The next calamity: Covid-19 in the emerging world
The world this week
Leaders
Everything’s under control
The state in the time of covid-19
Big government is needed to fight the pandemic. What matters is how it shrinks back again afterwards
The next calamity
The coronavirus could devastate poor countries
It is in the rich world’s self-interest to help
The medicine tastes bad
America’s emergency stimulus is imperfect but necessary
Like past rescue packages, this one could leave a lingering sense of unfairness
Through the keyhole
Videoconferencing etiquette
Working and entertaining online pose new challenges—and require new thinking
Letters
On Taiwan, Myanmar, primaries, elephants, Freeman Dyson, congenital diseases, house names
Letters to the editor
Briefing
Creating the coronopticon
Countries are using apps and data networks to keep tabs on the pandemic
And also, in the process, their citizens
Building up the pillars of state
Rich countries try radical economic policies to counter covid-19
History suggests that the effects will be permanent
Europe
The emergency room
Spain has suffered more covid-19 deaths than any country save Italy
Covid comparisons
Why does Germany’s death rate look better than Italy’s?
Desperate times
Germany offers cash for everyone
Typhus off!
Why Dutch swear words are so poxy
Fortress Russia
Russia’s economy is isolated from the global rout
Britain
Dealing with the virus
How covid-19 exacerbates inequality
Politics
Boris Johnson’s belated lockdown
Rural England
Village life under lockdown
Labour market
The jobs retention scheme’s unintended consequences
Scottish politics
Not-guilty verdicts for Alex Salmond
Middle East & Africa
Continental contagion
Africa is woefully ill-equipped to cope with covid-19
An even tighter grip
As covid-19 spreads, Arab states are clamping down
A double lockdown
Gaza, already under siege, imposes quarantine
United States
The bills you have to pay
Young Americans have been surprisingly vulnerable to the virus
Love under lockdown
The return of slow courtship to American dating
Pushing on an open door
The virus should speed efforts to shrink America’s prison population
Sharing and not caring
American teens are sexting more and sexing less
The Americas
Asia
Blowing out the flame
Covid-19 forces Japan to delay the Olympics
Naming and shaming
A sex-abuse scandal incenses millions of South Koreans
Hand-to-mouth to lockdown
India and Pakistan try to keep a fifth of humanity at home
China
The post-virus economy
China goes back to work
International
Special report
The African century
Africa is changing so rapidly, it is becoming hard to ignore
Demography
Africa’s population will double by 2050
The forever wars
Parts of Africa will remain unstable for decades
Food and climate
African countries must get smarter with their agriculture
Business
The importance of people people
The coronavirus crisis thrusts corporate HR chiefs into the spotlight
Bartleby
Diary of a home worker
The nowhere firm
How to manage a business without a headquarters
Finance & economics
Trucks, queues and blues
If you thought the trade war was bad for global commerce...
On shaky ground
America’s mortgage market sickens
Ripping up the rules
The ECB breaks its self-imposed rules
Free exchange
How to pay for the pandemic
Science & technology
Covid-19 and climate change
The epidemic provides a chance to do good by the climate
Detecting elevated body heat
Taking people’s temperatures can help fight the coronavirus
Culture
How to survive a plague
When Athenians feared a disease would wreck their democracy
The online of beauty
How art galleries are adapting to the lockdown
Civilisation and barbarism
Art and carnage in the Italian Renaissance
Women overboard
People—and money—vanish in “The Glass Hotel”
The yolk of fate
Bulgakov’s biting vision of an avoidable plague
Economic & financial indicators
Graphic detail
Winter is not coming
The northern-hemisphere winter of 2019-20 was the warmest ever on land
Obituary
Cooking with Albert