Mar 28th 2020

Everything’s under control: Big government, liberty and the virus

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

Get serious

Iran cannot fight covid-19 with conspiracy theories

Try public-health policies instead

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

United States

A $2trn bazooka

Congress puts aside its habitual dysfunction and responds to covid-19

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

Zowie Howie

Howie Hawkins will probably be the Green Party’s 2020 nominee

Lexington

Relations between China and America are infected with coronavirus

The Americas

BolsoNero

Brazil’s president fiddles as a pandemic looms

Distancing neighbours

Mexico and the United States shut their border, sort of

Bello

Covid-19 will sicken Latin America’s weak economies

Asia

Blowing out the flame

Covid-19 forces Japan to delay the Olympics

Ee begum!

Bangladesh releases a jailed opposition figure

Naming and shaming

A sex-abuse scandal incenses millions of South Koreans

Banyan

Let Taiwan into the World Health Organisation

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

Chaguan

The pandemic will boost China’s standing, its propagandists claim

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

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

Charlemagne

How grasshoppers triumphed over ants in Europe

Britain

Dealing with the virus

How covid-19 exacerbates inequality

Politics

Boris Johnson’s belated lockdown

Drugs

Coke is out, weed is in

Health care

How the National Health Service is transforming itself

Rural England

Village life under lockdown

Community

How covid-19 is playing out on a London street

Labour market

The jobs retention scheme’s unintended consequences

Scottish politics

Not-guilty verdicts for Alex Salmond

Bagehot

Politics in the time of covid-19

International

Stop, collaborate and listen

Crowdsourcing to fight covid-19

Wind rush

Scientists and industry are dashing to make more ventilators

Jobs at The Economist

We’re hiring

Special report

The African century

Africa is changing so rapidly, it is becoming hard to ignore

Demography

Africa’s population will double by 2050

Migration

Migration is helping Africa in many ways

The forever wars

Parts of Africa will remain unstable for decades

Food and climate

African countries must get smarter with their agriculture

Economy

Many of Africa’s economies are doing well

The future

Why are some African countries improving and others not?

Business

Best in show

The pandemic shock will make big, powerful firms even mightier

Still open

How retailers vie to be considered “essential” in a lockdown

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

Schumpeter

How Alan Jope runs Unilever from his study

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

The Zoom accord

America’s central bank is not the only one doling out greenbacks

Ripping up the rules

The ECB breaks its self-imposed rules

Buyer beware

Saudi Arabia floods the oil market; America tries to prop up prices

Buttonwood

An imaginative template for dealing with the cash crunch

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

The pandemic

Airborne particles may be assisting the spread of SARS-CoV-2

Detecting elevated body heat

Taking people’s temperatures can help fight the coronavirus

Books & arts

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

Economic data, commodities and markets

Graphic detail

Winter is not coming

The northern-hemisphere winter of 2019-20 was the warmest ever on land

Obituary

Cooking with Albert