Annalisa Merelli

AP Photo/Matt Dunham
For every heartwarming story of an ill person hitting the crowdfunding jackpot, there are thousands of people who fail to pretty much raise anything.
It’s perhaps the biggest misconception when it comes to medical crowdfunding: that setting up a campaign on a popular website is equivalent to getting it funded. But most campaigns don’t reach anything close to their goal, never mind hit it.
“The assumption that there’s a crowd of people out there waiting to give money becau...

AP Photo/Michael Dwyer
In a tale titled Légende du Beau Pécopin et de la Belle Bauldour, Victor Hugo writes about a meeting between the devil and a group of saints. The devil needs help. But the saints decline to give it, for a variety of reasons. Saint Autremoine has the most peculiar: “I regret that I can’t help you, my friend; I would consider that to be a good action, and since good actions have the inconvenience of pushing the vanity of those who make them, I refrain from doing it to pre...

Reuters/Flavio Lo Scalzo
In February, the coronavirus outbreak began ravaging Italy. In a matter of days entire cities were quarantined in the north, and in those that weren’t the number of cases began to rise rapidly. Hospitals quickly became overwhelmed, and reports prepared people for the eventuality that doctors might run out of ventilators and be forced to decide which patients to try and save and which to let die.
People mobilized quickly to donate to hospitals, and as the emergency spr...

James Daw for Quartz
Health, the saying goes, is wealth. It isn’t a cliché: At about $8 trillion per year, the global expenditure in healthcare accounts for more than 10% of the world’s economy. The average amount each person spends on healthcare these days is higher than ever.
But those costs aren’t evenly distributed. The availability of services and their out-of-pocket price are dramatically different for different people. Where governments don’t provide for healthcare expenses—like the US...

AP Photo/Paul Sancya
Last week, over 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits. This brings the total of initial unemployment claims to about 10 million since several states shut down all nonessential business.
The number of unemployed people is expected to jump again next week, likely pushing the actual unemployment rate (estimated on the basis of the claims) above 10%—possibly surpassing that of the 2008 recession.
Such a high unemployment rate would be a serious worry in any ...

Reuters/Sergio Moraes
Calls for social distancing and isolation have become the coronavirus battle-cry, and lockdowns are halting cities and towns all over the world (except in Sweden). Schools are closed, and so are non-essential businesses. All gatherings are off. Remote working is the new working, and time spent outside the home is down to a bare minimum.
That is, of course, when you have a home. In rich western cities, the homeless are at higher risk of contracting the disease, and cities...

Reuters/Guglielmo Mangiapane
Italy is in the middle of a war against an enemy that’s both invisible and far too visible in its impact: The Covid-19 pandemic.
But the Italian right-wing hasn’t been fighting the same war. The true enemies—it has desperately tried to remind its receding base—are visible, and the ones right-wing populists have been demonizing for years: immigrants, and especially those coming into the country from Africa, via sea.
The Lega, the biggest right-wing, xenophobic part...

The whole of Italy has been on lockdown to control the spread of Covid-19 for more than 10 days now.
The regions of Lombardia and Veneto are at the epicenter of the crisis and have been dealing with the epidemic for much longer than that. Hospitals there are overrun. There is not enough space in intensive care units (ICUs), which are necessary to treat about 10% of those infected with the disease. The situation has been compared to a war.
During the latest Democratic presidential debate earli...

AP Photo/Bernat Armangue
Since it came to power, the Trump administration has waged a relentless, multi-layered war on immigration.
But it only took a few days of panic over the spread of the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes for the government to start seeing the value of at least some immigrant workers. In an announcement published on March 26, and promoted on its social media channels, the State Department called on foreign medical professionals who already have US visas to eithe...

Reuters/Flavio Lo Scalzo
Few things could possibly distract Italians—a population prone to health concerns in the best of circumstances—from panicking about an actual infectious epidemic. But one of them is pasta. Better: a debate over pasta.
For several days now, parts of northern Italy have either been on lockdown or high alert due to the outbreak of Covid-19. As of March 4, the disease has killed more than 100 people and more than 3,000 have tested positive for it. The epidemic is overwhel...

Reuters/Brian Snyder
The world is sexist. No country—not Iceland, not Denmark, none—has achieved gender parity, and women continue to face enormous struggles in large parts of the world to see their basic human rights recognized.
But does that mean everyone is sexist? Pretty much, yes.
A new United Nations report, which looks at gender inequality and attitudes towards women around the world, put a staggering number to it: Nearly 90% of all people—that is, both men and women—are prejudiced aga...

Reuters/Dado Ruvic
The Covid-19 epidemic has yet to go global, yet there are fears among public health professionals it could be our century’s Spanish flu.
The 1918 pandemic circled the world three times over two years, infecting a third of the population and killing at least 50 million —and that was before globalization, and widespread international travel. The fact that it is still being talked about over a century later gives a measure of both the gravity of the outbreak—and the potential ...

AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
Virginia, together with 13 other states and the territory of American Samoa, is an important battleground on perhaps the most important day of the Democratic primaries: Super Tuesday.
But while everyone will be waiting to see whether former vice president Joe Biden or Vermont senator Bernie Sanders—or maybe there will be a surprise showing from Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren—will win the day, another potentially more important vote will be held in Virginia’s ...

AP Photo/Gillian Flaccus
The UN may not be the most innovative of institutions, yet it does, with surprising frequency, experiment with new technology and solutions. In recent years, it’s undertaken initiatives that incorporate artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and blockchain technology.
These projects often remain confined to the realm of experiments. But a recent undertaking by UNICEF, the UN agency tasked with providing aid to children around the world, now offers what could be a g...

There may be nothing more American than the pride of being American. Patriotic people who love their motherland—or adopted land—are everywhere in the world, but there is arguably no one as enthusiastically keen to demonstrate it as Americans.
More than the citizens of any other nations, Americans believe theirs is the “best country in the world,” and show their pride with an abundance befitting the land of plenty: American flags are ubiquitous—not just in flag form, but in the shape of any no...