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the pandemic has pushed all of the country’s problems to the center of American life. It has also highlighted how our political class, disproportionately wealthy and white, dithers for weeks, only to produce underwhelming “rescue” bills that, at best, do no more than barely maintain the status quo.

The median wealth of a U.S. senator was $3.2 million as of 2018, and $900,000 for a member of the House of Representatives. These elected officials voted for one-time stimulus checks of $1,200 as if that was enough to sustain workers, whose median income is $61,973 and who are now nearly two months into various mandates to shelter-in-place and not work outside their homes. As a result, a tale of two pandemics has emerged.

The crisis spotlights the vicious class divide cleaving through our society and the ways it is also permeated with racism and xenophobia.

he inflicted on us a presidency which was ignorant, cruel, reckless, lawless, divisive, and disloyal.

Mendacity and bigotry became the mode of communication between America’s president and his party’s base.

Not only did he worsen a deadly pandemic—by immersing an angry and alienated minority in his alternate reality, he is sickening our future.

ut simply, COVID-19 is mostly a talking disease—one that could be brought to heel with universal mask wearing, a national campaign that emphasizes quiet in public spaces, and harsh laws about indoor gatherings.

None of this is breaking news. We’ve known most of it for a while. In the spring, a raft of CDC studies—from a Chinese restaurant, a Korean call center, and an American choir practice—made it clear that talking, laughing, and singing in close quarters for many hours is the perfect storm for a super-spreader event.

- If these aerosolized particles spread easily in unventilated indoor spaces … we should shut down and bail out indoor businesses that naturally invite crowding and talking, such as bars.

As they closed in on a $900 billion stimulus deal, top Democrats and Republicans in Congress haggled on Thursday over a handful of remaining issues that could help determine how much power President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will have to act once he takes office to provide additional help for the sputtering economy.

Democrats were making a last-ditch effort to provide emergency aid to states, which they argued was critical to helping states weather the pandemic and avoid huge layoffs and cuts in services that could reverberate through the economy. Republicans were working to limit the power of the Federal Reserve to bail out businesses, municipalities or other institutions in the future.

With Congress running out of time to cement a stimulus agreement and avoid a government shutdown on Friday, leaders remained optimistic that they would ultimately find a resolution, although their wrangling could bleed into the weekend.

uropean gas prices have soared in recent weeks, climbing to a high of $25 per million British thermal units (chart 1, left panel)

from Russian supply bottlenecks to a lack of wind in the North Sea, caused the spike.

Even before the recent price surge, gas was in short supply. A prolonged northern-hemisphere winter meant that European countries ran down reserves, leaving their stocks 25% below the historic average

In 1949, Reinhold Niebuhr published a book called “Faith and History.” Niebuhr noticed a secular religion that was especially strong in the years after World War II. It was the faith that historical forces were gradually bringing about “the unification of mankind.”

Old nationalisms would fade away, many people believed. Transportation and communications technologies would unite people. Values would converge. This optimistic faith was at the heart of many postwar projects, first the United Nations and then the European Union. The idea was to create multilateral bodies that would hasten the process of convergence, harmonization and peace.

Unfortunately, this moral, cultural and political convergence never happened. In the decades since, people in different nations, even people within nations, have become less alike in at least as many ways as they have become more alike.

A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.

The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.

But weeks later Mr. Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.

A trial in Zimbabwe of a freelance reporter working for The New York Times, a case viewed as a litmus test of press freedom in the southern African country, paused on Friday after three days that included testimony by a chief witness for the state, who could not produce the documents at the heart of the case.

The reporter, Jeffrey Moyo, 37, has been accused of fabricating accreditation documents for two Times journalists, Christina Goldbaum and João Silva, who flew from South Africa to the southwestern Zimbabwe city of Bulawayo last May for a reporting trip.

Mr. Moyo was arrested and charged a few weeks later, and could face up to ten years in prison, a fine, or both. He has pleaded innocent.

The tragedy of Ian ought to help more Floridians understand the consequences of environmental destruction, perfunctory planning, and climate denial.

our politics might be less disastrous if more people understood why it still feels like paradise.

For too long, too much of the Florida economy has been an ecological Ponzi scheme that depends on bringing in 1,000 new residents a day, including the mortgage brokers and drywall installers and landscapers whose livelihoods depend on bringing 1,000 more new residents the next day. There’s no culture of long-term planning or investing, no ethic of limits or responsibility or risk management. Florida has always been about now, mine, more.

Today, Britain is very much not on the edge of national annihilation, whatever the hyperbolic coverage of the past few weeks might suggest. But it is in the grip of chaotic mismanagement that has left the country poorer and weaker, having lost its fourth prime minister in six turbulent years since the Brexit referendum and with an economy pushed close to its breaking point.

when did this era of the small people begin? What was its genesis?

He had also signed up to a new European treaty that left a fatal tension at the heart of Britain’s membership in the European Union. Major’s European compromise left Britain inside the European Union but outside its single currency. In time, the inherent tension in this position would reveal itself in disastrous fashion—the historian Niall Ferguson has called it “Brexit 1.0.”

with leaders from London to Berlin mounting costly state interventions, it augurs a reversal of decades of liberalization in energy markets.

France has capped gas and electricity rates, subsidized the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel and spent 45 billion euros ($45 billion) to help hard-hit families.

Germany has moved to take command of its energy markets, subsidizing new liquefied gas import terminals and bailing out one of the largest utilities, Uniper,

Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone.

Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events. The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.

exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see. Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake. 

Along with more pedestrian worries about various ways that AI could harm users, one side worried that ChatGPT and its many cousins might thrust humanity onto a kind of digital bobsled track, terminating in disaster — either with the machines wiping out their human progenitors or with humans using the machines to do so themselves. Once things start moving in earnest, there’s no real way to slow down or bail out, so the worriers wanted everyone to sit down and have a long think before getting anything rolling too fast.

Skeptics found all this a tad overwrought. For one thing, it left out all the ways in which AI might save humanity by providing cures for aging or solutions to global warming. And many folks thought it would be years before computers could possess anything approaching true consciousness, so we could figure out the safety part as we go. Still others were doubtful that truly sentient machines were even on the horizon; they saw ChatGPT and its many relatives as ultrasophisticated electronic parrots

Worrying that such an entity might decide it wants to kill people is a bit like wondering whether your iPhone would prefer to holiday in Crete or Majorca next summer.

U.S. gasoline prices are plunging just in time for Thanksgiving, and with the OPEC Plus oil cartel in apparent disarray, they could be heading lower for Christmas.

The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline on Wednesday was $3.28, about 6 cents less than a week earlier and 27 cents less than a month ago.

Prices have dropped below $3 a gallon in more than a dozen states

One great theme of the post-2008 financial world is that money is a social construct, a way to keep track of what society thinks you deserve in terms of goods and services.

15 years ago it was easier to think that money was an objective fact. Money is a kind of stuff, you might have thought, stuff with some predictable value that you can exchange for goods and services, and you can acquire a quantity of it and then you own that money and can use it however you like to buy things. 

Russia’s foreign reserves consist, in the first instance, of a set of accounting entries. But in a crisis the accounting entries don’t matter at all. All that matters are relationships, and if your relationships get bad enough then the money is as good as gone.

In 2008, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department also stepped in during the subprime lending crisis to coordinate the restructuring of troubled institutions. But creditor and investor rights and the political risks of bailing out banks limited what American regulators can do; arrangements were reached only after hard bargaining with banks and investment houses. In China, financial institutions have to do what the government tells them.

The government’s hand is everywhere. The most fundamental asset in China — land — is owned or controlled by the state. The value of China’s currency, the renminbi, is government-managed and regulators are widely believed to intervene in trading on the country’s stock markets.

Most of China’s biggest and most powerful companies, including all of its major banks, are state-owned, and executives are usually members of the Communist Party, which controls top-level corporate appointments.

French President Emmanuel Macron might have been too blunt about his worries about Europe becoming a “vassal” of the United States, but his views are in fact widely shared in Europe and beyond. The war in Ukraine has hurt Europe by raising its energy costs while benefiting the United States, which is the world’s top producer of hydrocarbons and sells many at low cost. European companies are shifting investment to the United States, lured in part by the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous subsidies. A German CEO said to me recently, “You cannot expect us to forgo cheap Russian energy as well as the Chinese market. That would be suicide for Europe.”

More broadly, if geopolitical tensions win out and economic ties continue to weaken, we will move into a very different world, marked by much greater chaos and disorder at every level. One sign of this can be seen in the impasse over debt restructuring. Dozens of the world’s most vulnerable economies are in or at high risk of debt distress. (Lebanon, for example, has been in default for three years.) Yet the International Monetary Fund cannot bail out these countries because China (which is one of the world’s largest creditors) cannot come to an agreement with Western nations on the terms of relief. The two sides blame each other and hundreds of millions of people suffer.

The last time two major world powers tried to manage a relationship of economic interdependence and rising geopolitical rivalry was Britain and Germany in the period from the 1880s to 1914. That experiment ended very badly, with a war that destroyed much of the industrialized world. Both sides should try to ensure we do better this time

“There is a sort of religion of language in France,” said Julien Barret, a linguist and writer who has written an online glossary of the language prevalent in the banlieues where Ms. Nakamura grew up. “French identity is conflated with the French language” he added, in what amounts to “a cult of purity.”

France’s former African colonies increasingly infuse the language with their own expressions. Singers and rappers, often raised in immigrant families, have coined new terms.

Ms. Nakamura’s dance-floor hits use an eclectic mix of French argot like verlan, which reverses the order of syllables; West African dialect like Nouchi in the Ivory Coast; and innovative turns of phrase that are sometimes nonsensical but quickly catch on.

I was thrilled when the Biden administration came in with a plan for big federal investments in the American industrial base, tariffs, support for labor unions and actions against monopolies. No one knew what to call it — Post-neoliberalism? Democratic capitalism? Neopopulism? — but for the first time in generations a U.S. administration was saying that people should control the market, not the other way around.

But if it was the right path, why didn’t more voters trust President Biden on the economy?

To understand who Ms. Harris is, you have to know who she used to be.