The layoff announcements coming lately from the chief executive officers of big technology companies all contain variations on the theme of “we hired too many people during the pandemic,” expressed with varying degrees of contrition. At one end of the spectrum are Seattleites Andy Jassy of…

In October 2020, a few weeks before the experimental trial results for the BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines were released, German virologist Christian Drosten cautioned that the shots would be of limited effectiveness in preventing the spread of the disease. “We…

For a few days late last month, “a cocktail of high atmospheric pressure, little wind and peak farming season emissions” left London with more-polluted air than Beijing, Bloomberg News reported. These worse-than-Beijing episodes are likely to occur more and more frequently — not because London’s…

One morning last week a young man in a light-blue sport coat with AirPods in his ears and no mask on his face boarded my bus in Los Angeles and sat down. Then he looked around at all the masked faces, got up, walked to the front of the bus to grab a free mask from the dispenser, put it on and…

In 2020, for the first time in 69 years, the US exported more energy than it imported. The numbers for 2021 aren’t all in yet, but everything is pointing to an even bigger energy surplus. The long journey that began during the 1973 oil crisis with President Richard Nixon’s “Project Independence”…

As Covid-19’s omicron wave begins to subside, one thing seems pretty clear: After it has passed, the number of Americans who are still immunologically naive to Covid-19 — that is, they’ve been neither infected by it nor vaccinated against it — will be quite small. How small? By my rough estimate…

Deaths among working-age Americans were up more than 40% over the pre-pandemic norm last summer and fall, the chief executive officer of an Indiana-based insurance company said late last month. His assertion has been reverberating around social media since, inspiring a much-shared Twitter thread…

The planned autumn 2021 return to the office is being delayed. Until January, purportedly. That’s when Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Google, Microsoft Corp. and some other major employers of knowledge workers now say they expect people back at their desks, 22…

According to the sixth assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the first part of which was released this week to much fanfare, global average temperatures, currently about 1.1 degrees Celsius over the “pre-industrial” (1850 to 1900) baseline, will pass…