THE INTERPRETER The country showed that it is possible to contain the coronavirus without shutting down the economy, but experts are unsure whether its lessons can work abroad. Seoul on Friday. South Korea is one of only two countries to dramatically slow the spread of a major coronavirus outbreak,…

Works of art that were once radical tend to find their cozy place in the cultural ecosystem. It’s almost funny to think that an audience ever booed “The Rite of Spring,” or that the Sex Pistols shocked people to their souls, or that museum patrons once stood in front of Jackson Pollock’s splatter…

Spencer Platt/Getty When the 1918 influenza pandemic ripped through the United States, inequality took its revenge. In the decade just before the outbreak, Progressives had worked tirelessly to narrow the gap between rich and poor that had blown wide open in the Gilded Age. They took on monopoly…

The November, 1993 release of Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) transported listeners into a discordant world of martial arts samples, Five Percenter knowledge, and street tales, all while unveiling the greatest concentration of talent hip-hop had ever witnessed. Ol’ Dirty Bastard, a…

Scott Laven /Getty Images The NBA season is postponed , MLB’s opening day is pushed back , the NHL hit pause , the NFL is relocating its draft from Las Vegas to a Google Hangout, and even the notoriously stubborn IOC just admitted that the Olympics won’t happen in 2020 . As the coronavirus pandemic…

During practically every stage of the coronavirus pandemic, Elon Musk — one of the world’s leading technologists, innovators, and entrepreneurs — has truly run the range on his most half-baked impulses. And each time, they fall somewhere between “annoying” and “outright dangerous on a Trumpian scale…

W hen the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed…

dondesigns / Shutterstock / The Atlantic March 14 was a standard Saturday night for the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day: “Just a bunch of random people smashing Guinness,” said Andrew, a bartender who works at an “Irish-adjacent” bar in Washington, D.C. From 6 p.m. until last call at 2:30 a.m.,…

FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty All new drugs that come into development are long shots, but some are longer than others. The vaccines most imminently starting trials for COVID-19 range from the promising but speculative to the highly promising but ethically fraught. On Monday, Kaiser Permanente began…

Joan Wong Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here . T hree months ago , no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and…

Anthony Fauci (far right) attends a recent White House press briefing on the pandemic. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images ‘I’m going to keep pushing.’ Anthony Fauci tries to make the White House listen to facts of the pandemic Anthony Fauci, who to many watching the now-regular White House press…

‘The existing differences in each nation’s fiscal condition are already causing a sharp divergence in the policy response.’ The European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt.Photograph: Daniel Roland/AFP via Getty Images D uring the 2008 financial crisis, many observers predicted the imminent…

Peter Cziborra / Action Images / Reuters Around the world, countries are seeking to lock down their populations to halt the spread of the coronavirus, “freeze” their economies in place, and help people survive the ice age by any means necessary. Denmark’s version of ice-age economics goes like this:…

Inside the surreal and lucrative two-sided marketplace of mediocre famous people Patrick J. Sauer Mar 17 · 19 min read “W ho’s the most famous person on the planet?” asks Steven Galanis. “Someone we would want to book?” It’s a bitterly cold January evening in Chicago, and we’re huddled at a…

Call Trump’s News Conferences What They Are: Propaganda Then contrast them with the leadership shown by Andrew Cuomo, Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel. Opinion columnist President Trump at the coronavirus briefing at the White House on Friday. Credit... Erin Schaff/The New York Times In a time of…

Play Video Animation shows sustainable urban plan of Merwede with car-free area – video The “cyclist-first” city of Utrecht is constructing the Netherlands’ first high-density, car-free residential district for more than 12,000 people, making it one of the largest of its type in the world. The…

The first world war didn’t change economics, it was the Wall Street Crash more than a decade later.Photograph: Icon Communications/Getty Images R ishi Sunak says the measures he has announced to support the economy are without precedent in peacetime, and he’s right. Never before has the British…

To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members. We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is…

Enlarge / Hakkar the Soulflayer was the primary source of infection for the "Corrupted Blood" outbreak in World of Warcraft . Blizzard Entertainment When it comes to a global pandemic, human beings are the ultimate wild card. That makes it challenging to build accurate mathematical models to predict…

In May 2018, President Donald Trump restructured and downsized the pandemic preparedness unit. Of course, it seems ill-judged in retrospect. But he was not the first president to do so. The National Security Council’s (NSC) global health security unit was set up under Bill Clinton in 1998. Years…

Like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the coronavirus pandemic is a world-shattering event whose far-ranging consequences we can only begin to imagine today. This much is certain: Just as this disease has shattered lives, disrupted markets and exposed the competence…

Infighting, turf wars and a president more concerned with the stock market and media coverage than policy have defined the Trump White House. They have also defined how it has handled a pandemic. The internal culture created by President Trump is haunting his administration’s crisis response to the…

Mar 12th 2020 W HAT A CONVENIENT thing a tame parliament is. On March 10th, acting on a proposal from the first woman in space (now a celebrity MP ), the Russian Duma approved an amendment to the country’s constitution that would reset the clock barring anyone from serving more than two consecutive…

Screenshot: Starsky Robotics Starsky Robotics is a self-driving truck company that was the first company to run an unmanned semi on a public highway. It’s now shutting down though, and its co-founder has some unusually sensible and honest things to say about the industry, unusual only because the…

D ennis Carroll doesn’t mean to sound callous when he says the coronavirus outbreak was predictable. And he doesn’t. He sounds sympathetic to people frightened by the outbreak. He has been an eyewitness to people around the world suffering from similar viruses. Most of all, Carroll sounds…

Photo: Handout/Getty Images Angela Merkel doesn’t do drama and she doesn’t give speeches on TV. So the mere fact that the German chancellor faced the camera across a desk and spoke to the nation Wednesday evening made the gravity of the situation clear. “ Es ist ernst ,” she said—“This is serious”—…

Letter to self and to anyone else: This is the wrong cover at the wrong time. And if you try read the front-of-the-book articles, it gets worse and worse. Thanks for the emotional boost, New York Magazine ! Panic is sudden, uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly unthinking behavior.…

What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time Tomas Pueyo Mar 19 · 27 min read This article follows Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now , an article with over 40 million views translated into over 20 languages describing the urgency of the Coronavirus problem. If you agree with this…

Grocery stores are being ransacked amid the coronavirus panic. Christian Petersen/Getty Images As with many crises, one way we’ve measured these early weeks of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak has been in supermarket lines and emptied shelves. In many places, nervous shoppers have been stockpiling…

Lauri “Tahko” (‘grindstone’) Pihkala is especially commemorated for his work in developing Finnish baseball. Finnish baseball is often compared to American baseball, and with good reason. As it happens, Pihkala visited the United States in 1907 and got to watch a local game of baseball. It is said…

Image: Massimo Temporelli Update, March 18th 5:30PM ET: A group of Italian volunteers distributed 3D-printed versions of a vital medical device — but it doesn’t appear that the original manufacturer threatened a legal crackdown. As we reported earlier, Cristian Fracassi and Alessandro Romaioli used…

An Amazon merchant, Matt Colvin, with an overflow stock of cleaning and sanitizing supplies in his garage in Hixon, Tenn. Credit... Doug Strickland for The New York Times Amazon cracked down on coronavirus price gouging. Now, while the rest of the world searches, some sellers are holding stockpiles…

The damage is likely to go well beyond tourism, as business plans are disrupted and consumer confidence is shaken. Air France KLM planes at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport. Airlines had already been cutting routes across the Atlantic when President Trump suspended most travel from Europe. By…

Under other circumstances, being homebound here might not seem a bad thing. Not for nothing is this stretch of the Italian Riviera called the Golfo Paradiso, the Gulf of Paradise. From our apartment, my wife and I look out at the Mediterranean, the nearby city of Genoa and the snow-capped mountains…

Closing the door: one of Vivos’ former army munitions bunkers, in South Dakota, US, repurposed for a ‘doomsday community’.Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA Like hundreds of thousands of people across the world the super-rich are preparing to self-isolate in the face of an escalation in the coronavirus…

An empty street is seen in Beijing in February, [+] [-] 2020. China's effort to contain the deadly coronavirus has closed factories and kept millions of workers and consumers at home—and that has reduced deadly air pollution. (Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images More From…

Top highlight Illustration: Mica Warren How venture capital became the most dangerous thing to happen to now-troubled DTCs like Outdoor Voices, Harry’s, and Casper Maya Kosoff Mar 9 · 14 min read E ven if you don’t know who Ty Haney is, if you’ve spent any time on Instagram you probably know her…

Uber knows when the battery on your phone is running low – and that you are more likely to pay higher “surge” prices for a car as a result. The taxi-hailing app captures a huge amount of data on all its users, and the company’s head of economic research Keith Chen has revealed how Uber uses that to…

After a recent, extensive, and rather withering bout of bad press, the facial recognition company Clearview AI has changed its homepage, which now touts all the things it says its technology can do, and a few things it can’t. Clearview’s system, the company says, is “an after-the-fact research tool.…