A pair of sentences, published on April 17, show us how strange globalization has become: “Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected.”
This passage didn’t appear in one of Richard Stark’s crime novels or in the script of an East Coast reshoot of Breaking Bad. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, describing a hospital’s desperate efforts to secure a shipment of personal protective equipment.
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “This Is What the Future of Globalization Will Look Like,” Foreign Policy (Summer 2020).