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Fareed Zakaria hosts Fareed Zakaria GPS for CNN Worldwide and is a columnist for the Washington Post. He is the author of the best-selling books The Future of Freedom and The Post-American World.

About Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

COVID-19 is speeding up history, but how? What is the shape of the world to come?

Lenin once said, “There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.” This is one of those times when history has sped up. CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria helps readers to understand the nature of a post-pandemic world: the political, social, technological, and economic consequences that may take years to unfold. Written in the form of ten “lessons,” covering topics from natural and biological risks to the rise of “digital life” to an emerging bipolar world order, Zakaria helps readers to begin thinking beyond the immediate effects of COVID-19.

Ranging widely from the danger of “nature’s revenge” to the future of the city to the prospect of a cold war with China, the common theme is that all these forces are being propelled and reshaped by the pandemic.

Specific lessons include:
• It’s time to trade speed for resilience
• It’s not the quantity of government but the quality that matters
• Markets are not enough
• Listen to experts—but ask questions as well
• Digital life is life
• Aristotle was right: we are social creatures
• Inequality will get worse
• Globalization is not dead
• The world is polarized
• Sometimes the greatest realists are idealists

A powerful brief on what lies ahead, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World speaks to past, present, and future, and, while urgent and timely, is sure to become an enduring reflection on life in the early twenty-first century.