Bryan Walsh

1 week ago | vox.com | Bryan Walsh

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!Back in 2022, sunglasses-wearing U2 frontman and rock star philanthropist Bono gave one of those long interviews to the New York Times Magazine.

2 weeks ago | vox.com | Bryan Walsh

In Ezra Klein and Derk Thompson’s new book Abundance — which maybe you’ve heard of — they tell the story of Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian American scientist whose work ultimately led to the mRNA Covid vaccines. When the research center she was working for in Hungary lost its state funding in the early 1980s, Karikó left her homeland, selling her car for 900 British pounds and sewing the cash into her daughter’s teddy bear so her family had something to live on.

2 weeks ago | vox.com | Bryan Walsh

Anyone who has watched a loved one descend into the fog of dementia knows the tremendous toll that neurodegenerative diseases of aging can exact. Dementia currently afflicts over 55 million people worldwide; in the US, — about 1 out of 10 of those 65 years or older — live with dementia. The economic cost of treating and the often uncompensated cost of caring for those sufferers is now more than $600 billion a year.

3 weeks ago | vox.com | Bryan Walsh

I was an English major in college, and my favorite poet was the first-generation Romantic William Wordsworth. For one thing, there’s the name, the best example of nominative determinism in the annals of English literature. But what I most love about Wordsworth is the way he acts as a bridge between the formal, at times stultified style of the poetry that came before him, and the dawn of a new era that venerated individual emotion and experience — both the good and the ill.

1 month ago | vox.com | Bryan Walsh

If you’re anything like me — a policy dork who spends too much time on X — you’ve been unable to escape discussion of a new book called Abundance. Written by the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and the New York Times’s Ezra Klein (also a co-founder of Vox), Abundance is one of those policy books with one big idea that everyone has to have an opinion on — whether they’ve read it or not. Good NewsA weekly dose of stories chronicling progress around the world.