Even accounting for California’s much larger population, its death rate was three times as high as Iowa’s by February. Yet Iowa supposedly had done everything wrong through the winter, California everything right. (In a follow-up article in February 2021, The Atlantic would claim, laughably, that “one key reason” its promised apocalypse in Iowa had

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A THEME in this book, strategic narcissism, and the corresponding tendency to artificially separate interconnected problem sets, encourages short-term, simplistic solutions to complex problems. Bias against the long-term approach, like other maladies affecting U.S. policy, stems from a lack of empathy. Jamil Zaki, professor of psychology at Stanfor

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And so, as the pandemic shut down cities and states, half the country looked to science and the other half looked to Trump. Americans didn’t look to one another because there was no longer any trust between them. Into this void government by the people collapsed, leaving the unelected elites and the elected demagogue to battle it out. The struggle

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