In Covid's Wake

Two Princeton political scientists turn their own institutional world's pandemic performance into the subject, arguing that school closures, one-size-fits-all mandates, and the marginalizing of dissenting experts reflected professional class interests as much as science. The book's force comes from where it's published and who wrote it—establishment academics indicting establishment failure rather than partisan outsiders doing so. It's most persuasive tracing how uncertainty got laundered into false consensus and how costs fell disproportionately on people who couldn't work from home. It's least persuasive when the same rigor isn't applied evenhandedly to arguments the authors are less sympathetic to, making it feel more like a brief for one side of an argument it presents as adjudicated.