Our Pandemic Times

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—a riveting thriller and “all-too-convincing chronicle of science, espionage, action and speculation” (The Wall Street Journal). At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will have staggering repercussions. Halfway across the globe, the deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security scrambles to mount a response to the rapidly spreading pandemic leapfrogging around the world, which she believes may be the result of an act of biowarfare. And a rogue experimenter in man-made diseases is preparing his own terrifying solution. As already-fraying global relations begin to snap, the virus slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions and decimating the population. With his own wife and children facing diminishing odds of survival, Henry travels from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia to his home base at the CDC in Atlanta, searching for a cure and for the origins of this seemingly unknowable disease. The End of October is a one-of-a-kind thriller steeped in real-life political and scientific implications, filled with the insight that has been the hallmark of Wright’s acclaimed nonfiction and the full-tilt narrative suspense that only the best fiction can offer.

“We live in paradoxical times. Traditionally, the West has led the world in theory and practice. Yet, recent developments, from COVID-19 to the storming of the US Capitol, show how lost the West has become. This loss of direction has deep roots. In their usual thoughtful and incisive fashion, Lim Mah-Hui and Michael Heng Siam-Heng, draw out the deeper origins of our current crises and show us a new way forward. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand our strange times." -- Kishore Mahbubani, founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, is the author of Has China Won? “A powerful and compelling critique of neoliberal globalization and its potentially devastating, but long underestimated, consequences for financial stability, the environment, social equity and democracy. COVID-19 has laid bare these dysfunctions and stresses. But this is not a pessimistic book. The authors argue, correctly, that we may be on the cusp of another Great Transformation. The choices we make today to make markets more resilient, improve social protection, and preserve our freedoms could lay the foundations for a sustainable globalization that works for future generations.” -- Donald Low, Professor of Practice in Public Policy and Director of the Institute for Emerging Market Studies, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology “This fascinating book highlights the interplay between financial and health crises that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed. Financialized capitalism is bad for the planet, bad for human health, and creates more unequal and insecure societies. The authors make a strong and convincing case for re-embedding markets into society and finance into the real economy.” --Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA “Lim and Heng’s ambitious volume argues that 2020 was the year of the global ‘perfect storm’ of multiple crises, with the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating financial, economic, socio-political and environmental breakdowns. They extend Karl Polanyi’s original insights to appeal for a sustainable global New Deal. While the reader may not agree with all their theses, the scope of their coverage and ambition will set the stage for debates over the annus horribilis.” -- Jomo K.S., Founder-chair, IDEAS www.network.ideas; former United Nations Assistant Secretary General "This book provides plenty of food for thought for many pondering if the COVID-19 crisis could lead to a major transformation of the global economic system shaped by unfettered market forces and policies of governments in their service."-- Yilmaz Akyuz, former Director, UNCTAD, Geneva

"Governing Human Lives and Health in Pandemic Times looks into the instruments and the type of reasoning involved when large-scale social control strategies were implemented worldwide in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The repertoires of institutional and administrative governance tools used during the pandemic are studied in their unique institutional, socio-geographic and cultural settings, in order to form an understanding of the political climates and the values inscribed in current societal contracts. The book is intended for academic audiences interested in policy research, health governance, and civil societal issues. It will be of great relevance and use for a wide audience of policy-makers, public officials and health care planners as well as students in a broad range of disciplines"--

Since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic in March 2020, people in every part of the world encountered many troubling events. We were in and out of lockdowns. We experienced personal difficulties related to health, finances, and the stresses of working from home, on the frontlines in the community, or for not having work at all. We witnessed the necessity of social interaction for our own mental health and for that of our children who spent months without the company of their schoolmates. Communities struggled with deep political and societal issues, but also displayed resilience and strength. Some found the focus, energy, and inspiration to write, to make art, and to express their creativity in other ways during this difficult, disruptive period. This book began as a blog for a group of Northumberland writers in Ontario; a place where they could share their work and stay connected. Writing and reading these stories and poems helped to get us through. Our Pandemic Times provides a record of what we did, what we wrote, what we felt, and how we rose to the challenges of this uncertain year.

A refreshing approach to the dominance of technology in our contemporary lives, The Digital Pandemic, translated from Portuguese, poses fundamental questions about love, fear, connectedness, proximity, imagination and consciousness. Arguing that the pandemic has ushered in a civilizational digital shock, João Pedro Cachopo charts new channels of relatedness and communication between people through digital technologies for the foreseeable future. The transformation of human experience that began in 2020 creates a break in our sociality that Cachopo pinpoints through key themes of love, travel, study, community and art. In contrast to the growing philosophical literature on the pandemic, this bold theoretical work does not prophesy the fall of capitalism or the end of personal freedom and relationships. Instead, this book carefully investigates the advanced technology that is increasingly inextricable from our lives, using an alternative approach that avoids pessimism, while remaining alert to the risks and threats of the digital age. It opens up the possibility of fostering global solidarity and consciousness beyond physical borders in the 21st century.

"An essential volume." -E. J. Dionne, Jr. * "A damning portrait" -Publishers Weekly With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winner Timothy Egan, the riveting, eye-opening first-draft history of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unprepared is the sweeping history of the Covid-19 pandemic-a raw, primary-source accounting of the epoch-defining event: a virus that first appeared in China in late 2019 and spread rapidly across the globe, killing hundreds of thousands, devastating economies, and changing the modern world forever. A day-by-day chronicle of the response to Covid-19 as it attacked, Unprepared gathers a range of public statements from President Trump and his administration, elected officials such as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, leading journalists and scientists, and organizations from National Nurses United to the United Food and Commercial Workers union. A haunting portrait of the world scrambling for answers while the number of cases rose alongside the death toll, the book reveals not only our strengths as a people, but also the fault lines and dysfunction that plague our nation in the new millennium. Unprepared is an illuminating artifact for today and for future generations, an astonishing document of history being made, and a multifaceted narrative that drops the reader directly into the real-time experience of confusion, drama, and fear that defines the outbreak of Covid-19.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR One of our most scintillating public intellectuals explores the political paradoxes of the pandemic and helps us think our way through it 'We are able to imagine anything because we are being besieged by something that was considered unimaginable...' Beneath the panic and bluster, beneath the confusing speeches and the conflicting advice, the Coronavirus pandemic acted, changing our world in the most profound ways. The tragic human cost and the economic devastation will be assessed and calculated for decades to come. But the pandemic also changed things in ways that are less easily expressed and understood. It has made bare the frayed contradictions of modern life. It has distorted things that seemed simple and settled. It has affirmed plain, uncomfortable truths. In this brilliant, thought-provoking essay, Ivan Krastev, one of our most interesting thinkers today, explores the pandemic's immediate consequences and conceives of its long-term legacy. Will things be different for the communities most harmed, and for those who escaped the worst? Where are we now with the US and China, with the UK and Europe? And how do we think our way through the unthinkable?

“We live in paradoxical times. Traditionally, the West has led the world in theory and practice. Yet, recent developments, from COVID-19 to the storming of the US Capitol, show how lost the West has become. This loss of direction has deep roots. In their usual thoughtful and incisive fashion, Lim Mah-Hui and Michael Heng Siam-Heng, draw out the deeper origins of our current crises and show us a new way forward. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand our strange times." -- Kishore Mahbubani, founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, is the author of Has China Won? “A powerful and compelling critique of neoliberal globalization and its potentially devastating, but long underestimated, consequences for financial stability, the environment, social equity and democracy. COVID-19 has laid bare these dysfunctions and stresses. But this is not a pessimistic book. The authors argue, correctly, that we may be on the cusp of another Great Transformation. The choices we make today to make markets more resilient, improve social protection, and preserve our freedoms could lay the foundations for a sustainable globalization that works for future generations.” -- Donald Low, Professor of Practice in Public Policy and Director of the Institute for Emerging Market Studies, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology “This fascinating book highlights the interplay between financial and health crises that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed. Financialized capitalism is bad for the planet, bad for human health, and creates more unequal and insecure societies. The authors make a strong and convincing case for re-embedding markets into society and finance into the real economy.” --Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA “Lim and Heng’s ambitious volume argues that 2020 was the year of the global ‘perfect storm’ of multiple crises, with the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating financial, economic, socio-political and environmental breakdowns. They extend Karl Polanyi’s original insights to appeal for a sustainable global New Deal. While the reader may not agree with all their theses, the scope of their coverage and ambition will set the stage for debates over the annus horribilis.” -- Jomo K.S., Founder-chair, IDEAS www.network.ideas; former United Nations Assistant Secretary General "This book provides plenty of food for thought for many pondering if the COVID-19 crisis could lead to a major transformation of the global economic system shaped by unfettered market forces and policies of governments in their service."-- Yilmaz Akyuz, former Director, UNCTAD, Geneva