This invaluable guide will help the historical number of eightysomethings live fulfilled, happy lives long into their twilight years. Old age is not what it used to be. For the first time ever, most people in the United States are living into their eighties. The first guide of its kind, Eightysomethings changes our understanding of old age with an upbeat and emotionally savvy view of the uncharted territory of the last stage of life. With insight and humor, Dr. Katharine Esty describes the series of dramatic and difficult transitions that eightysomethings usually experience and how, despite their losses, they so often find themselves unexpectedly happy. Living into one’s eighties doesn’t have to mean declining health and loneliness: Dr. Esty shows readers how to embrace—and thrive during—the later stages of life. Based on her more than 120 interviews around the country, Esty explores the lives of ordinary eightysomethings—their attitudes, activities, secrets, worries, purposes, and joys. Their stories illustrate how real people in their eighties are living and how they make sense of their lives. Esty adds her wisdom and perspective to this multi-dimensional look at being old as a social psychologist, a practicing psychotherapist, and as an eighty-four-year-old widow living in a retirement community. Eightysomethings is a must-read for people in their eighties, and also for their families. Adult children—often bewildered by their aging parents—need a wise guide like Eightysomethings to help them navigate their parents’ last stage of life with real-world guidelines and conversation starters. Readers, young and old alike, will find this first-of-its-kind book eye-opening, comforting, and filled with practical tips.

Donald Horne famously called Australia &‘ the lucky country' . So how did we become the locked-up country and how might the future look different? Australia has changed enormously since Horne' s 1960s, but its response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the enduring truth of his thesis that our &‘ luck' was undeserved and wouldn' t last. By closing its borders and imposing a nationally coordinated lockdown, Australia unexpectedly eliminated COVID-19 in 2020, achieving one of the world' s lowest excess mortality rates. But as governments proceeded to bungle key planks of the pandemic response, by mid-2021, Australia was &‘ locked up' &– closed off to the world and fragmented along state and territory borders, with its major cities enduring repeated and extended lockdowns. It soon became clear that Australia' s regulatory state had let us down. But these failures were not inevitable, and we can manage future crises more successfully. In The Locked-up Country, political experts Tom Chodor and Shahar Hameiri identify the source of Australia' s recent challenges and suggest a better way forward.

Covid-19 changed the lives of millions of people around the world. The effects of the global pandemic on the physical and psychological health of individuals, as well as on their behavioral habits, relationships, and the way they communicate, do not seem to be only short- or medium-term, but, on the contrary, appear to be long-lasting. In the same way that it is possible to use the term “long-covid” to refer to the long-term effects on the physical health of individuals who have contracted the virus, so we think it is possible to use the expression 'psychological long-covid' to indicate the long-term effects on the psychological health of individuals, not only of those who have been infected, but more generally of all those who have had to cope with social restrictions, lockdowns, distancing, remote work and learning, etc. imposed by the pandemic. At the same time, many people demonstrated resilience, as the capacity to cope with adverse events through positive adaptation.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.

This volume analyzes the development of the reactions to Covid-19 by governments, the public and the crime patterns in 16 European countries. All countries are members of the European Union and share common European norms and values, but the Covid-19 pandemic can serve as an example of how these norms and values are interpreted differently with regard to people’s trust in public institutions, governmental control strategies, dealing with fear, anxiety and other emotional responses to the new virus, crime patterns and law enforcement priorities to prevent and combat them. The volume provides empirical data based on available statistics, media analysis and qualitative data from interviews and observations, and examines the similarities and differences in crime patterns and the consequences for local communities and law enforcement priorities.

Turn of the tide in China: "Zero Covid" leads to a relapse into self-imposed isolation and intensifies geopolitical tensions. The Chinese leadership soon considers itself the victor in the fight against the pandemic and the Western social system. Possibly prematurely, because at the same time it is risking its business model, which has been successful since Deng Xiaoping. Between facts and propaganda, the foreigners who remain in China experience how people settle into a country of contradictions. They observe how the country continues to progress in many respects, while repression and nationalism hark back to the days of Mao. At the same time, China mercilessly reminds the West of its own gaps between aspiration and reality. A snapshot with an open-ended outcome.

Jim Ottewill’s exploration of UK club culture and the urban landscapes that have housed it returns in a newly remixed form. Out of Space plots a course through the different UK towns and cities where club culture has found a home. From Glasgow to Margate via Manchester, Sheffield and unlikely dance music meccas such as Coalville and Todmorden, this book maps where electronic music has thrived, and where it might be headed next. This extended version features a new chapter exploring hidden histories and untold stories within Birmingham’s nocturnal scene to provide more insights into the past, present and future of electronic music culture.