A note to Quartz readers during the coronavirus pandemic
Dear readers,
How are you holding up in these strange, difficult times? What are things like where you are? Here in my makeshift office in my apartment in New York, I can hear birdsong, my daughter’s first-grade class, and too many sirens going by.
The desk I am sharing with my daughter.
I became Quartz’s new editor in chief in January. Within just a few weeks, our reporters and editors in Hong Kong had published their first stories about the new coronavirus and started working at home. Since then, the virus has turned into the story, a catastrophe both sudden and slow-moving, and it feels as though both time and space have collapsed. So many of us are confined in our homes, and yet it’s more obvious than ever how connected to each other we all are, wherever we are in the world, by the illness itself and our collective fear and grief, by video conferencing and supply chains, and by the choices we make every day that affect other people and could save lives.
Quartz was founded in the wake of the last global economic crisis, which exposed the interconnectedness and fragility of the world’s financial systems and the way in which second- and third-order effects now pile up faster than most people can make sense of them. Our mission has always been to help our readers understand and adapt to unprecedented change.
As we face this new global crisis together, Quartz’s reporters in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the US can help you see beyond the immediate crisis. We’ll explain the potential impact on every aspect of the global economy, put incomplete data in context, help you work in a new way, and consider how we might all contribute to building a more humane and resilient economy.
To fight a pandemic, “what is required is not less globalization, but more, or at least more globalization of a different kind,” the economist Angus Deaton said back in 2004. Our recovery from Covid-19 and its impact on the world depends on the globalization of information, data, and understanding, and that means we need great global journalism—the kind of reporting and analysis Quartz is committed to bringing you every day—more than ever.
If you haven’t already, you should sign up for Need to Know, our free email about coronavirus and its impact on the global economy, which I promise will also give you other things you might need right now, like distraction and companionship, along with vital information about the pandemic itself. And if you are working at home, I recommend you join us for Quartz at Work (from home), our new weekly workshop series on working remotely. The first two have been fantastic.
Please consider supporting our work by becoming a member of Quartz. As a member, you’ll get complete access to Quartz, including all of our analysis on the consequences of coronavirus; exclusive field guides to the global economy on everything from the future of batteries to innovations in senior living to why startups fail; and award-winning video series like Because China. We know that one way or another, you’re likely to be involved in helping the world get past this crisis, and we’ll be here to support you and your work in every way we can.
I’d love to hear what you’d most like to know about the new world we’ve all just entered. You can reach me by sending an email to hi@qz.com.
Take care, and thank you for reading.
Katherine Bell
@katherineabell
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