Christmas Week 2020

 

The Economist this week Highlights from the latest issue

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Our cover this week, depicting an astronaut on Mars, presents 19 special features from our double issue—some of which appear in this newsletter. Our first leader looks back over a year consumed by the miseries of covid-19. The sheer scale of the suffering in the pandemic, the injustices and dangers it has revealed—but also the world’s response—mean that this will be remembered as a time when everything changed. The coronavirus has served as an engine of innovation, proved the value of science and its way of establishing facts, and recast the relationship between the citizen and the state. Most of all, people under lockdown have asked themselves what matters. Out of the ashes of their suffering will emerge the sense that life is not to be hoarded, but lived to the full.

Zanny Minton Beddoes Editor-In-Chief

Editor’s picks Must-reads from the current edition

Covid-19 in 2020 The year when everything changed Why the pandemic will be remembered as a turning-point

A travelogue of Mars Taking a short walk in Gale crater We follow the tracks of NASA’s Curiosity rover as it explores the red planet

Christmas newsletters Season’s greetings! Dispatches from the days when the newsfeed was refreshed once a year, by post

Zululand Trust deficit How a deal struck in the dying days of apartheid still afflicts modern South Africa

Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander The Alexander technique Economists are rediscovering the first African-American to earn a PhD in their discipline

Pleistocene Park The prophet of permafrost One scientist’s grand plan to to repopulate the Russian Arctic with large grazing animals

Shaolin monastery The profession of renunciation Tales of a “CEO monk” obscure the complex business of faith in China

Babbage Taming the internet titans—can the EU rein in big tech? Our podcast on the science and technology making the news. Also this week: a promising new treatment for blindness and the non-covid science stories of 2020

ADVERTISEMENT   It's time to go Beyond Great. The post-COVID reality will demand a new playbook. Read more

The world this year

A novel coronavirus, possibly transmitted by animals sold at a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, spread to create one of the worst global crises since the second world war. Covid-19 has so far caused more than 73m recorded infections and 1.6m recorded deaths. On January 23rd the Chinese authorities imposed a quarantine in Wuhan, soon extending it to the rest of Hubei province and beyond. Variants of this “lockdown” policy were adopted by other countries as they struggled to contain the outbreak.

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