Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, listens as the president delivers an update on the omicron variant at the White House in Washington, Nov. 29, 2021.

One week after the omicron variant was publicly identified, the message from American political leaders and public health officials has been consistent: Be watchful, but not alarmed.

The new coronavirus variant, about which much is still unknown, is “cause for concern but not panic,” President Joe Biden said Thursday from the National Institutes of Health. The president promised to fight the new variant “with science and speed, not chaos and confusion.”

Many of the new White House measures announced Thursday aimed at combating both the delta and omicron strains of the virus this winter build largely on existing government strategies. They include urging vaccination and boosters, expanding the supply of at-home COVID-19 tests and making them reimbursable through private insurance, and strengthening testing protocols for all inbound international travelers. The administration notably did not announce more drastic measures, such as lockdowns or other hard-line mandates. It did extend the requirement to wear a mask on airplanes, rail travel, and public transportation through March 18.

The administration’s biggest mandate initiative – requiring businesses with 100 or more employees to require vaccination – has been temporarily blocked by a federal appeals court. On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked the vaccine mandate for health care workers.  

The first American omicron case was announced Wednesday, in a person in San Francisco who had recently traveled to South Africa, where the variant was first identified. The news was not a surprise; public health experts had widely assumed omicron was already in the United States. The case is reported to be mild. By Thursday, cases had been identified in two more states.

This new variant emerged just as many Americans were fully resuming elements of pre-pandemic life, such as plane travel, cruises, and large indoor gatherings. And “pandemic fatigue” is a growing challenge for political and health leaders, who once again are urging the public to take additional measures to protect themselves and others.

“People just are over it,” says Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at New York University and Bellevue Hospital. Cases were already surging before omicron, and many Americans don’t want more restrictions, notes Dr. Gounder, a member of the Biden-Harris COVID-19 transition team. “This is one of the main challenges.”

Keeping communications clear and factual remains a paramount goal. On the initial omicron messaging, some experts give the Biden administration high marks. 

“Their communication has been quite good on this – and that is, wait and see what the science shows,” says Kenneth Bernard, an epidemiologist who ran the office on global health threats in the Clinton and second Bush White Houses. “We’re not going to do anything drastic out of fear.” 

“Noise ... from a lot of different directions”

But critics say other administration efforts to communicate clear guidance to the public have fallen short, as with the rollout of a campaign to encourage those already fully vaccinated to get booster shots, which some compared to the Trump administration’s “chaotic” pandemic messaging.

In September, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, overruled her agency’s own vaccine advisory panel’s recommendations by expanding the categories of people eligible for boosters – a decision that was released at 1 a.m. Last month, the CDC further expanded eligibility, by saying all adults over age 18 who were more than six months out from their second mRNA vaccine dose (or two months out from a dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine) “may” get a booster. This week, the agency’s guidance changed again, from “may” to “should.”  

“There was just a lot of, in my opinion, noise coming from a lot of different directions,” says Elizabeth McNally, director of the Center for Genetic Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

Dr. McNally thinks the Biden administration took an appropriate, proactive approach to boosters, given the information it had at the time. But the confusion was undeniable. Her own patients and colleagues didn’t know whether to get a shot. Public health departments across the country faced a deluge of similar questions.

“They keep saying it’s essential now for everybody to get boosted who can without really explaining how that fits with the overall control strategy,” says Ira Longini, professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida.

Some experts take issue with how public health officials have broadly approached pandemic messaging – by telling people what to do, rather than explaining the science behind the guidance. 

Baruch Fischhoff, a professor at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, says there are two kinds of scientific communication: “risk communication,” which entails giving people the information they need to make choices for themselves and evaluate the government’s decisions; and “health promotion,” in which the government tells people what to do based on expert advice, such as “wear a mask.”

Ideally, Professor Fischhoff says, the two approaches complement one another, but so far the administration has focused more on health promotion. 

“It’s just a continuing failure,” he says. 

Health promotion only works if people trust the expert or institution giving the advice, but there’s no person or group with that kind of sway in the U.S. today, he says. 

“There’s lots of people giving advice in the health promotion area,” Professor Fischhoff says. “It’s often contradictory. You have no idea what facts they’re working on. You have no idea what their values are.”

“The idea that the public could not understand this information is just not true,” he adds. 

Political polarization and public health

Adding to the challenge of public health communication during a pandemic is the parallel development of political polarization. 

When the pandemic shut down normal life in March 2020, partisan patterns in personal behavior became clear early on, and have stuck, according to a forthcoming book, “Pandemic Politics: How COVID-19 Revealed the Depths of Partisan Polarization.” Such behaviors include mask-wearing, social distancing, and later, a willingness to be vaccinated. 

“There are these big gaps between Republicans and Democrats that we see in our survey data very early on in March 2020, and which don’t go away over time as the virus starts to move across the country,” says Shana Gadarian, a political scientist at Syracuse University in New York and one of the book’s co-authors. “Those patterns have locked in.”

The overall argument of the book is that “elite” messaging on the part of politicians matters a lot, she says. And it mattered early on, as conservative media and the Trump administration played down the risks of the virus. 

“Democrats very early on were in line with public health officials,” Professor Gadarian says, noting that some Republican state leaders also took the virus seriously from the start. 

With omicron, the immediate challenge around addressing it – including public communication – remains its unique nature and the lack of understanding about its properties. 

“The right thing to do right now is to have an all-hands-on-deck response, where we are preparing for the worst case but hoping that the worst case never arises,” says Spencer Fox, associate director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. 

“I think Biden’s tone was right in saying now is not the time to panic,” he says. “But I do think it is the time to make those necessary preparations.”

Dr. Fox adds that Americans’ “pandemic fatigue” ties the president’s hands to a large extent when it comes to new restrictions. The alternative, he suggests, is local action: “There actually needs to be a really strong kind of local community involvement to reenergize people in the face of a surge.”

Former Afghan officials who once served the American-backed government in Kabul say the war against them did not end with the Taliban’s victory in mid-August.

Across Afghanistan, members of the jihadist group are pursuing revenge attacks with a single-minded determination that may even be quickening in pace, according to ex-officials and independent rights monitors.

They cite incidents of Taliban violence – from the dragging of a 6-year-old boy behind a motorcycle to pressure his father, to the severe beating of the brother of another former official in an attempt to reveal his hiding place – and they say colleagues taken by the Taliban are turning up dead, one after another.

Taliban leaders had declared a blanket amnesty that was meant to include even Afghan security forces and intelligence operatives, who had fought the Taliban for 20 years. Yet, because of their role in the collapsed U.S. nation-building exercise, the former officials instead describe still being treated as the “enemy,” as “infidels” subject to killings, disappearances, and confiscations of houses and cars.

The targeted violence – which appears to be increasing as the Taliban tap into captured government databases, according to experts and Western human rights monitors – shows how little the jihadis have shifted their thinking, and their priorities, even as Afghanistan faces new immediate crises of severe hunger and economic meltdown.

“You absolutely have a reluctance on the part of the Taliban [leadership] to acknowledge the extent to which this [violence] is happening,” says Andrew Watkins, an Afghanistan expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

The Taliban have “just been unwilling or unable to challenge the militant nature of their own organization,” he says.

The Taliban’s most devoted members, he says, “look out and see a landscape of very, very recently defeated enemies. Sometimes they’re taking them out because they’re a threat; sometimes because they feel like it’s righting a wrong. Sometimes they’re just doing it because all they’ve known is ‘hunt down and seek out and eliminate the enemy.’”

Effective indoctrination

The Taliban leadership “proved incredibly effective at indoctrinating and incubating an entire generation of fighters,” says Mr. Watkins. “Those guys have the mindsets that they do because of Taliban propaganda … and now they can’t put a lid on it.”

The result is that local Taliban commanders and fighters appear to be pursuing former government officials with the same zeal with which, for two decades, they waged an insurgency, and, a year ago, stepped up a targeted assassination campaign against officials, civil society activists, and journalists.

In central Wardak province, for example, a former finance officer shows photographs of his 6-year-old son, recently bloodied and bruised after being seized by the Taliban. The boy was beaten, tied up, and dragged behind a motorcycle for 10 yards – actions witnessed by neighbors, the father says – because the boy did not know where his father was in hiding.

The Taliban message? “Your death is permissible and your house and all your belongings are a prize for us, because you are not Muslim, and for 20 years you [were] a slave to the Americans,” says the former official, who asked not to be named for his safety.

The posse of a dozen Taliban fighters demanded that the former official forfeit his house, claiming it was “government” property. The family refused, noting the house had been built with private funds.

“The Taliban say former government officials are safe and secure, that no one can hurt, kill, or insult them … but this is just a slogan from the Taliban, and secret terrors are still going on,” says the former official.

War booty

Even before the Taliban victory, the official often received death threats, he says. His fears were heightened recently when two former colleagues, arrested by the Taliban last month, turned up dead.

“They call former officials ‘unbelievers,’ not committed to Islam and God, [who] should be tortured physically and mentally,” he says. “Taking cars and houses and other property is booty for them.”

The disconnect between the Taliban’s official amnesty and the targeting of former officials is made clear in a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released this week. It found that more than 100 former security and intelligence officers had been executed or “forcibly disappeared” in just four provinces between August and the end of October.

One Taliban commander from central Ghazni province told HRW that they have lists of people to target who have committed “unforgivable” acts.

“The pattern of the killings has sown terror throughout Afghanistan, as no one associated with the former government can feel secure they have escaped the threat of reprisal,” the report noted.

Rahmat Gul/AP

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, at his first news conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 17, 2021, said the victorious Taliban sought no revenge and that “everyone is forgiven.”

The surprise, says Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at HRW, is that Taliban revenge killings “have not only continued, but possibly increased and are more deliberate … as they’ve had time to go through documents, and all the information the fleeing government left behind” that allow them to pinpoint new targets.

Reasons for going after former officials include revenge, she says, as well as providing booty to fighters, and even going after senior district and provincial personalities to stymie the chances of organized resistance.

Placating the fighters

The Taliban “can’t pay these guys, and they need to give them something,” says Ms. Gossman. “The revenge part of it was also a kind of payback. They recruited these guys saying, ‘You’ll get your chance to get revenge on whoever did whatever to your family.’ So they choose not to pull the plug on that now.”

The Taliban also “fear alienating any of their ranks because they know they could be recruited by the Islamic State,” adds Ms. Gossman, who notes the volatility of a situation “where people don’t have enough food on the table.”

“There are a lot of armed, angry young men who could be recruited by anyone,” she says.

In late September the Taliban established a commission to purge wrongdoers. While publicly noting “isolated reports” of unauthorized executions, the Taliban told HRW it had removed 755 members for lesser offenses and set up a military tribunal to try cases of murder and torture.

But examples abound of continued abuses. In southern Helmand province, a former district governor who worked closely with the U.S. military and diplomats is among many on the run. He was widely praised in 2015 for wrapping his arms around a would-be Taliban suicide bomber, who had infiltrated a public meeting, to prevent him from detonating his explosive vest.

The former official “had endangered himself for the lives of scores of others,” according to the letter of recommendation for a U.S. special immigrant visa, written by an American official he worked closely with.

But the former Afghan official, who asked not to be named for security reasons, was unable to get on an evacuation flight last August. Instead, he is being hunted. He shares voice messages spread between Taliban commanders, who dismiss the amnesty and order their fighters to “have no mercy” and kill former officials “wherever you see them.”

One Taliban phone message addresses him directly: “Your killing is my only desire. I am asking Allah to find you.”

In recent weeks, he says, three of his colleagues, all former officials, have been arrested and killed by the Taliban. His own brother was held for 10 days and severely beaten in a bid to discover his whereabouts and details of property that could be seized.

A Robin Hood-esque narrative

And in eastern Nangarhar province, the wife of one former finance ministry official recounts how even after the Taliban took the family’s car, militants later came for their house, accusing the family of serving as a “puppet of America.”

“We told them that we are Muslims, we pray and follow all Islamic rules, but the local Taliban commander said, ‘No, you are infidels in Muslim clothes, and you are our absolute enemy,’” she says.

Her husband refused to give up the house and was severely beaten, she says. The Taliban arrested him more than a month ago, and he has not been seen since. Her home and possessions were seized.

Many Taliban fighters seeking revenge have long nursed grievances, which often include abuses and corruption at the hands of the previous Western-backed political order.

“It’s easy for people to tell themselves, ‘Well, we’re just righting a wrong,’” says Mr. Watkins of the U.S. Institute of Peace. “In some cases you have Taliban … who almost have a Robin Hood-esque narrative of, ‘We have to take away from the awful, corrupt class that was previously in charge and give back to those who were marginalized, sidelined, or ignored.’

“The only problem now is the people doing the taking are the new power brokers, the new abusers,” says Mr. Watkins. “And there is really nothing to check their behavior.”

Susan Walsh/AP

President Joe Biden speaks as he meets virtually with Chinese leader Xi Jinping from the White House on Nov. 15, 2021. The Biden administration has invited Taiwan to its upcoming Summit for Democracy, prompting sharp criticism from China.

The planning started within days of President Joe Biden’s inauguration, and now it’s happening: a gathering of more than 100 world leaders to launch a democratic fightback against the rising influence and assertiveness of autocracies like Russia and China.

Yet in the run-up to next week’s Summit for Democracy, there are growing signs that the deeper challenge to the future of liberal democracies may lie within.

A series of recent surveys has charted the trouble that even the oldest democracies are in. Last week, one influential report – on “backsliding” democracies – included, for the first time, the United States itself.

So while the summit will highlight what Mr. Biden has termed a historic struggle between democracy and autocracy, it will also inevitably focus attention on what’s ailing democracies themselves, and what might be done about it.

The encouraging news for democracy advocates is that Mr. Biden has recognized that challenge. Along with this virtual summit, there are plans for an in-person meeting next year to encourage, and gauge, progress.

The less encouraging news? The list of what needs repair is long and daunting: 

How to revive belief and trust in the institutional pillars of democratic government: the rule of law, civil liberties, freedom of expression, fair elections, and the peaceful transfer of power?

Paula Bronstein/AP/File

Distrust that democratic institutions are working, as shown by these supporters of President Donald Trump at a "Stop the Steal" rally in Salem, Oregon, on Nov. 14, 2020, may be a greater threat to democratic nations than autocracies, experts warn.

How to restore civility to public debate, a shared commitment among political parties to democratic norms and values? And, distant though that prospect may now seem in the U.S. and numerous other democracies, how to rebuild compromise in service of the public good?

Finally, and perhaps most critically, how to demonstrate democratic government works, that it can deliver on issues affecting voters’ everyday lives?

If there were any doubt of the erosion afflicting all these fronts, pre-summit reports from internationally respected democracy monitors – Freedom House in Washington and a pair of Sweden-based organizations, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and Varieties of Democracy – have painted a similarly sobering picture. 

“This is the fifteenth consecutive year of decline in global freedom,” Freedom House reported. “Countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest number since the trend began in 2006.”

In fact, of the 110 countries invited to next week’s summit, nearly a third were defined as “not free” or “partly free” in this year’s assessment by Freedom House.

The “decline in global freedom” is all the more stark given the trend toward democracy at the end of the Cold War, leading the distinguished political scientist Francis Fukuyama in 1992 to suggest that liberal democracy and free market economies had definitively won the contest of ideologies, and to declare “the end of history.”

Since then, there have been serial shocks to the democratic system: the global “war on terror,” the world economic crash, and the rise of strongman populist politicians. Their underlying message, echoed by Moscow and Beijing: Liberal democracies are too slow, too bound by rules and institutional limits, too remote or corrupt or uncaring, to fix the problems of people’s day-to-day lives.

Mr. Biden told Congress a few months ago that “autocrats think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century. We have to prove that democracy still works.”

With the summit drawing nearer, a London webinar brought home last week the scale of that task, but also points to how it might be accomplished.

The speaker was the British philosopher and writer A.C. Grayling, whose most recent books have focused on the future of democracy. He began with a salutary reminder that democratic government has been the historical exception, not the norm. Indeed, it’s only in the last century that two of the world’s leading democracies, Britain and America, extended the vote to women.

He also unpicked how, in both Britain and the U.S., the voting system had reduced politics to a contest between two major political parties, leaving large numbers of voters feeling that their own voices went unheard. That fed a sense of disengagement that is easily amplified, and weaponized politically, through “microtargeting” of divisive, or even false, messages on social media.

Professor Grayling recognized that his own preferred recipe for fixing things – proportional representation electoral systems such as those used in many European countries, for instance, and web transparency to end microtargeting campaigns – might face serious head winds.

But what stuck with me were the pair of sea changes that he saw as critical: a two-way reconnection between the government and the governed, and a rekindling of can-do political compromise among political groups across the partisan divide.

Will that be hard? You bet.

But possible? Two very different countries suggest the answer might yet prove “yes.”

The first is Israel, where years of increasingly divisive, populist-style government by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have given way to a coalition of parties with deep differences but a shared determination to make their government work.

And even as Professor Grayling was speaking, three quite different political parties in Germany – the Social Democrats, the pro-market Free Democrats, and the Greens – agreed on unified Germany’s first three-way coalition, vowing to “dare more progress” following Angela Merkel’s 16-year tenure.

Both countries’ leaders will be at Mr. Biden’s online summit. And while their models might not necessarily work elsewhere – each country is different – they’ll at least offer an example of what’s possible, and a glimmer of hope.

Growing up in Namibia, Paul Thomas knew that something terrible had happened to his family, though the exact details were fuzzy.

His parents mentioned in passing that their grandparents had once been forced to flee from their land. Older people in his community spoke of those who had died fighting German soldiers.

But it wasn’t until Mr. Thomas was a university student in Namibia, a former German colony, that he learned there was a specific term that historians and activists used for what had happened to his community. A genocide.

Earlier this year, Germany’s government offered an apology for the massacres its colonial forces carried out against Herero and Nama people – including Mr. Thomas’ ancestors – in what is now Namibia between 1904 and 1908. For the past three weeks, Namibia’s parliament has been debating whether or not to accept the offer, which came with more than $1.2 billion in aid money to be distributed across eight affected regions of the country over the next three decades. And Germany formally acknowledged that what had happened in Namibia was a genocide.

But in Namibia, many felt the offer was hollow. And what Namibia and Germany do in these negotiations is being watched globally by many former colonized countries and their colonial powers looking for a roadmap to come to terms with their own brutal histories of violence and repression. Namibia’s experience suggests there will be no easy answers. For many there, for instance, the current offer from Germany lets the country off the hook too easily, and doesn’t give descendants of those killed a proper opportunity to make their own needs heard.

For more than two months, from the end of September to early December, the country’s Parliament fiercely debated whether to accept the offer. Because it was supported by the ruling South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), many expected the motion to pass despite the heavy opposition.

But on Wednesday, the country’s minister of home affairs made a surprise announcement.

“The government is going to further engage Germany,” explained Frans Kapofi, who is also a SWAP member of Parliament. There would be no vote.

Although Mr. Kapofi cautioned that negotiation would always be a “give and take,” many saw this return to the negotiating table as a victory for those calling for more punitive measures against Germany.

“We are not hearing the word we want – a real apology would include the word reparation,” says Henny Hendly Seibeb, a member of Parliament for the Landless People’s Movement, a party that opposed the German offer. “They must be clear and direct, and say that what they are offering are reparations for a genocide committed.”

Negotiations between Germany and Namibia have been closely watched as a possible model for how former European colonial powers could atone for past atrocities. Although victims from other African countries, including Mau Mau fighters in Kenya tortured by the British in the 1950s, have successfully petitioned for compensation, no case has been as far reaching in its scope as that of Namibia.

Germany and Namibia have been debating this apology – what to call the killings, how to compensate affected communities, and what responsibility Germany holds – in some form since 1990, when Namibia won its independence from South Africa.

A colonial massacre

What has never been in doubt are the basic historical facts. In 1904, German commander Lothar von Trotha arrived in what was then German South West Africa with a mandate from Berlin: Crush the rebellions of local people and consolidate German rule. “Every Herero, with or without rifles, with or without cattle, will be shot,” he wrote in an order.

Historians believe that over the next four years, Germans massacred around 100,000 ethnic Herero, or 80% of their population. They also killed 10,000 Nama, half that group’s population. Those who weren’t murdered were sent to concentration camps; many were sterilized, subjected to medical experiments, and deliberately infected with diseases like tuberculosis and smallpox.

Today, the killings are widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century, and a precursor to Nazi Germany’s extermination of Europe’s Jews. To this day, German museums still hold hundreds of skulls of murder victims from the killing fields of southwest Africa. 

Tobias Schwarz/Reuters/File

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas speaks at a news conference in Berlin on May 28, 2021 after Germany recognized for the first time that it had committed genocide in Namibia during its colonial occupation and agreed to provide over €1 billion in development aid.

But despite the clarity of the historical record, the push to recognize the German mass murders as genocide remained a marginal cause for many years. After gaining its independence, Namibia was cash-strapped and reliant on foreign aid – of which Germany was a major source. And there were few Herero and Nama leaders in the ruling party, SWAPO, to push their agenda.

In recent years, however, Germans have begun advocating for their government to take responsibility for its colonial atrocities, including the Namibian genocide.  

After six years of back and forth, Germany’s foreign minister Heiko Maas announced in May that Germany admitted the killings amounted to a genocide and made the offer of €1.1 billion in aid and development.

“In light of Germany’s historical and moral responsibility we will ask Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness,” he said.

“This was seen as a very symbolic step in the right direction, especially outside of Germany,” says Henning Melber, a German Namibian political scientist who has written extensively about the genocide negotiations. Around Europe and North America, he says, the apology gave momentum to other campaigners seeking to hold colonial powers to account for acts of brutality.

Avoiding legal responsibility

But critics in Germany and Namibia described the apology as inadequate. By saying Germany’s responsibility was “historical and moral,” Mr. Melber says, Berlin sidestepped any question of legal responsibility. In his statement, Mr. Maas avoided any mention of reparations, which the German government fears could potentially open it up to legal action by the descendants of other victims of German violence, particularly during World War II.

Many in Namibia see that refusal of legal responsibility as racist.

“Look how they’ve dealt with the Jewish Holocaust versus what’s happened here,” says Mr. Thomas, who is secretary of an advocacy group called the Nama Genocide Technical Committee. “It tells you that some lives are more important than others.”

Many in both Namibia and Germany have also pointed out that the financial compensation offer is paltry. The sum is comparable to the aid money Germany has given to Namibia in the past 30 years, and amounts to about 7% of what Germany has spent on pandemic relief to small businesses.  

After Namibia’s negotiators agreed to the deal, it went to the country’s Parliament for approval in September. Because the ruling party holds a majority, the vote was widely seen as a rubber stamp for the government. But the ferocity of the opposition to the deal – both within and outside Parliament – appeared to rattle the SWAPO majority.

Mr. Kapofi, the home affairs minister, announced just before Parliament closed for the year on Dec. 2 that there would be no vote. Instead, government would return to negotiations with Germany.

“They saw that overwhelmingly the people have rejected” this offer, Mr. Seibeb says. “It was not enough.”

In 2021, musicians emerged from pandemic hibernation in studios, basements, and bedrooms. Scrambling to mount tours, artists snapped up calendar dates at reopened music venues like land during the gold rush. 

Although music fans may have been deprived of attending concerts during lockdown, they’re reaping an unexpected benefit: Many musicians used the unplanned downtime to compose new material. Since March of last year, some artists have been inspired to look outward and write about the collective human experience. Other musicians haven’t directly addressed the pandemic on new albums, but the period of confinement amplified their yearning for connection. On many of 2021’s best releases, it felt as if artists and listeners were reaching out to each other to share loss and love. 

When the pandemic upended Sting’s plans, for example, the songwriter resolved to go into the studio each day at 10 a.m. (For a rock star, that’s an unearthly hour to punch the clock.) He wrote “The Bridge,” his best album in years. Its captivating flagship single, “Rushing Water,” is about people in transition. Sting recently told Billboard that the connective thread running through the album was that “all the characters were looking for a bridge to the future that was somewhere different, somewhere safer, somewhere happier. And I think the whole planet is looking for a bridge at the moment. I am. Everyone is.”

Singer-songwriter Nick Cave discovered that, sometimes, one person has to build a bridge by extending a helping hand. On his website, he shares the back story of befriending a painter and sculptor named Thomas Houseago in late 2019. Soon after, Mr. Cave explains, Mr. Houseago had a breakdown and “could no longer find it in himself to make art.” 

It was the start of the pandemic and, like many songwriters, Mr. Cave was struggling to write lyrics. His head was filled with “dread and uncertainty.” So he made a deal with his friend: Paint me a picture and I’ll write you a song. 

Shawn Brackbill/Pitch Perfect PR

"I Don't Live Here Anymore" is the latest offering from The War on Drugs. The group's fifth studio album is about bridging disconnection.

“I felt that this challenge might give him the impetus to create something – I have found that sometimes it can be helpful to remove oneself from the creative process, and do work in the service of others,” Mr. Cave wrote. “I personally felt I could write a song for my friend Thomas, even if I couldn’t write one for myself.” 

The arrangement broke the creative stasis in both men. Mr. Cave says Mr. Houseago’s outpouring of paintings is a testament to the “miraculous healing power of art.” Mr. Cave’s consequent 2021 album, created with longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, utilizes electronic instruments and chamber orchestration to chiaroscuro effect. “Carnage” is occasionally as dark as the singer’s suits. His barking baritone can veer from menace to playfully profane wit. But mostly the songs are tender and gentle with lyrics that locate compassion and beauty in a broken world. 

The fifth studio album by The War on Drugs is also about bridging disconnection. On “I Don’t Live Here Anymore,” the songs are often about restless, blue-collar loners who yearn to return home to find redemption and love. The production harks back to the 1980s – touchstones include Don Henley and Phil Collins – but oblique guitar lines offer an earthy counterbalance to the lush keyboards. These are songs that gallop like Pegasus until they take flight. Case in point: The title track, built on a steady backbeat you could set a metronome to, has an ascending chorus sung by vocalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of the group Lucius. Adam Granduciel, frontman for The War on Drugs, told the Seattle public radio station KEXP in October that the pandemic influenced the tenor of his songs.

“There was a concept of trying to make something that felt good, you know, as hard as it was,” he said, later adding, “Musically, it was always about trying to make it pretty uplifting.”

WH Moustapha

Niger-based Mdou Moctar (wearing black above) and his band bridge Western and African music with their latest release, “Afrique Victime.”

Mdou Moctar’s “Afrique Victime” bridges Western and African music. When the guitarist from Niger was unable to tour during the pandemic, he invited his American bassist and producer, Mikey Coltun, to join him in his nation’s capital. They filmed a documentary about the dangers of playing live music in the country for fear of reprisals by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram. “Afrique Victime” is rooted in Tuareg desert blues with its trancelike repetition in hand-clapped rhythms and call-and-response vocals sung in Tamasheq. But Mr. Moctar breaks from traditional sounds with the ferocious attack of his feedback-soaked guitar. His spiraling guitar arpeggios have been compared to those of Jimi Hendrix. Mr. Moctar doesn’t just sing about issues such as women’s rights, he takes action.

“Every time I’ve managed to do an album, I build a well,” he told Dazed in May. “Access to water is an ongoing problem in Niger, so at the moment I’m travelling around villages and trying to assist people. I want to see how women are living locally, to facilitate improvements in healthcare and shift to becoming a father figure in my family.”

Just before the pandemic, two old friends from both sides of the Atlantic reached out to each other. British rocker Robert Plant and American singer Alison Krauss convened in Nashville, Tennessee, to record “Raise the Roof,” the follow-up to their 2007 blockbuster, “Raising Sand.” The pair’s Americana sound is rooted in country and bluegrass and New Orleans rhythm and blues. But this time, the collection of cover versions includes two folk songs – “Go Your Way” by Anne Briggs and “It Don’t Bother Me” by the late Bert Jansch – from Mr. Plant’s home country. Sometimes the duo both sing lead. At other times, one singer steps to the fore while the other sings backup. Ms. Krauss delivers a standout aching vocal on a brooding reinvention of the Everly Brothers song “The Price of Love.” “High and Lonesome,” the album’s sole original composition, showcases Mr. Plant’s deft rhythmic phrasing. The duo’s vocal blend is sheer alchemy. “Raise the Roof” is the rare sequel that’s at least equal to, if not better than, its predecessor. 

Simon Emmett

Adele’s latest album, “30,” grew out of her recent divorce and includes deeply felt songs that fans are flocking to.

When Adele released the biggest-selling album of 2021, it felt as if she needed us as much as we needed her. “30” is the long-awaited successor to her earlier albums “19,” “21,” and “25.” It’s a divorce record. The heartbreak piano ballad “Easy on Me,” which has more than 370 million streams on Spotify as of the beginning of December, probably boosted tissue sales. “My Little Love” includes candid audio of Adele sobbing and talking to her young son about the split. It’s a relief when the next track, “Cry Your Heart Out,” changes
pace with a skip in its step and doo-wop female backing vocals. On the glossy R&B stomper “Oh My God,” she gets giddy about a new romance, her voice bobbing and weaving in between the beat. 

The return of the beloved British singer offers comfort to listeners at the end of what has been, for many, a difficult year. Similarly, Adele was overcome with emotion at the audience’s response in a recent live televised concert in the United Kingdom. “30” exemplified how 2021’s best music forged a heart-to-heart connection that lifted up artists and listeners alike.

Reuters

An Iraqi woman in Baghdad holds a picture of Moqtada al-Sadr, a cleric whose political bloc won the most votes in the Oct. 10 election.

In the decade before the pandemic, social hostilities involving religion were on the decline around the world, according to the Pew Research Center. In the Middle East, a region long riven by religious strife, a 2019 poll by the Arab Barometer found a drop in popular support for religious political parties. Among Arabs, declared The Economist, “Faith is increasingly personal.”

A current example of this trend can be seen in the results of an Oct. 10 election in Iraq that were announced Tuesday. The final tally was delayed by a manual recount.

The extreme Shiite parties backed by Iran lost badly. The more moderate bloc under the umbrella of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr won the most seats in Parliament with 73. Coming in second with 37 seats was the moderate Sunni party Taqaddum, or Progress, led by outgoing Parliament Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi.

Mr. Sadr campaigned as a nationalist, meaning his Shiite party will likely now form a majority coalition with Sunni parties, further reinforcing a trend away from sectarian politics and violence in Iraq. Since the election, this Muslim preacher has also asked Shiite militias to disband and join government security forces in a show of national unity.

The election itself was forced on Iraq’s political elite by a mass uprising of young people in 2019. The protests brought in a reformist prime minister and a cleanup of the election process. Most of all, the protesters sought a government not corrupted by the divvying of power along religious and ethnic lines. That 2019 Arab Barometer survey found the share of Iraqis who say they attend Friday prayers has fallen from 60% to 33% in five years’ time.

Dozens of the protest leaders won in the October election. For the first time, Iraq will have a large, independent opposition in the 329-seat Parliament to counter the religious-based parties.

The election was the fifth since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and the second since Iraq banished the Islamic State caliphate of 2014-2017. “There is much for Iraqis to be proud of in this election,” says the United Nations’ top observer in Iraq, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert.

Iraqis can also be proud for being part of a global trend away from hostilities along religious lines. Any faith that puts love at its core must extend it to all.