Books & ideas

Telemedecine: Connecting Healthcare Providers and Patients

Manon Plegat — 2024-03-05T07:02:40Z

French sociologist Alexandre Mathieu-Fritz analyzes the rise of telemedicine, which was brought to the fore by the pandemic. He examines changes in the practices of healthcare professionals, the doctor-patient bond, and delegation between professions.

Capitalist Pandemonium

Éric Monnet — 2023-02-09T06:00:00Z

In a new book, Robert Boyer offers an analysis of the economic and political consequences of the pandemic that counter to irenic claims about the advent of a new world. His geopolitics of capitalisms takes a worried view of the conflicts between states and multinational corporations.

Listen to the Birds

Priscilla Wald — 2020-09-07T07:00:00Z

Once seen as omens, birds continue to point to the future: a few years ago, their change of behavior heralded the beginning of avian flu. Two anthropological studies focus on these avian sentinels. A closer observation of the relationships between species, they argue, would help us better prepare for the pandemics to come.

How China Governs

Editorial Team — 2020-08-03T07:00:00Z

Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week's selection focuses on China today, its uses of digital technologies to govern, and the political theories developed by its intellectuals.

How Fiction Can Help Us Navigate the Pandemic

Chandra Mukerji — 2020-07-02T07:00:00Z

During the Black Plague, Boccaccio's Decameron provided readers ways to laugh through the pandemic. A few centuries later, a new kind of pandemic strikes: with Covid-19, the world as we knew it seems forever changed. Can fiction help us imagine new ways of existing together in times of uncertainty?

The Globalisation of Lockdowns

Éric Charmes & Max Rousseau — 2020-06-01T07:00:00Z

If Covid-19 has spread so rapidly, it is namely because urbanisation is now planetary and connects a wide range of territories to each other, through an international flows of goods and people.

The Covid-19 Crisis in India

2020-04-13T07:00:00Z

The lockdown in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic will have terrible consequences on an informal economy that relies first and foremost on movements and will deepen the socioeconomic inequalities that divide the country. The risk of people dying from hunger is extremely high and the death toll worsened by poor health infrastructures.