Weekend Reading, Watching, and Listening Recommendations (January 22, 2021)

The Rise and Fall and Rise (and Fall) of the U.S. Financial Empire; How did Israel become “vaccination nation”?; Reducing poverty through an address; How Japan Is Building Disaster-Proof Skyscrapers

1. Read: Moderna believes it could update its coronavirus vaccine without a big new trial [via MIT Technology Review]

2. Read: How to Save Democracy From Technology: Ending Big Tech’s Information Monopoly By Francis Fukuyama, Barak Richman, and Ashish Goel [via Foreign Affairs]

3. Read: The Rise and Fall and Rise (and Fall) of the U.S. Financial Empire. The dollar is dead. Long live the dollar. By Adam Tooze [via Foreign Policy]

4. Listen: How did Israel become “vaccination nation”? With less than 0.1% of the world’s population, Israel accounts for 10% of COVID-19 vaccinations globally. By one estimate, the over 65 population will be covered by the end of February. How did they do this?

5. Listen: Reducing poverty through an address. An address is something many people take for granted today, but they are in fact a fairly recent invention that has shaped our cities and taken on great political importance. Deirdre Mask is the author of The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, examines how addresses impact wealth and poverty, and how they serve as proxies for our most contentious debates. Mask also explores a digital future where we aren't reliant on the numbers on our homes to tell us where we are or where we're going. [via 99% Invisible]

6. Watch: Esteban Rossi-Hansberg on the economic geography of climate change [via Princeton Economics]

7. Watch: How Japan Is Building Disaster-Proof Skyscrapers [via Bloomberg]