The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead

Tracing Putin’s 22-year slide from statesman to tyrant.

We’re in a golden age of progress in artificial intelligence. It’s time to start taking its potential and risks seriously.

A very strange conversation with the chatbot built into Microsoft’s search engine left me deeply unsettled. Even frightened.

Procrastination is a self-reinforcing cycle. The more you stall important work, the more you’ll continue to do so. Yet procrastination doesn’t result from a dearth of motivation or productivity; it manifests from a failure to regulate negative emotions. If you are mired in a chronic procrastination cycle, journalist Charlotte Lieberman helps you dig your way out. She interviewed an array of psychologists, authors and professors to figure out how best to end the self-destructive cycle. Lieberman provides a range of tips to guide procrastinators into a more positive frame of mind.

«“Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem,” said Dr. Tim Pychyl, professor of psychology and member of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa.»

A new analysis of genetic samples from China appears to link the pandemic’s origin to raccoon dogs.

Writing in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis details the ways that women face outsized consequences in a pandemic and what governments could do about it. As she notes, William Shakespeare wrote King Lear and Isaac Newton’s work flourished during the Great Plague of London, but they weren’t sheltering in place with children. Lewis offers telling anecdotal and statistical evidence that during the coronavirus pandemic women are likely to shoulder the lion’s share of child care and domestic work and are more likely to lose or give up their jobs, all while governments pay scant attention to their thoughts or needs.

«“As a collective academic group, we knew there would be an outbreak that came out of China, that shows you how globalization spreads disease, that’s going to paralyze financial systems, and there was no pot of money ready to go, no governance plan … We knew all this, and they didn't listen. So why would they listen to something about women?”»

Monotony and anxiety wrought havoc on our brains. Can we bounce back?

Most Americans think they know the story of the pandemic. But when a writer immersed himself in a Covid oral-history project, he realized how much we’re still missing.

An estimated 4 million workers in the U.S. are struggling to work due to debilitating symptoms from long COVID. The government is urging employers to provide accommodations to keep them on the job.