Best of the week - 7 May 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 podcasts, radio programmes, videos and readings. She finishes with 'In other news', giving you a moment's break from the pandemic.

Reading

• Anne Applebaum writing for The Atlantic explains how China is intending to fill the vacuum left by Trump, and why the rest of the world are laughing at him
• The Wired looks inside the early days of China’s coronavirus cover-up
• New York Times asks why the virus wallops some places but not others
• Michael Clark gives his thoughts on COVID 19 and Britain’s integrated review
• The Economist discusses how COVID 19 gave peace a chance and no one took it
• Exhausted by Zoom? National Geographic explains why
• Fintan O’Toole for The New York Review of Books looks at the vector-in-chief!
• Nicholas Kristof says the virus is winning.

Video, radio and podcasts

• Understanding the science. The chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty giving the Gresham College lecture on the COVID 19 coronavirus pandemic
• Tom Chivers, on Unherd asks ‘A cure at what cost?’
• The History of Now from the University of Cambridge podcast series with Professor Gary Gerstle. How the ‘live free or die’ Americans and their governments have confronted epidemic disease
• Talking Politics - Ebola, COVID and the WHO. Professors Runciman and Thompson talk to Amy Maxmen on comparisons between the two, the failure of the US response, whether WHO can still make a difference, and explore the implications of the growing politicisation of science.
• A History of Ideas - a new series of 12 episodes takes us on an exploration of some of the most important thinkers and prominent ideas lying behind modern politics – from Hobbes to Gandhi, from democracy to patriarchy, from revolution to lock down. A History of Ideas tries to make sense of what’s happening today.
• Intelligence Squared. Listen to The Great Slowdown and Why It's Good, with Danny Dorling and Linda Yueh. The end of our high-growth world was underway well before COVID-19 arrived. According to Danny Dorling fertility rates, growth in GDP per person, and even technological progress, have all steadily declined since the 1970's. Rather than lament this turn of events, Dorling says we should embrace it as a moment of promise and a move toward stability. 
• Listen to Veepstakes, Pod Save America. A look at how Trump is stepping up in his efforts to blame China.

In other news

• Raviv Drucker in Haaretz looks at Israel’s coalition government
• The challenges facing the new Prime Minister of Iraq from the Guardian and Al Jazeera
• Another thing to worry about? Murder hornets
• The strange absence and reappearance of Kim Jong Un. Read the view from the Washington Post
• Nature and Pandemics: How habitat destruction forces more wildlife into human environments where new diseases flourish. Read the Guardian’s view.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash