Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Major urban centers worldwide were reduced to ghost towns in the midst of last year's lockdowns.

That was assumed to be temporary.

But as the world tentatively reopens for business, a more permanent change to cities seems to be settling in.

And an ancient burial site in Finland threw up a mystery in 1968.

Did the remains belong to a man or a woman?

A new study complicates the answer to that question

and some entrenched ideas about gender roles in the deep past.

But first... One after another, America's Republican governors are speaking out against the vaccination mandates put in place by President Joe Biden last week.

Florida's governor, Rhonda Santis,

reckons it's a legislative end run.

When you have a president, like Biden,

issuing unconstitutional edicts against the American people,

we have a responsibility to stand up for the Constitution

and to fight back,

and we are doing that in the state of Florida.

South Dakota's Christy Noem agrees.

This is not a power that is delegated to the federal government.

This is a power for states to decide.

In South Dakota, we're going to be free, and we're going to make sure that we don't

overstep our authority.

The mandates will affect 100 million Americans, about a third of whom have had no jabs at all,

...