Subterms
US President Donald Trump will go down in history as the ultimate master of hyperreal politics. No matter how far he deviates from reality, the American public consistently expresses its approval. The further he wanders from rationality, even when the consequences are measurable in the number of deaths, the more he is rewarded. In the […] More
A crisis, according to self-help and leadership books, reveals much about a person’s character. The same can be said of a nation’s character. Since the latest pandemic began to spread out of China in 2020, countries responded in very different ways to the challenge. There was ingenuity, inflexibility, incomprehension and sheer incompetence. Diversity can be […] More
I have just finished a couple of weeks on the road in Texas, during which time the coronavirus pandemic blew up across the American landscape. The best sign that something serious was happening while I was on the road was the number of guys in truck stop and convenience store restrooms washing their hands after taking […] More
His grammar leaves something to be desired, but the message is clear. US President Donald Trump has informed the nation and the world that he has now risen to the same significant height reached by his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. Explaining the measures he intends to take to protect the nation from COVID-19 (formerly given […] More
The Guardian’s columnist Will Hutton, a declared Keynesian, has expressed his astonishment at the Tory government suddenly abandoning its economic orthodoxy as the appropriate response to the coronavirus pandemic. His readers certainly remember the “Cameron-Osborne austerity” of only a few years ago, when Conservative economists, as they have done for decades, insisted that austerity was […] More
The bubonic plague pandemic — the Black Death — was arguably the greatest catastrophe to hit Western Europe in the Middle Ages, killing tens of millions of people or around a third of the continent’s population. The disease originated in the vast plains of central and eastern Asia, from where it was carried to the […] More
