This is the year of paradoxes. Everything has changed and maybe nothing has altered. The impossible is easy, the familiar impossible. Taboos become normal conduct, as the taken-for-granted slips away.

New information technologies and the use of media open up incredible learning opportunities, and more sinister ways to influence, control, enslave and destroy. There is nothing like a global pandemic or war to make the impossible obvious and easy.

C-19 pandemic sweeps across everywhere and everything. The rate and range of responses are remarkable; yet millions have lost faith in governments and leadership, science and rationality. Citizens are fed fake news by the false prophet and, fall prey to fantasy and terror; yet rediscover family, neighbourhood, and ways of living together, even as wealth-poverty gulfs widen further, New technologies hasten to gain ground on an ever-accelerating climate-change extinction crisis brought upon ourselves. The glass is half full and half empty, as Chris Brooks pointed out in Bulletin 34, in Two Victories for Science and Rationality: Why so much doom and gloom?

Extract: Editorial – the new normal? Chris Duke