Michael lewis

Thursday

Ross Anderson

Tales from the crypto

From our US edition

I don’t gamble. But in October 2016, I made a bet. It was obvious Trump didn’t just have skeletons in his closet but a walk-in necropolis. As we stumbled toward November, the question wasn’t whether one of these skeletons would break free, but just how bad the October Surprise would be. It was supposed to be a polling-shifting, election-sealing, reputational nuclear bomb. And if you read the press, that’s what the “Pussy-Grabbing Tape” was. But to me, it was just another example of Trump being vulgar. And Trump had always been vulgar. And voters liked that he was vulgar, or didn’t care that he was vulgar, or liked that he was so unlike other politicians that he could be vulgar.

crypto

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

‘This was a horrible pandemic – but it wasn’t the big one’: Michael Lewis interviewed

Michael Lewis’s new book, The Premonition, is a superhero story — though one in which the superheroes don’t, in the end, win. It’s the true story of a group of far-sighted, tough-minded scientists who, in January last year, saw the coronavirus pandemic coming in the USA, and the politicians who wouldn’t listen to them. And at the heart of the book is the terrible discovery, as true here as it is in the States: we imagine that, come disaster, the people we elect will look after us. We’re told they’re well prepared. But when it comes down to it, they protect not us but themselves. The villain of Lewis’s book is the United States Centers for Disease Control, which equivocated until it was far too late and ignored the pandemic plan it had.