The nonprofit Covax, which distributes Covid vaccines to mostly poor countries, has been saying for a year no one is safe until everyone is. Rich countries may finally be getting the message.
By Stephanie Baker and James Paton
On Jan. 23, 2020, the day the novel coronavirus forced the Chinese city of Wuhan into lockdown, two American doctors named Seth Berkley and Richard Hatchett met at the bar of the Hard Rock Hotel in Davos, Switzerland, to talk about vaccines.
At that point it wasn’t clear how soon, or even whether, effective vaccines for the disease caused by the virus could be developed. But Berkley, an epidemiologist who runs Gavi, a nonprofit that delivers immunizations to poor countries, was thinking about how the crisis would unfold if the virus swept across the…
On its way to the moon, the movie theater chain raised cash — something the video game company didn’t. But meme-driven retail investors are still taking a big risk.
By Katherine Doherty and Brandon Kochkodin
In a TikTok video with nearly a million likes, a cocky young guy walks into an AMC theater wearing a white, backwards ball cap. An attendant asks him if he needs anything. “I’m just making sure the theaters are running smoothly,” says ball cap guy.
The cashier does a double take. “Do you work here?”
“Let’s just say, I’m a partial owner. I’m the money.”
The cashier is still puzzled. “Don’t you come in here every Saturday night with your mom?”
The 25-year-old actor Andrea Angiolillo, who plays both characters, is one of the…
Government officials and NGOs are concerned, but worry that good Samaritans are playing into the hands of child traffickers
By Saritha Rai and Shwetha Sunil
In early May, Mumbai resident Akancha Srivastava noticed something unusual. Her social media handles and the chatbot on the website of the nonprofit she runs were swamped with anguished appeals to help children orphaned by India’s ferocious second wave of Covid-19, which has claimed more than 150,000 lives just in the past two months. Veering from her usual work of promoting cybersafety, the thirtysomething engineer assembled a team of eight and set up a WhatsApp Covid helpline for children in distress. Within hours after the number went live on May 3, Bollywood stars, TV…
A hundred questions have arisen in the Illinois community, including whether the payments should be called reparations at all
By Susan Berfield and Jordyn Holman
Lucious Sutton disconnected the water line, the gas line, and the sewer line for the home he’d built on Bauer Place on the northwestern edge of Evanston. He and his brothers removed the appliances and the furniture. They secured the windows. Then he watched as men he didn’t know — maybe they worked for the city, maybe for a property developer — jacked up the wooden house, set it onto a truck, and drove it a mile-and-a-half to the neighborhood the city had deemed more suitable for Black families. A sheriff stood by.
A viewer’s guide to the future of entertainment, where blockbusters no longer require cinemas, studios make sitcoms again, and more
By Lucas Shaw
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, things seemed to be going from bad to worse for Hollywood. Studios, already suffering from declining ticket sales, now faced theater and theme park closures, release delays, and production freezes. Television networks, battered by cord cutting, saw sporting events canceled or delayed, depriving them of their most valuable programming.
But the chaos also sharpened Hollywood’s attention, forcing it to focus on what consumers want. Streaming services, already a major priority, fast became the only way most people got their film and TV fixes. Netflix Inc. added 26 million customers…
Canine life-extension research by the startup Loyal could lead to breakthroughs for the rest of us
By Ashlee Vance
As the tech industry has matured, people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with developing ways to stop the human aging process. It started with really long bike rides and intermittent fasting, but some venture capitalists and startup employees have moved on to taking dozens of pills every morning, or injecting stem cells into their brain, or infusing their body with the blood of the young and virile.
This brand of life-extension experimentation remains fringe, probably because it’s weird and there’s not a ton of evidence any of it works. But Celine Halioua has a plan to…
Content that is blocked or flagged in the U.S. often continues to circulate in other languages
By Sarah Frier and Daniel Zuidijk
One of the earliest people to get Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine was a nurse in Tennessee, who fainted after getting the shot on live television in December. The incident sparked rumors that she had died and that the vaccine was a tool of genocide. Five months later the nurse, who is not dead, continues to be bombarded by messages from strangers on social media. They send condolences to her family or demand details about the incident. Oddly, they often do so in German, Italian, or Portuguese.
Laura Miele is helping direct the company toward a future where it’s more attuned with consumers
By Olga Kharif
One of the first things Laura Miele did when she became chief studios officer of Electronic Arts Inc. three years ago was to gather 19 video game influencers in a conference room. “What do you want me to hear? Lay it on me,” she recalls asking them. “One guy sitting at the corner of the table, he just said, ‘I don’t understand why you don’t give players what they’re asking for.’ ”
It’s something many gamers have wondered about EA for years. The $40 billion company, one of the biggest in gaming, is responsible for Battlefield, Madden…
The only consensus right now is that there isn’t one
By Sarah Green Carmichael
Managers are making tentative plans to reopen offices, leading to a bunch of questions from workers who’ve spent more than a year settling into (and in some cases learning to love) their work-from-home routines. Here are the most common ones bosses are facing, and how they’re looking at them.
● When will the office reopen?
Mid-May to October is the range most companies are giving. But one lesson from the past year is that plans need to evolve with the virus.
At large businesses, this could mean that as some locations reopen, others stay closed (or close again) as infection rates change…
What’s real, what’s transitory, what’s base-effect distortion? Let’s cut through the noise.
By Peter Coy
We’ve been told for years that inflation has been too low. Now that it’s finally reached and surpassed the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, it looks as scary as the fast-growing carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
Iron, copper, lumber, cotton, computer chips, and gasoline are jumping in price. The dollar has weakened, making imports more costly. Employers are having to raise wages to fill record openings; the federal government is spending heavily; and consumers emerging from the pandemic are in the mood to light some money on fire. On May 12 the U.S. Bureau of Labor…
Bloomberg Businessweek
Covering the business world like no one else.
