... employs a wide lens, drawing on governance, economics and culture. Call it 'applied history' ... Having laid out a 'gloomy compendium of threats,' Zakaria rightly celebrates 'our resilient world' ... With his lively language and to-the-point examples, Zakaria tells the story well, while resisting boilerplate as served up by the left and the right. Nor does he spare his own liberal class, the 'meritocracy' of the best educated and better off, which he fingers ever so gently as deepening the divide between urban and rural, elites and 'deplorables.' He might have said a bit more about the uses and abuses of cultural hegemony that have driven hoi polloi into the arms of Donald Trump and triggered defections from the democratic left in Europe ... Both The Financial Times and Zakaria’s book urge a revolution already upon us, and probably represent today’s zeitgeist and reality ... read Ten Lessons. It is an intelligent, learned and judicious guide for a world already in the making.

... a pithy roundup of some of the inevitable global changes that will follow the current pandemic ... Examining issues both obvious and subtler, Zakaria sets out how and why the world has changed forever ... A cleareyed, concise look at current and future affairs offering pertinent points to reflect and debate.

... [a] scattershot treatise ... In the book’s strongest sections, Zakaria argues that America needs a less fragmented and gridlocked government bureaucracy to cope with health threats, and he calls for more honesty and empathy from scientists, and foresees accelerated migration of work and life onto the internet. Other points seem tangential to the virus (the rise of robots and artificial intelligence to displace humans), or rehash Zakaria’s already well-articulated stances (he spends many pages defending globalization and multilateralism against Trumpian nationalism) ... He anthropomorphizes Covid-19 as 'nature’s revenge' for overpopulation and human environmental encroachments, and suggests that 'promoting healthier diets' will help to prevent the next pandemic. Zakaria also disparages America’s Covid-19 response by cherry-picking the statistic that by July 2020 'per-capita daily death rates in the United States were ten times higher than in Europe,' without noting that the continent’s outbreak peaked earlier, with similarly high death rates in multiple countries. This less-than-cogent analysis of the coronavirus pandemic leaves much to be desired.

... true to this author’s rather unflinching humanism ... necessarily a Herculean effort at speculation ... we don’t come to Zakaria’s books for their crystal ball. It’s fascinating to watch this author’s mind at work, regardless of the direction or likelihood of that work ... This book ranges across a wide array of possible changes that might be brought about by the plague, and most of the speculation is firmly grounded in the observable present-day realities of shutdown, quarantine, and economic downturn on a global scale.

Zakaria is a rational, thoughtful thinker and an excellent communicator who has essentially put together ten extended opinion columns like you regularly see in the Washington Post ... As we must recalibrate our politics Zakaria writes that must we understand how Covid is challenging economic orthodoxy and revealing that markets alone are not enough. Predictably as an expert on global affairs he urges the pandemic to make us listen again to the experts. Yet his picture of how populism has supercharged culture wars and fissures across America and beyond is left as a problem without a clear sense of a solution ... A recognition of Covid catalyzing advances in the digital domain begins with a somewhat predictable look at remote working but ends in a far more interesting examination of what Artificial Intelligence (AI) will do to fundamental concepts of human labor. He skilfully paints a picture of AI not replacing humanity but allowing it to refocus ... Zakaria’s general idealistic realism is refreshing. However, Zakaria’s grasp of the big picture and his ability to channel such a wide narrative in a very readable format should be commended.