Major crises bring lasting change. We should expect no less from the Covid-19 depression. The only question is what kind of change we will get. The New Deal gave us Social Security, unemployment insurance, and infrastructure construction. Soldiers returning from World War II could attend college for free because of the GI Bill; the large […]

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Thinking several steps ahead prepares us for the future; not doing so invites failure. The inability to think ahead has turned a global health crisis into an economic crisis for the United States and a political crisis for President Trump. Currently (early May), it is hard to know when the U.S. economy can safely reopen […]

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The newspapers are full of obituaries for New York. In my neighborhood, one place has not closed even for a day: Russo’s, the Italian grocery that dates from the turn of the last century, that weathered the 1918 flu, the Depression, the wars, deindustrialization, and gentrifiers’ arson. It’s a tiny place, and the main worker […]

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In New Orleans, we usually recoil at comparisons to Hurricane Katrina. Phrases like “Trump’s Katrina” round off the important edges of both our 2005 tragedy and the current one. Yet as I walk my newly quieted neighborhood in New Orleans these past few weeks, it is impossible not to recall—or flash back to might be […]

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The president’s early indifference and his administration’s slow-motion response to the emerging threat of Covid-19 are well-documented, as are his now-famous remarks at the World Economic Forum that it was “just one person coming in from China” and how he had the virus “totally under control.” In recent weeks, as the nation’s horrific death toll […]

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