This week: What leads to emergence of a virus / Our love for leather / The end of the Evo Morales era / Life at the North Pole / Chaos under the snowy surface
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1. Destroyed Habitat Creates the Perfect Conditions for Coronavirus to Emerge
By John Vidal | Scientific American | March 2020
“COVID-19 may be just the beginning of mass pandemics”
Also see, from The Guardian: Dogs working from home during coronavirus crisis? There’s an Instagram account for that
Also see, from The Cut: Walking the Dog Is the Only Time I Feel Sane
2. Inside the Story of How H-E-B Planned for the Pandemic
By Dan Solomon and Paula Forbes | Texas Monthly | March 2020
“The grocer started communicating with Chinese counterparts in January and was running tabletop simulations a few weeks later. (But nothing prepared it for the rush on toilet paper.)”
3. A Forest Submerged 60,000 Years Ago Could Save Your Life One Day
By JoAnna Klein | The New York Times | March 2020
“Before this underwater forest disappears, scientists recently raced to search for shipworms and other sea life that might conceal medicine of the future.”
4. Saudi official urges Muslims to delay hajj plans over virus
By Aya Batrawy and Jon Gambrell | Associated Press | April 2020
“Saudi Arabia has barred people from entering or exiting three major cities, including Mecca and Medina, and imposed a nighttime curfew across the country. Like other countries around the world and in the Middle East, the kingdom also suspended all inbound and outbound commercial flights.”
5. The Fall of Evo Morales
By Jon Lee Anderson | The New Yorker | March 2020
“A controversial socialist leader fled his country. Was he deposed — or did he escape justice?”
6. Why we all submit to leather
By Matthew Sweet | 1843 :: The Economist | April / May 2020
“Evocative of both the authoritarian state and the rebel cause, leather is a material that evokes both freedom and restaint”
7. Time Has No Meaning at the North Pole
By Katie Weeman | Observations :: Scientific American | March 2020
“The utter lack of time zones, daylight and people creates a bizarre world”
8. Snow Science Against the Avalanche
By James Somers | The New Yorker | March 2020
“On slopes shallow enough to accumulate snow but steep enough for it to be unstable, chaos hides beneath the surface.”
9. What The Fed Was Designed To Do
By Bronson Arcuri | Planet Money :: NPR | March 2020
“In 1906, an earthquake in San Francisco started a chain of events that destroyed the U.S. economy by 1907. It also led to the creation of the country’s most powerful economic tool: the Federal Reserve.”
10. Hanging trees and hollering ghosts: the unsettling art of the American deep south
By Lanre Bakare | The Guardian | February 2020
“From lynching and slavery to the civil rights movement, Alabama’s artists expressed the momentous events they lived through — as a landmark new exhibition reveals”
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stillness of heart 
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