“Week after Christmas” reading list, part one

The New Yorker: Jeffrey Sachs on the Catastrophic American Response to the Coronavirus. “Where does the United States stand in this? Well, the United States has done the unimaginable, and that is to try to cut the functioning of the W.H.O. in the middle of the pandemic. So I’m not looking for American heroism. I’m looking for the United States not to be among the most destructive forces on the planet right now.”

How to start a new job, in a new country, in the middle of a pandemic: Justin Giovannetti moved from Canada to New Zealand, and then COVID-19 happened. Here’s his report from November.

It starts when you’re always afraid: This is a 2013 piece by Greg Fallis, and it’s about a phenomenon that’s only ramped up since then. “The United States has become a nation ruled by fear-biters. A lot of our social policies are grounded in fear, and much of that fear is totally unfounded. We’re afraid of terrorists, so we find ways to weasel around the law in order to round up the people we’re afraid of and lock them away forever where we can’t see them. ‘Indefinite detention’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ are other forms of fear-biting.”

The case against telecommuting: Face Time, a New Yorker article published back in the halcyon days of March 2013, uses the case of Yahoo!’s then-CEO Marissa Meyer’s ending of telecommuting at the company. The article does say that telecommuting is workable in companies with healthy cultures, but there was a trend away from it, and management at the time was all for bringing everyone back to the office. It makes for very quaint reading now.

And finally, here’s The Emotional Journey of Creating Anything Great.