Some years—1789, 1929, 1989—change the world suddenly. Or do they? In 2020, a pandemic converged with an economic collapse, inequalities exploded, and institutions weakened. Yet these crises sprang not from new risks but from known dangers. The world—like many patients—met 2020 with a host of preexisting conditions, which together tilted the odds toward disaster. Perhaps 2020 wasn’t the year the world changed; perhaps it was simply the moment the world finally understood its deadly diagnosis.

In The Long Year, some of the world’s most incisive thinkers excavate 2020’s buried crises, revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more equal future. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for the defunding of police and the refunding of communities; Keisha Blain demonstrates why the battle against racism must be global; and Adam Tooze reveals that COVID-19 hit hardest where inequality was already greatest and welfare states weakest. Yarimar Bonilla, Xiaowei Wang, Simon Balto, Marcia Chatelain, Gautam Bhan, Ananya Roy, and others offer insights from the factory farms of China to the elite resorts of France, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest to the overcrowded hospitals of India.

The definitive guide to these ongoing catastrophes, The Long Year shows that only by exposing the roots and ramifications of 2020 can another such breakdown be prevented. It is made possible through institutional partnerships with Public Books and the Social Science Research Council.

Contributions by: Andy Horowitz, Éric Charmes, Max Rousseau, Adam Tooze, Joan Wallach Scott, Andrew Lakoff, Keisha N. Blain, Natalia Molina, Marcia Chatelain, Michelle Cera, Gilles Guiheux, Ye Guo, Renyou Hou, Manon Laurent, Jun Li, Anne-Valérie Ruinet, Govindan Venkatasubramanian, Isabelle Guérin, Mathieu Ferry, Marine Al Dahdah, Neha Vora, Sulfikar Amir, Sherihan Radi, Mustafa Dikeç, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Simon Balto, Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, Rachel Nolan, David Schmidt, Julie Livingston, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Xiaowei Wang, Priscilla Wald, Evan Lieberman, Warwick Anderson, Julia Foulkes, Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Sophie Lewis, Guobin Yang, Sophie Gonick, Margaret O'Mara, Alfonso Fierro, Erick Corrêa, Ananya Roy, Gianpaolo Biaocchi, Jake Carlson, Quentin Ravelli, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Rikki J. Dean, Afsoun Afsahi, Emily Beausoleil, Selen A. Ercan, Miguel Centeno, Gautam Bhan, Joanne Randa Nucho, Yarimar Bonilla, Jacob A.C. Remes, Warren Breckman, Cordula Dittmer, Daniel F. Lorenz, Kathryn Cai, Eric Klinenberg, David S. Barnes, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Merlin Chowkwanyun