Is It Tomorrow Yet?: Paradoxes of the Pandemic

Description

One of our most scintillating public intellectuals explores the political paradoxes of the pandemic and helps us think our way through it 'We are able to imagine anything because we are being besieged by something that was considered unimaginable...' Beneath the panic and bluster, beneath the confusing speeches and the conflicting advice, the Coronavirus pandemic acted, changing our world in the most profound ways. The tragic human cost and the economic devastation will be assessed and calculated for decades to come. But the pandemic also changed things in ways that are less easily expressed and understood. It has made bare the frayed contradictions of modern life. It has distorted things that seemed simple and settled. It has affirmed plain, uncomfortable truths. In this brilliant, thought-provoking essay, Ivan Krastev, one of our most interesting thinkers today, explores the pandemic's immediate consequences and conceives of its long-term legacy. What will change for the young and for the old? Will things be different for the communities most harmed, and for those who escaped the worst? Where are we now with the US and China, with the UK and Europe? And how do we think our way through the unthinkable?

Ivan Krastev is a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times and, most recently, the author of the widely acclaimed After Europe.

One of the great European minds of today -- Timothy Snyder Few people question the conventional wisdom like Ivan Krastev -- George Soros Ivan Krastev is one of Europe's leading thinkers -- Madeleine Albright