Here Longreads.com collects their top story from each week of 2020, adding up to…I don’t know…counting on my fingers…50 stories or so. How many stories do they publish per week anyway? Here are a handful that caught my I (TLDRJS – too long didn’t read every word, just skimmed):

• “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus” – published in February. An accurate story, I would say. The headline is all we need to read now.
• “Shell is Looking Forward” – I’ve been puzzling over this for awhile. How does an oil and gas company “evolve” into a green energy company, when getting into the regulated electricity utility business, the nuclear business, or the largely decentralized renewable energy/energy storage business means basically shedding their entire business model and becoming a completely different kind of company, and there are already companies operating in those spaces that are going to better at it than some new entry from the outside? This article gave me some clues – modern corporations are somewhat agnostic about what they “do”. They are more like private equity investors. So they will just horde cash for awhile and use it to buy some other companies, including smaller companies and startups they hope will expand. Then they will hang on to the winners and shed the losers. So a company really becomes nothing but a brand name for an operation that can be doing absolutely anything, and the mix of what it is doing will change over time. I just question whether a big established company like an oil giant is nimble enough to pull something like this off. It seems more likely tech or finance companies would be successful at this game.
• a pair of articles on mass migration driven by climate change – one international and one U.S. focused. These were really TLDR, but the long-term situation is just depressing. Coastlines are going to be inundated, the southern U.S. is going to get too hot, the western U.S. is going to get too dry, and places we grow a lot of food now are going to get too hot and too dry to continue yielding the amount of food we need. The article seems to point to the northeast and midwest. The big northeastern cities are coastal though, so that is going to require some serious commitment to coastal engineering and flood control if it is really going to work. The midwest might be the place to be. Internationally, I just don’t know. Beyond the obviously horrifying humanitarian implications, we’ve already seen migration trigger political instability in Europe and the U.S., and that process seems set to get worse.
• “Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup” – It seems there was some denial and censorship. It’s a little easy to judge in hindsight. Would earlier action or more open communication by China and/or WHO have prevented the virus from spreading to Italy? Hard to say. It spread to Korea, and they dealt with it effectively. Thailand, which has extensive travel to Wuhan, contained it through airport screening, contact tracing, and quarantining people in public hospitals. So western countries can point the finger if they want, but their response was just too slow and ineffective early on to contain the situation, and in the case of the U.S. just a completely incompetent non-response.