Once upon a time, we had some reason to hope that we might have been through the worst of the pandemic by now. But it’s clear that it’s going to be with us for a while. Its social impact will be more far-ranging and staggering than we could have thought back in March.

It’s a bleak situation, but it’s also one that we must learn from. We’ve learned things about our country that were true before the virus but that its arrival exposed and intensified. Racial health disparities are the most obvious example here, but there are many others.

In the late spring, we started assigning pieces on a wide range of topics but joined around a common theme: What has the virus taught us about the state of our demos, and what can we do to emerge from this a stronger country when that day finally comes? We ran the pieces on our website over the course of the summer, and we’ve assembled some of them here. Some are “big-sweep” essays that look at the embedded economic assumptions that made the United States more susceptible to this pandemic than other nations, or that lay out visions for how we create a more equitable and creative economy going forward. Others are devoted to narrower topics, though still of course important. I urge you to read them and to visit our website to see some of the others.

As the George Floyd protests continued into the summer and forceful calls for police reform took hold, we knew just who to turn to—our friend Jonathan Blanks, who has written for us on such issues over the years. Jonathan helped us assemble a terrific panel of experts to discuss whether police reform is possible and what logs need to be unjammed for change to happen.

Moving our attention to the wider world, we have an important piece from Anne-Marie Slaughter, who held a high position in the Obama State Department, on how the department needs to be updated and reorganized to face today’s challenges. Roughly a century after the creation of the original Foreign Service, Slaughter calls for the creation of a new Global Service to work on “global problems that affect all human beings.” This is one of those pieces that I feel is sure to start a conversation. Finally, with book reviews on Thomas Piketty, urban planning, reparations, and conservative education policy, we cover the usual Democracy-ish broad range of topics.