Discontent

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.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

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.

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

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

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.

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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.

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

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.

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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.

Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

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.

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

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.

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

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”.

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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.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

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.

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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.

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

big-box store, coronavirus, COVID-19, drone strike, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, eurozone crisis, failed state, Filipino sailors, financial innovation, information security, lockdown, megacity, offshore financial centre, Skype, South China Sea, trade route, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

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.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

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.

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

activist lawyer, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, COVID-19, David Vincenzetti, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, food desert, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, operational security, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero day

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.

Routes to Rejoin by Stay European

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, lockdown, Rishi Sunak

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.

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

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet Archive, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, obamacare, pets.com, power law, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, too big to fail, yield curve

* * * 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.

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

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

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.”

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

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

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.

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

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

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.

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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.

Palace Coup: The Billionaire Brawl Over the Bankrupt Caesars Gaming Empire by Sujeet Indap, Max Frumes

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, data science, deal flow, Donald Trump, family office, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, lockdown, low interest rates, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, NetJets, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, super pumped, Travis Kalanick

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.