COVID-19 and Our Purgatory of Consumerism
Our pandemic quarantine has become the sublime enactment of Baudrillard's theory of consumption – that modern consumption, with its myth of individual liberty and choice, is in fact 'de-socialising'.
pandemic
Is Trump’s COVID-19 Diagnosis Ironic?
Just hours before tweeting that he was COVID positive, Trump recorded a speech wherein he opined that "The end of the pandemic is in sight."
Fire in the Time of Coronavirus
If we venture out our front door we might inhale both a deadly virus and pinpoint flakes of ash. If we turn back in fear we may no longer have a door behind us.
Teaching Hayao Miyazaki’s Films in the Time of Pandemic
Miyazaki's powerful worldview speaks to our times in striking ways: the hidden terror of the natural world; the need for truth and compassion; the humanism in the face of adversity.
COVID-19 Is but One Indication of the Return of the Pandemic Monster
Mike Davis' COVID-era update about emerging flu pandemics, The Monster Enters, is concise, disturbing, and valuable.
Zadie Smith’s ‘Intimations’ Essays Pandemic with Erudite Wit and Compassion
Zadie Smith's Intimations is an essay collection of gleaming, wry, and crisp prose that wears its erudition lightly but takes flight on both everyday and lofty matters.
Distance Remakes the Heart in Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’
Throughout Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez depicts love as an infectious disease. Must we quarantine from it?
The “Luxurious Loneliness” of Anime Film ‘Perfect Blue’
In Satoshi Kon's 1997 masterpiece, Perfect Blue, former J-Pop idol Mima Kirigoe's crisis of identity echoes our current 'epidemic' of loneliness -- upsetting the boundary between private and public agency, the desire to hide and the compulsion to be seen.
How Aaron Sorkin and U2 Can Soothe the Pandemic Mind
Like Aaron Sorkin, the veteran rock band U2 has been making ambitious, iconic art for decades—art that can be soaring but occasionally self-important. Sorkin and U2's work draws parallels in comfort and struggle.
Parable Pandemics: Octavia E. Butler and Racialized Labor
Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, informed by a deep understanding of the intersectionality of dying ecologies, disease, and structural racism, exposes the ways capitalism's insatiable hunger for profit eclipses humanitarian responses to pandemics.
Coronavirus and the Culture Wars
Infodemics, conspiracies, culture wars – the fault lines beneath the Fractured States of America tremble in this time of Coronavirus global pandemic.
Pandemic, Hope, Defiance, and Protest in ‘Romeo and Juliet’
Shakespeare's well known romantic tale Romeo and Juliet, written during a pandemic, has a surprisingly hopeful message about defiance and protest.