March 26, 2020
Profits or People
Week 4 was when dollar signs kept turning up, and up, astonishingly: price-tags on the virus’s damage, price-tags on fighting it. The bailout of bailouts came in at $2.2 trillion...| More
March 19, 2020
Springtime in the Plague Year
It’s the virus’s world. We just live in it: isolated, locked down for the duration, sheltering in place, with an alternate risk of cabin fever. The theme of the week...| More
March 12, 2020
Contagious Crisis
Our journals of the plague year start this week. Coronavirus went pandemic, and the investors’ bull market turned free-falling bear. In the conversation market, the monopolist Donald Trump is upstaged...| More
March 6, 2020
Plagues, Pathogens, and Panic
Stuff we’re all learning in coronavirus time: the word miasma, for example, meaning noxious bad air; that we touch our faces 23 times an hour; that sanitizers like Purell were...| More
February 27, 2020
The New Red Scare
The winter round of the presidential race goes to Bernie Sanders, not so much for winning the most votes from Democrats as for coining the key word, the big theme...| More
February 20, 2020
The Soul of Care
Arthur Kleinman is a name that comes up again and again when you search around our big college town of Boston / Cambridge for people asking the great human questions,...| More
February 13, 2020
Malcolm X in Boston and Beyond
The life of Malcolm X is the classic hero’s journey, in a setting we almost know: a story of anointment, dedication, fate, faith, family, incredible risk and reversals. There was...| More
February 6, 2020
The New Hampshire Primary
Say what you will about the cranky-Yankee New Hampshire primary, in a remote, mostly white state in the shape of a dunce cap on the map of New England. It’s...| More
January 30, 2020
The Age of Illusions
Soldier and citizen, Andrew Bacevich is the overqualified expert who turns the standard take on our distress inside out. It’s not President Trump that divides us, Bacevich says. Rather, Trump...| More
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