Preparing for plague (The Atlantic)
by Ed Yong
When the next serious pandemic begins, it will already be too late to prepare. From Kikwit, Congo to Dallas, Texas, medical systems lack the staff and supplies they’ll need.

Is this a trade war? (New York Times)
by Neil Irwin
Do the new tariffs President Trump is levying on Chinese imports represent the start of a trade war? And what could this kind of policy mean for the U.S. economy?

What fans do for teams (The Conversation)
by Francisco Javier López Frías
How do you choose who to root for in the World Cup? Beautiful technique? Players’ personal stories? Or maybe a DNA test to determine your ancestry? What fans are looking in a team for can affect the way a sport evolves.

Zora Neale Hurston’s difficult hope (Public Books)
by Stephen Pasqualina
Zora Neale Hurston insisted on her individual agency in the face of racism and the legacy of slavery. Her long-delayed, recently published anthropological work Barracoon demonstrates the enormous barriers to that kind of optimism that she faced.

Black pioneers in the Midwest (Atlas Obscura)
by Sarah Laskow
Decades before the Civil War, black pioneers were part of the transformation of the Northwest Territory, creating black and integrated communities before pro-slavery neighbors drove many of them off.

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