Best of the week - 24 April 2020

Each week BISA Director, Juliet Dryden, scours the internet for COVID-19 content that might interest you. Here she brings this week's best podcasts and readings. She finishes with 'In other news', giving you a moment's break from the pandemic.

This week marks the second of our 'Best of lockdown' lists of readings, podcasts, videos and non-COVID news, and the first of this becoming a weekly series. If you missed the first list covering the first three weeks of lockdown, it's still available on our analysis pages.

Podcasts

• The Talking Politics team interview Nate Silver on database politics.  A fascinating look through an expert’s eye to reading the data and what it means for politics.
• Listen to The Conversation’s review of coronavirus theories with the Anthill Podcasts by Annabel Bligh. Why are there so many and what lies behind them?
• The Ezra Klein Show analyses the loneliness pandemic. What are the social consequences of social distancing, and what toll will isolation and loneliness take on our health?
• Talking Politics interviews Adam Tooze in ‘Shockwave’. What do we know about the crisis that we didn't know a month ago, and what do we still not have much of a clue about? Talking Politics tries to join up the dots from fights inside the French government to the fate of the planet, from shale gas to corona bonds.
• Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd give us ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’, on learning from the crisis. They ask two historians about learning lessons from the past. Walter Scheidel argues that economic inequality has only ever been significantly reduced by catastrophes and war. Theda Skocpol discusses the impact that ideas and social movements can have.

Readings

• John R. Allen, President of the Brookings Institution and Karin von Hippel, Director-General of RUSI ask: where is the global coalition to fight the virus?
• George Packer for the Atlantic gives us a special preview (June 2020) on the failed American state in ‘We are living in a Failed State: The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken'.
• The New Statesman’s Brian Melican takes us back to look at three cities transformed by pandemics across history.
• Read Bridget Anderson’s blog from the University of Bristol’s Migration Mobilities. ‘No more back to normal: normal was the problem. Thoughts on corona.’ A look at the unprecedented challenges and opportunity facing social scientists.
• Creon Bulter from Chatham House analyses how we can reopen the UK economy?
• The Guardian asks why people from BAME groups are dying disproportionately from the virus.
• Barry R. Posen writes in Foreign Affairs, ‘Do Pandemics Promote Peace?’
• Washington Post looks at whether there is a problem calling it a ‘war’ against coronavirus.

In other News

UK Politics: Mile End Institute podcast – What’s Keir Starmer all about?

Brexit: The Guardian – UK making impossible demands over Europol database

Middle East:  EA Worldview – 'Trump threatens as Tehran launches first military airstrike' and Helen Thompson in the Guardian - 'Low demand for oil is not good news'.

Earth Day: April 22nd was Earth Day.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash