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LLast Saturday afternoon, Kristina Moy decided to swing by her local supermarket in the US city of Seattle to pick up some weekly groceries and supplies for her son’s upcoming baseball tournament. What started as a quick errand turned into a three-hour ordeal, navigating checkout lanes packed with hundreds of shoppers stocking up amid the outbreak of coronavirus.

Moy isn’t the only one to experience long queues and empty shelves. Mass demand for rice and instant noodles in Singapore prompted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to assure the public there was enough to go around. In Auckland, New Zealand, supermarket spending shot up 40% last Saturday compared to the same day a year ago. And shoppers in Malaysia wanting to pad “pandemic pantries” – grocery hoards to fill people’s kitchens until the crisis dies down – have driven an 800% increase in weekly hand sanitiser sales. (All of those places have confirmed cases of Covid-19.)

With events like looming natural disasters, such as a hurricane or flood, people frequently stock up with emergency supplies. “It is rational to prepare for something bad that looks like it is likely to occur,” says David Savage, associate professor of behavioural and microeconomics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, who’s written about the rationality behind stocking up in a crisis. However: “It is not rational to buy 500 cans of baked beans for what would likely be a two-week isolation period.”

Sometime in the next few days, the 100,000th American will succumb to Covid-19 in a pandemic that President Donald Trump once predicted would just "miraculously" disappear.

In his most politically significant maneuver, he heaped intense pressure on North Carolina's Democratic governor to permit a normal, crowded Republican National Convention, despite fears such a mass gathering could seed virus hot spots. Trump warned he could pull the huge money-earner out of Charlotte, which was picked to play host in August.

And he indulged his preoccupations on his tax returns, Hillary Clinton, Fox News, slanders against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, the Russia investigation, Joe Biden's mental health, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, mail-in voting in November and highlighted dangerous and unproven Covid-19 therapies promoted on conservative media he has tested himself.

We draw on all these areas to address a variety of contemporary and urgent themes that are philosophically challenging, and at the same time also have immediate relevance for our lives as social beings, in our daily interactions as well as in relation to broader economic, scientific, technological and cultural events.

Traditional understandings of the human-nonhuman relationship are being questioned,

to really understand the problem with Facebook we need to understand the structural roots of that problem, how much of it is baked into the core architecture of the site and its very business model

much of it is inherent in the core strategies of the post-2000, second wave Internet tech companies that now dominate our information space and economy.

Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation.

Habits -- actions performed with little conscious thought and often unwittingly triggered by external cues -- are powerful influences on behavior and can be our greatest allies for positive change. But because they are so difficult to break, habits are also frequent saboteurs of personal progress.

The first thing to identify for yourself is the habit you want to work on, whether it's starting a new (good) one or ending an old (bad) one. That's a minor distinction, by the way. Eating healthier is eating less junk. Exercising more is being less sedentary. One is often the inverse of another.

We know what many of the most common areas of improvement are, at least when it comes to making resolutions. People want to lose weight, eat better, be more mindful, spend money more wisely, sleep better and improve relationships. By eliminating bad habits and starting new ones, you can succeed in most of these areas.

What's that worn-out phrase? Shouting into the wind? Well, after a decade of rising pollution, failed politics and worsening disasters, it seems the many, many of us who care about the climate crisis increasingly are shouting into the hurricane, if not the apocalypse.

On the cusp of 2020, the state of the planet is far more dire than in 2010. Preserving a safe and healthy ecological system is no longer a realistic possibility. Now, we're looking at less bad options, ceding the fact that the virtual end of coral reefs, the drowning of some island nations, the worsening of already-devastating storms and the displacement of millions -- they seem close to inevitable. The climate crisis is already costly, deadly and deeply unjust, putting the most vulnerable people in the world, often who've done the least to cause this, at terrible risk.

There are two numbers you need to understand to put this moment in perspective.The first is 1.5. The Paris Agreement -- the international treaty on climate change, which admittedly is in trouble, but also is the best thing we've got -- sets the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 or, at most, below 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

Rich people live healthy, disability-free lives an average of nine years longer than less wealthy people, according to a major study that lays bare the troubling economic inequalities behind lifespans in the US and UK.

The biggest socioeconomic factor in predicting when those problems began was wealth, the team discovered, with richer people enjoying almost an extra decade before experiencing difficulties.

Research in 2016 found that men in the top financial 1% in the US can expect to live until the age of 87.3, nearly 15 years longer than those in the bottom 1%. The gap for women was 10 years.

Over the decades, Trump constructed and then inhabited a public persona that is powerful but unnatural. As a businessman and TV personality, Trump was, perhaps, the greatest illusionist of our time. He has repeated, ad nauseum, his unverified claims of wealth, sexual magnetism, and brilliance -- a "very stable genius" -- in an effort to produce the image of a great man.

But the theatrical dynamic of the Trump presidency was threatened every time real life collided with Trump's cartoon. His failures have often come at moments when he should be guided by a moral compass. But no one who is so devoted to a false persona could possess this kind of ethical reflex

Then, on Monday, Trump seemed to yet again try and regain his power by implying the Ukraine scandal couldn't be significant because it revolved around a "perfect" letter he wrote to Zelensky. It's the sort of distortion of the facts one would expect from a man whose comforting false reality is falling apart. As analysts have pointed out, Trump's contact with Zelensky involved not a letter, but a telephone call which was far from perfect. Indeed it was only "perfect" if one was looking for an example of a president abusing his office.

Coronavirus poses daunting challenges for economic policymakers. Public health efforts to contain the virus rely on "social distancing" by encouraging people to stay home and requiring businesses to reduce their output. In the past, the primary tools the government used to get our economy going focused on raising spending by encouraging people to do more of their usual activities. But that interferes with the public health effort against coronavirus.

In a typical recession, these effects are desirable. Unfortunately, what worked in previous recessions won't work for coronavirus. If schools and businesses are closed by order of public health authorities, then lower interest rates and tax cuts do not increase spending much. Instead, people are likely to save the money, undermining the stimulus effect. And if people do spend the money instead of saving it, monetary and fiscal stimulus may harm public health by encouraging people to go out and spend.

The response to the coronavirus pandemic has been unprecedented in terms of speed and scale. Commitments from governments and central banks to date are close to $7 trillion, according to an analysis by CNN Business. The total includes government spending, loan guarantees and tax breaks, as well as money printing by central banks to buy assets such as bonds and stock funds.

The figure includes the $2 trillion US relief package working its way through Congress and an anticipated 30 trillion yen ($274 billion) in stimulus from Japan that could be approved next month. In Europe, CNN Business tallied stimulus efforts by the biggest economies: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.

"The [$2 trillion US] stimulus package is likely the bare minimum needed to offset the current drag from the outbreak," Bank of America economist Joseph Song told clients Thursday. "The economy will likely need close $3 [trillion] in fiscal stimulus, if not more."

In Teaford’s case, the scouting evaluation was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, which was first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal.

Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become essential among many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staffs.

“Pretty much wherever I go, I’m bothering people, ‘Have you read this?’” said Mejdal, now an assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, writer and regular Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman faithfully carries the spirit of Seneca’s classic essay forward

It’s a deft and eclectic synthesis of ancient and modern thinking about how humanity can come to terms with our limited time on Earth – the title derives from the length of the average human lifespan – ranging intellectually from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like Seneca to modern-day Buddhist and existentialist thinkers.

he only touches on politics briefly and sporadically throughout the book’s 245 pages. But those of us in politics and policy – whatever capacity we find ourselves in – can learn quite a bit

It’s a deft and eclectic synthesis of ancient and modern thinking about how humanity can come to terms with our limited time on Earth – the title derives from the length of the average human lifespan – ranging intellectually from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like Seneca to modern-day Buddhist and existentialist thinkers. Stuffed with valuable and practical insights on life and how we use – or misuse – it, Four Thousand Weeks is an impressive and compact volume well worth the time and attention of even the most casual readers.

As Burkeman notes, our preoccupation with productivity allows us to evade “the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path.” The end result is a lot of dedicated and talented people in politics and policy burning themselves out for no discernable or meaningful purpose.

Then there’s social media, defined by Burkeman as “a machine for misusing your life.” Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook don’t just distract us from more important matters, he argues, “they change how we’re defining ‘important matters’ in the first place.”

Because of this, subtle biases can creep in and influence the way you see and think about the world. The concept of cognitive bias was first introduced by researchers Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972. Since then, researchers have described a number of different types of biases that affect decision-making in a wide range of areas including social behavior, cognition, behavioral economics, education, management, healthcare, business, and finance.

People sometimes confuse cognitive biases with logical fallacies, but the two are not the same. A logical fallacy stems from an error in a logical argument, while a cognitive bias is rooted in thought processing errors often arising from problems with memory, attention, attribution, and other mental mistakes.

You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.

Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are

Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.

for the past few years, these books have been written by Colleen Hoover.

What is it about Hoover’s stories — which dwell largely in romance, but also include a thriller and a ghost story — that women are drawn to?

I slorped down three of them in one week. I found myself carrying them from room to room, slipping in what would begin as “just a few pages” but then stretch into hours’ worth.

The five biggest technology giants in the U.S. have collectively lost more than $2 trillion of stock market value this year.

Start-up founders who were turning away eager investors a few months ago now must make an effort to get more money. (Gasp.)

Every couple of years for the past decade, anytime there were some wobbles in technology or moments of doubt, smart people predicted that the growth of the tech economy since the Great Recession couldn’t possibly last.