Analysis & Opinion

Joe Biden’s presidential bid has often invited comparisons to President Warren G Harding, whose 1920 campaign slogan promised a “return to normalcy” after a chaotic preceding decade.

On January 6, as the two chambers of Congress convened to count Electoral College votes and officially certify Joe Biden as the president-elect of the United States, a violent mob stormed the US Capitol in support of President Donald Trump and his false allegation that the presidential contest was “stolen” through voter fraud.

If there was any doubt at all, let’s end it today. Words have meaning. When a president tells his followers that the fate of the nation is at stake in a presidential election, millions will believe him.

It is one of the curiosities of this inside-out age that Donald Trump is loved by conspiracists, even though he is a leader – at last! – who embodies of all their worst fears. He really does hate them, he really is plotting against them, and he really is lying to them, in multiple and increasingly wicked and baroque ways.

Brexit was never fundamentally an economic project. It was always more about what it said on the ballot paper in 2016. Brexit was about ceasing to be a member of the European Union. Leavers understood that. Remainers, in contrast, still struggle with it.

You’re reading an excerpt from the Today’s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest, including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.

Air pollution in British cities must urgently be reduced. The public, and particularly people who have asthma – or other conditions that place them at increased risk from breathing particulate matter or gases including nitrogen dioxide – must be much better informed about the threat to their health.

Brexit means Brexit” – the mantra of the former British prime minister Theresa May – deserves a place in philosophy textbooks as the most meaningless sentence ever to contain the word “means”. But let’s not fool ourselves..

As a scientist, I firmly believe that scientific progress will provide the exit strategy from this pandemic. But I’ve often worried that we may not be able to achieve what’s needed to prevent the spread of this virus, or that doing so would take a very long time. Never have I been happier to be proved wrong.