Editor’s Note: In avoiding a lockdown, and allowing most schools, restaurants and other businesses to remain open for the duration, the Swedish government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has diverged sharply from those pursued by most other European governments – although neighbouring Norway also avoided a mandatory lockdown, confining people to their homes. With an … Read more
I have always loved Star Trek. The utopian future was at odds with most other fictional visions of the times ahead. It’s easy to paint a world where nothing works, it’s much harder to paint one where everything does and still make it compelling. Plus, there were space ships! One of the franchise’s great heroes … Read more
Holy Gawd, we’re back to Charles Darwin and his interpreters. In the mid-19th century Darwin was recognised as a superb recorder of natural history and the inventor of evolutionary theory. He pointed to adaptation as a species’ key to survival. If an animal couldn’t adapt to new circumstances it faced extinction – like the dinosaurs … Read more
Editor’s Note: A long-term Western resident in China responds to conspiracy theories about the country benefitting from the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of what is being spread is untrue he says, but he does worry that the country is on the brink of another, dystopian Cultural Revolution. I have been living here for almost a decade. … Read more
Despite a mortality rate not far off Ireland’s (107 v 150 per million), Sweden has come in for a lot of criticism over its response to Covid-19 of leaving responsibility in the hands of civic society, with little acknowledgement of potential health benefits of not imposing one. Interestingly, nor did neighbouring Norway impose a full … Read more
The five hundred billion euro rescue package agreed by E.U. Finance Minister, subject to approval from their national governments, has received a lukewarm reception. The compromise was forged in typical EU fashion at the third attempt after the Dutch Finance Minister led stiff resistance to a push from France, Spain, Greece and Italy for a … Read more
Imagine a world where people live isolated in underground one-person apartments, talk to each other only through video-calls, and cannot go out because, if they do, they will not be able to breathe for long. You have just imagined the world of E.M. Forster’s novella The Machine Stops, in which humanity have altered the world … Read more
It all happened too fast, so quickly that we didn’t have time to fully understand. The night before we were sipping beer and eating tapas and waiting for spring to come in the warm evening breeze; the following day we were on the sofa consulting the Netflix schedule for the umpteenth time, without finding an … Read more
In October of 2013, a ship carrying hundreds of women, men and children, mainly from Eritrea and Ethiopia, sank off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy. Over three hundred of those on board drowned, prompting a brief media focus on the precarious journeys of those seeking refuge in Europe. One of the accounts published in the … Read more
The total number of deaths attributed to the Coronavirus in Ireland had reached 22 by March 27th, from 2,121 confirmed cases. However, with 14 of those occurring over the previous two day it suggests that number could rise steeply. Indeed, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has warned that intensive care units may be at capacity ‘within a … Read more