Best of the week - 5 June 2020

Each week BISA Director, Juliet Dryden, scours the internet for COVID-19 content that might interest you. Here she brings you this week's best readings. She also gives you 'The best of the rest' - readings and podcasts to keep you up to date with what's happening around the world.

COVID-related news

• An interview with neuroscientist and COVID-19 expert Professor Karl Friston in the Guardian
• Matt Ridley for the Wall Street Journal explains where the virus came from
• Professor Hugh Pennington in the Telegraph argues that there is no evidence a second wave is coming
• Helen Thompson for the New Statesman on how the crisis has sharpened the English Question as the devolved administrations go their own way
• Gary Younge in the New Stateman on systemic racism
• Foreign Policy looks at how the world will look after the Coronavirus Pandemic: 12 leading global thinkers give their predictions.

The best of the rest

Podcasts

• Listen to The Showdown at Lafayette Square from the Daily. Go inside a high-stakes White House debate over how President Trump should respond to reports that he was hiding in a bunker while the nation’s capital burned
• The Burner: Two Pandemics from Novara Media Podcasts. Listen to Ash Sarkar going to the Black Lives Matter protest in London, and hear him talk to the protesters on the new front line of anti-racist struggle in the UK
• Facts vs Opinions from Talking Politics. The team interview Jonathan Shainin, Head of Opinion at the Guardian newspaper, about the challenges of political journalism in a deeply polarised age. Is it possible to hold the line between news and comment? Are the arguments about Covid a re-run of Brexit? What can scientists and historians add to political analysis?
• The Passion Economy with Adam Davidson and Hugo Lindgren from Intelligence Squared. Are the middle classes really dying off? Will robots really take our jobs? Contrary to common belief, Adam Davidson argues the twenty-first-century economic paradigm offers new ways of making money, fresh paths toward professional fulfillment, and unprecedented opportunities for curious, ambitious individuals to combine the things they love with their careers
• Listen to Professor Archie Brown talk about his new book on the end of the Cold War: the Human Factor for the St Antony College podcast series.

Reading

Brexit

• Lawrence Freedman for Foreign Affairs: The UK’s search for a post-Brexit role

China and Hong Kong

• The Economist: China’s national security bill for Hong Kong is an attempt to terrify

Arms Race

• Inderjeet Parmar and Atul Bhardwaj for the Wire look at Trump’s decision to walk away from the Open Skies Treaty

USA/Trump/riots

• The Atlantic’s Eliot A Cohen asks if Trump has underestimated the resilience of Americans and their institutions
• Vox – America at breaking point
• General Mattis denounces Trump in the Atlantic
• Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic: History will Judge the Complicit: Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in favour of an immoral and dangerous President
• New York Review of Books. Hari Kunzru’s ‘Democracy’s Red Line’. A look at Masha Gessen’s new  book on Surviving Autocracy.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash