The stock market plunged, the dollar spiked and digital frenzy swept Brazil. Another record-breaking day for Covid-19 fatalities, or one more assault on civility by the nation’s provocateur-in-chief, President Jair Bolsonaro? None of the above. What has Brazilians in a lather is a new variant of a more familiar affliction — Lulapalooza. Until this week, the much admired and widely ...

Covid-19’s path of destruction has not exempted the pieties about it. People who said it was “just the flu” don’t look wise after nearly 540,000 deaths in the US. But “14 days to flatten the curve” didn’t turn out to be prescient either. The more partisan the narrative, the worse it has fared. Liberals have spent much of the pandemic ...

In the futurist law now named after him, the late Stanford University computer scientist Roy Amara once declared, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” India’s public digital infrastructure — in many ways, an immense online bureaucracy — is an outlier to this principle. The effort ...