Annalisa Merelli

REUTERS/Cheriss May
On the evening of Nov. 3, and through the following days, liberal American voters who hoped to see a blue tsunami overtake Congress and the White House watched instead as a near imperceptible tide slowly rose to give Joe Biden just enough of an edge in critical states to make him the projected winner.
It might be disappointing to see that even after four years of increasingly divisive and unpresidential behavior, a mishandled pandemic that killed over 235,000 people, and d...

REUTERS/Carlos Barria
There was only so much more of Donald Trump that America could take.
In the end, and despite the continued support for Trump in wide swaths of the country, the United States chose not to re-elect a president who spreads conspiracy theories, sows racial discord, politicizes public health directives, and cozies up to brutal dictators.
For voters who stuck with him, these seemingly would have been small prices to pay for a leader who kept his first-term promises on limiting...

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Americans who cast their ballots for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden did so for varying reasons. Some were simply fed up with the current White House occupant; others were concerned for the fate of democracy itself, and still others were channeling a more hopeful view of the future.
Either way, the defeat of Donald Trump promises a wave of policy rollbacks and reversals by the former US vice president and Delaware senator.
Having averted another four years o...

Reuters/Aaron P. Bernstein
There’s a new Supreme Court justice, election day is less than a week away, and the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality is set to be argued before the high court in two weeks. If you’re wondering about what this all means for the future of Obamacare, you’re not alone.
What happens to Obamacare if the Supreme Court decides against the ACA? What happens if Joe Biden wins the election? Or if Donald Trump remains in office? American healthcare coverage could be sign...

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/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/Michael Probst
If there is a lesson parents are learning around the world right now, as coronavirus keeps schools closed and children indoors, it’s that education isn’t just about learning or personal growth: It’s also an important social buffer.
Moms and dads have to manage restless kids all day long and essential workers have to find childcare solutions. Others, too, from workplaces to neighbors, are learning that schools are quite the Jenga brick upon which our society rests.
But ...

AP Photo/Jay Reeves
Of the roughly 2,000 rural hospitals in operation in the US in 2010, more than 100 have closed their doors. So far this year 10 more have closed, four in April alone. Many more—about a fourth of the total in operation today—are at risk of closing.
On average, people living in rural parts of the country live about 17 minutes away from the nearest hospital. But a quarter of them has to travel an average of 34 minutes to get to the nearest emergency room. And that statistic g...

Reuters/David Ryder
Relatively early in America’s adventures in coronavirus, on March 18, the US government approved legislation that made coronavirus testing, as well as the visit to administer it, free for all Americans, whether or not they have health care insurance (although if the visit doesn’t result in a coronavirus test, it is not covered).
It was an essential policy: The fear of medical bills acts as a deterrent for many Americans, pushing them to delay, or avoid, tests or medical tr...

Reuters/Lucas Jackson
On May 25, America witnessed yet another display of police brutality toward Black people. A video, about nine minutes long, showed Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man—a father and grandfather who worked as a truck driver and security guard. Three other officers stood by.
As the video circulated online and on news media, people around the country took to the streets to protest and demand justice for Floyd as we...

REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Since George Floyd was killed on May 25 in Minneapolis, cities all over the world have erupted in protests. Some of these demonstrations have turned violent. In Minneapolis, protesters appeared to burn down buildings and loot a local Target; other cities have witnessed similar looting and damaged or vandalized property.
These events have resurfaced an old narrative in the US: That protests lead to riots, and that rioters take out their ire on businesses, inflicting outsi...

Reuters/Leah Millis
The cost of police brutality is enormous.
First and foremost, of course, it is paid in lives: According to the Washington Post database, US police have shot and killed 1,042 men and women in the past 12 months, of whom Black people make up a disproportionate number. That doesn’t account for those not killed by firearms, such as George Floyd. There is no official record of police brutality in the US.
But police brutality also has a cost in dollars, often borne by taxpayers,...

Image courtesy of United States Library of Congress
Overnight on May 31 and June 1, 1921, in a period of just about 12 hours, the single largest incident of racial violence in American history occurred in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“More than a thousand African American homes and businesses were looted and burned to the ground; you had a thriving community occupying more than 35 square blocks in Tulsa that was totally destroyed,” Scott Ellsworth, the author of Death in a Promi...

Reuters/David Ryder
Black Americans in certain age groups are as much as nine times more likely to die of Covid-19 than similarly aged whites, and overall their fatality rate is nearly four times that of whites, according to new data from Harvard’s Center for Population and Development studies.
Months into the Covid-19 outbreak, there are still many things scientists don’t know about how the disease hits, so it is hard establish all the reasons for such discrepancy between races. One of many ...