The world since Covid
Weekend Reads for March 15, 2025
Hello, friends and readers! And happy Saturday to all.
As we do each weekend, we’ve gathered the most interesting essays, interviews, and analysis from across the internet that we’ve read during our research this week, along with some music to move you forward. Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:
How, five years on, Covid changed the world we know — and how we know it
Is there more to the biochemical language of life than DNA and RNA?
How Robert Caro learned about power and found his mission
What imaging the world without us can teach us about caring for nature
The real story of Zelensky’s fatigues
How liberals (and mainstream Republicans) lost their way, and steered us towards losing everything
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A programming note: More Lives next week!
Join us this coming week for more great Live conversations. Monday, March 17 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll have our weekly conversation with scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. And Thursday, March 20, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern (a half-hour later than usual) we’ll be joined again by messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio. We hope to see you at both!
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Ides of March
No, it wasn’t quite Shakespearean — even serious resistance to the American would-be Caesar turned out not to be in the cards — but after Chuck Schumer and eight other Senate Democrats voted to pass the Republican budget yesterday, even after House Democrats stood firmly opposed, the metaphorical knives are out within the Democratic Party.
What’s next for the Democratic Party is far from clear, but there’s a real crisis of leadership now. The largely older Senate Democrats saw the political blowback of signing off on a shutdown as a worse threat than signing off on another six months of DOGE’s chaos and relinquished whatever limited leverage they might have had to exact concessions.
They’re clearly at odds with the younger leaders in the House — and with anyone who wants to achieve progressive goals in the foreseeable future. And, as Anand puts it, that means the political fight ahead is more complex than ever:
And I suggest that this is now a two-front war: the first and most urgent job is to fight the Trump-Musk rampage. The second but not trifling one is to depose much of what currently masquerades as Democratic Party “leadership” and build a new party.
And as always, that’s up to the people.
And now, your weekend reads
How Covid changed us
With retrospective clarity it seems obvious that the events we experienced beginning five years ago were not simply a replay of that established literary trope of humankind vs. nature, but rather a contest of duelling information systems – two feuding epistemologies and the distribution networks that ferried their disparate conclusions to their polarised constituencies. [Reuters Institute]
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