Every Friday I highlight the most interesting or entertaining items from my media diet from the past week.

This week continues to be dominated by Coronavirus coverage. I’ve made a conscious effort to mix in other topics to counterbalance COVID-19 overwhelm.

Articles:

• A Toilet Paper Run Is Like a Bank Run. The Economic Fixes Are About the Same (theconversation.com): Game theory and the Nash equilibrium provides some insights.
• ASCII Art + Permadeath: The History of Roguelike Games (arstechnica.com): Fun retrospective on the venerable “dungeon crawl” video game genre.
• Book Recommendations Aggregated from Hacker News (mapfilterfold.com): Great way to find interesting ideas for your personal reading list.
• Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count (nytimes.com): The New York Times tracker is among the best available. Moreover the underlying data has been open-sourced.
• Coronavirus is a Preview of our Self-Isolating Future (medium.com): “It feels, in some ways, like a dress rehearsal for a future that was already on its way — one in which more and more of us self-isolate voluntarily, interacting with the outside world only from behind screens.”
• The First MBA Course on the Longevity Economy (nextavenue.org): Reflections from students, professors and observers of an innovative course at Stanford University.
• How Insects are Trained for TV and Movies (businessinsider.com): Fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how entomologist Steven Kutcher, who has worked on over 100 Hollywood films, gets insects to “perform” for movie directors.
• It Wasn’t Just Trump Who Got It Wrong (theatlantic.com): “America’s coronavirus response failed because we didn’t understand the complexity of the problem.”
• National Emergency Library (archive.org): The Internet Archive has made 1.4 million books generally available (with no borrowing quotas or waitlists) in an effort to support online education during the COVID-19 crisis. This is a tremendous boon to readers.
• Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising? (wired.com): “If companies couldn’t use our data to target ads, they would have no reason to gobble it up in the first place, and no opportunity to do mischief with it later.”
• Why You Need to Start Using a Decision Journal (trello.com): “It’ll give you some helpful insight into your own decision-making process, so you can improve your selections moving forward.”
• Unity Learn Premium Is Free for 3 Months (unity.com): Unity is the leading engines for the development of 3D and 2D games. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the company has made its learning platform free for folks interested in acquiring new skills.

Podcasts:

• Animal Spirits Podcast (libsyn.com): A longtime favorite. Hosts Ben Carlson and Michael Batnick offer level-headed commentary on the financial markets with a healthy dose of good humor.
• Behind the Bastards: The Worst Grifters of the Coronavirus (iheart.com): Unethical opportunism is always eager to pounce quickly in times of uncertainty and volatility.

Videos:

• Ted Talk: The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready (ted.com): Bill Gates’ 2015 TED Talk on the global risk of viral pandemic is frighteningly prescient in hindsight.