You want to know when you can hug friends again. You want to know when your family can get back to regular travel and indoor dining. You want to know when your teens can go back to school without masks and get started on what they’re supposed to be doing at this stage of development (making out and taking turns chugging beer from the same 40oz bottle). But in the meantime, what you really want to know is when that damn package you’re waiting on will finally arrive. You expected this to be fixed by now. But, “the game of supply-chain whack-a-mole that manufacturers and shippers have been playing for the past year and a half has grown only more complex. Some book publishers have had to delay new releases because the pulp used to manufacture paper has been gobbled up by online shopping’s endless appetite for cardboard.” (Great, the book I spent my whole adult life working towards is gonna get outsold by a cardboard box.) Amanda Mull in The Atlantic: Americans Have No Idea What the Supply Chain Really Is.

+ Everything is interconnected. That makes the supply chain fast. But it can also make it fragile. Sometimes it comes down to one tiny delayed part. How A Single Missing Part Can Hold Up $5 Million Machines And Unleash Industrial Hell.