Every Friday I highlight the most interesting or entertaining items from my media diet from the past week. These weekly lists will include a variety of media—articles, blog posts, forum threads, podcasts and videos—from a range of sources. It’s a personal bookmark archive of sorts but if it's helpful to others, that’s great too.

Articles:

• A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data (statnews.com): A Stanford physician and epidemiologist considers the quality of the current government and societal responses to COVID-19.
• Capitalism’s Favorite Drug: The Dark History of How Coffee Took over the World (theatlantic.com): Michael Pollan’s review of Augustine Sedgewick’s new book “Coffeeland.”
• Flattening the Coronavirus Curve is Not Enough (mit.edu): Flattening the curve is important but this article looks at the other limiting factor in the equation that isn’t getting much attention: healthcare system capacity.
• Google Arts & Culture: Museum Collections (google.com): Amazing collection of artwork form over 2000 museums from around the world. Some feature virtual tours where you can “walk” the galleries.
• The Groceries That No One Wants to Panic-Buy (slate.com): Amusing look at some of the products that are left untouched (hint: the rise of chocolate hummus has been sorely overestimated).
• He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them (nytimes.com): One of the reasons why there is a scarcity of consumer goods like toilet paper and hand sanitizer: the opportunistic hoarder.
• The State of the Restaurant Industry (opentable.com): Opentable provides aggregate restaurant bookings data in light of the COVID-19 crisis. Prognosis: extremely grim.
• What if Andrew Yang Was Right? (theatlantic.com): Politicians like Mitt Romney are seriously considering recurring cash payments to Americans as one way to mitigate the impacts from COVID-19.
• Zero Trust Information (stratechery.com): A consideration of internet gate-keeping and the paradox of information quality (which results in both useful and misleading information) in a free society.

Podcasts:

• Disgraceland: Guns N’ Roses (disgracelandpod.com): 2-part episode about the origins and self-destructive antics that made this one of the most notorious acts of the late 80s.
• Econtalk: Munger on Price Gouging (econtalk.org): This 2007 episode of Econtalk is still relevant today and provides a good overview of the basic lessons of price fluctuations and price controls.
• Floodlines (theatlantic.com): 8-part series about the aftermath in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina