Two Sources on the State of America

Like many MindBlog readers, I am reading countless articles on the current pandemic and its medical, economic, and social consequences. I generally restrain myself from noting them on MindBlog, worrying that readers have become as saturated as I have. However, I do want to point to two that do stand out:
First, In a Making Sense Podcast Sam Harris talks with General Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell about the Covid-19 pandemic. They discuss the nature of the ongoing crisis, the threat of a breakdown in social order, the problem of misinformation, the prospects of a nationwide lockdown, the trade off between personal freedom and safety, the threat of tyranny, the concerns about the global supply chain, concerns about the price of oil, safeguarding the 2020 Presidential election, and other topics. McChrystal was the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan, is now senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and is founder of the McChrystal Group leadership institute.
Second, a piece by Leonhardt and Serkez in the New York Times opinion series “The America We Need” paints the most clear graphical picture I have seen of how inequality in America has grown to its current extreme, defining the struggle society faces after Coronavirus.