Your Weekend Reading: Another Grim Year Lost to the Pandemic

This year has witnessed millions more perish from the coronavirus, a fact that will forever color its memory. The pandemic’s other consequences, from mass resignations to labor shortages to supply chain crunch-induced inflation, also made themselves known over the past 12 months as our year in review details. Economies roared back, but the fallout of global warming became more apparent. This will go down as one of the hottest years in modern telling as the horrors of the climate crisis were on full display, from floods in Germany and frosts in Brazil to the relentless heatwave in the Pacific Northwest. Power shifts, rulers-for-life and an unprecedented attack on American democracy from within punctuated the year in politics. But on Wall Street, the big lesson was that crypto and NFTs can no longer be ignored.

The week was spent weighing the threat, cost and impact of the omicron variant of the coronavirus. One study showed it was four times more transmissible than delta and a U.K. report suggested booster shots could make a big difference in fighting it off. Here’s why omicron should be a wake-up call and what the hardest part is about developing a super-vaccine for all coronaviruses.

U.S. President Joe Biden engaged in Cold War-era diplomacy to defuse tensions triggered by Russia’s threatening military buildup on the border with Ukraine. James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, has four ideas to make sure Vladimir Putin doesn’t invade his neighbor again. In Washington, Republicans are pushing Democratic Senator Joe Manchin to help them kill Biden’s $2 trillion package to fund healthcare, climate and social infrastructure initiatives.