Weekend articles to read.
The 1920s Roared After a Pandemic, and the 2020s Will Try The modern economy sprang to life in the Jazz Age, but today’s secular stagnation will be tough to overcome. (Businessweek)
Fauci on What Working for the Admin in 2020 Was Really Like From denialism to death threats, Dr. Anthony Fauci describes a fraught year as an adviser to President Donald J. Trump on the Covid-19 pandemic. (Science Times)
ex-KGB Spy: Russia Cultivated Trump as Asset for 40 years, ‘The Perfect Target’ Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, according to a former KGB spy. Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, is a key source for American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, a new book comparing the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the early cold war. (The Guardian)
Worrisome New Coronavirus Strains Are Emerging. Why Now? Across the globe, SARS-CoV-2 is evolving ways to evade the immune system and become more infectious. Blown pandemic response plans are to blame. (Wired)
Three Weeks Inside a Pro-Trump QAnon Chat Room For the past three weeks, a group of Trump supporters and QAnon believers met online, swapped theories and eagerly awaited the conspiracy’s violent climax. I was listening in. This is what they sounded like. (New York Times)
A Ticket to Build: permits rebound after suffering from lockdown backlogs The construction sector has weathered the pandemic storm with a strong rise in activity. The third quarter of 2020 saw the total value of building permits issued on Vancouver Island rebound to $681.6 million, or 40 per cent above the second quarter of 2020. (Douglas)
Inside the Reddit army that’s crushing Wall Street This past week has been a banner one for Reddit’s island of misfit investors, as WallStreetBets exploded into the mainstream, moving from the front page of Reddit to the front page of the New York Times and nearly every other major news site. Describing itself as if “4chan found a Bloomberg terminal,” the forum’s giddy nihilism, inscrutable language and memes fueled a war on a perceived corrupted mainstream. (CNN)
What to Know About Music’s Copyright Gold Rush Neil Young, Lindsey Buckingham, Shakira, and others recently sold their song catalogs to the flashy music publishing upstart Hipgnosis, in deals that have implications for the future of the recording industry (Pitchfork
Tourism in Victoria, BC in 1936