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It’s been two years. Chamberlain now has 8 million YouTube followers. She brought in the editing tricks that first set her friends and family rolling on the floor, but now they take longer to perfect.

Chamberlain edits each video she makes for between 20 and 30 hours, often at stretches of 10 or 15 hours at a time. Her goal is to be funny, to keep people watching. It’s as if the comic value of each video is inversely proportional to how little humor she experiences while making it. During her marathon editing sessions, she said, she laughs for “maybe, maybe 10 seconds max.”

Like other professional social media users, the work has taken a physical toll on her. (She releases roughly one video a week.) She used to edit at a desktop, but she developed back pain. Now she works from her bed. She keeps blue mood lighting on, but her vision has deteriorated. She wears reading glasses “like I’m 85 years old, because my eyes do actually get really strained.”

That is because anthropologists immerse themselves in an alien culture, try to shed the preconceptions of their own and seek to understand how a strange society works. Only if you view anthropology as an exact science would you suspect scandal when two anthropologists disagree, however sharply.

“Pandemics have hit us before - like influenza, measles and chickenpox – and they killed millions of people in Latin America,” he said, echoing the fears of indigenous communities across the region.

“Knowing we can’t cure ourselves because there is no cure, we have shut ourselves in,” he told the Guardian by telephone. “We don’t have masks or alcohol but we can use our medicinal plants to protect us.”

In Colombia’s southern reaches, on the edge of the Amazon jungle, the semi-nomadic Nükak community have also gone into isolation with 40 families – about 200 people – heading into two remote reservations hours from the nearest town.

When the investigations into the UK’s response to Covid-19 come to be written, there is widespread recognition among experts that this lack of long-term strategic planning will be at the centre of it.

So too should be the need to ensure that the views of experts are fed into government more efficiently and widely.

“Given the continual emergence of new pathogens ... and the ever-increasing connectedness of our world, there is a significant probability that a large and lethal pandemic will occur in our lifetime,” Bill Gates predicted several years ago. “And it will have the impact of a nuclear war,” he warned, while urging nations to start stockpiling antiviral drugs and therapies. If only.

It’s amazing how quickly you become used to new habits: not getting in the lift with other people or standing well apart in a queue (normally we’re bunched tight to foil the queue-bargers). When you ask a shopkeeper for a loaf of bread, they put it on the counter then step away. You pick it up, pay and step away. They put your change out and move back as you move forward. You feel like repelling magnets.

last Wednesday night, another emergency decree ramped up the restrictions: all shops, except chemists and food stores, were ordered to remain closed. If you want to leave the house, you now have to print off a document to explain to police your timing, destination and motive.

What’s intriguing is that all the adjectives you might normally use to describe Italy (sociable, excitable, chaotic, undisciplined, polemical, fun and – despite all its troubles – somehow optimistic) have become redundant. It feels completely the opposite: isolated, calm, orderly, obedient, cowed, dour and pessimistic. It’s as if the country has suddenly discovered a different, maybe deeper, side. It’s a sterner, more serious place.

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.

'He's under attack': pro-Trump rallies battle chill and opposing protesters

The anti-Trump group began chanting “T, R, U, M, P, are you fucking kidding me”, before moving on to “How much are they paying you?” – a reference to frequent claims by conservatives that liberal activists are being paid to protest.

In something of a blow for the expression of support, the pro-Trump rally was hampered by a dwindling turnout and a counter-protest.

Oklahoma Republican asked Muslims if they beat their wives, group says

An Oklahoma lawmaker who once likened Islam to a cancer this week handed out a questionnaire to Muslims that included questions such as “Do you beat your wife?”, a local civil rights organisation said.

“I will not tolerate something like Islam to come into the United States,” Bennett said, calling the religion “a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out”.

why should we train ourselves with dogged resolve to read reputable news sources and be informed about the global community? Because the people’s right to know is the foundation of our democracy. It is the media that has historically been the voice of the people and, in many senses, the fourth branch of government. It is important to make the connections between current events and past events so as to understand not only what is happening, but why it is happening.

he growth of technology has made the world smaller. It enables people to communicate across long distances which has led to an interweaving of politics, culture, and economies across the globe. It also means that anyone can express any opinion and have it broadcasted to millions of people with little to no filter or review process.

A recent poll at WFS asks a similar question: How do students in our community get their news? This poll revealed that of the 145 student responses, 38.6% learn about the news from social media, which is eerily close to the national average of adults.

we don’t really have to wonder what it’s like to live in a tribal society anymore, do we? Because we already do. Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures).

I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.

I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.