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Three years after the coronavirus pandemic began, what lessons have we learned? Four new books-The Big Fail, Lessons from the Covid War, The Phoenix Economy, and Chaos Kings-and a blog series on Crooked Timber search for answers. They examine the response to the crisis, the systemic and societal weaknesses it revealed, and the ways it has fundamentally changed the world.

Having studied TV signals in East Germany from the 1960s to 1989 and rates of entrepreneurship there after German reunification, the researchers found that people in households with access to West German broadcasts were more likely than other East Germans to launch companies later in life.

According to an analysis led by Ranjay Gulati, during the recessions of 1980, 1990, and 2000, 17% of the 4,700 public companies studied fared very badly: They went bankrupt, went private, or were acquired. But just as striking, 9% of the companies flourished, outperforming competitors by at least 10% in sales and profits growth. A more recent analysis by Bain using data from the Great Recession reinforced that finding, showing that the top 10% of companies studied didn't merely survive; their earnings climbed steadily throughout the downturn and continued to rise afterward. Among the companies that stagnated in the aftermath of the Great Recession, few had made contingency plans, according to the Bain report. "When the downturn hit, they switched to survival mode, making deep cuts and reacting defensively." How should firms prepare for a recession, and what should they do when one hits? This research roundup examines advice in four areas: debt, decision making, workforce management, and digital transformation.

As machines evolve from tools to teammates, the author writes, accepting them will be more than a matter of simply adopting some new technology. The first challenge will be recognizing when computers know more than we do. "Algorithm avoidance," for instance, makes people prefer human judgment over that of machines and can lead to worse decisions, from diagnosing patients to predicting political outcomes. The message for managers is that helping humans to trust thinking machines will be essential. One way to encourage that trust is to make robots more humanoid. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon explored this idea with an autonomous robot named Snackbot, which had wheels, arms, a male voice, and an LED mouth that could smile and frown. People in the office made conversation with it and treated it with kindness. But this approach may lead us to put too much faith in the machines' abilities. How we work with thinking machines will vary according to the work we're doing, how it's framed, and how the machines are designed. But under the right conditions, people are surprisingly open to a robotic colleague.