As it turns out, COVID-19 isn’t the first catastrophic event to plague mankind. Or so Niall Ferguson, the Hoover Institution’s Milbank Family Senior Fellow, reminds us in his new book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, a historical look at past disasters and their aftermaths. The author joins Hoover senior fellows H. R. McMaster and John Cochrane to discuss why it is that we still struggle with disaster response and how to better prepare for future calamities.
Col. Denny R. Davies, representing the US Air Force, is a National Security Affairs Fellow (NSAF) for the academic year 2020–21 at the Hoover Institution. In this interview, Davies talks about his career in the US Air Force, specifically as a C-130 pilot during missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the deputy executive assistant to the commander of Indo-Pacific Command.
Herb Lin, a cybersecurity expert and a member of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board, told a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee last week that foreign disinformation campaigns are one form of what he characterized as an existential threat to US society and democracy: cyber-enabled information warfare. The Pentagon, however, is, Lin suggested, poorly positioned to protect the public from the threat.
Seven Stanford faculty members were named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows last month. This honor recognizes those who have “demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.” Approximately 3,000 applications are submitted each year for these fellowships spanning across various disciplines and reviewed by experts in each field.
The biggest uncertainty for investors watching the Federal Reserve in coming months may not be the rate of inflation but turnover at the top of the U.S. central bank.
