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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."

Roger Kreuz

                                      
Love in the Time of Coronavirus
    
        Fire in the Time of Coronavirus
    
R.P. Finch

        21 Sep 2020
    
Love in the Time of Coronavirus
    
        Teaching Miyazaki's Films in the Time of Pandemic
    
Tom Kemper

        20 Aug 2020
    
Love in the Time of Coronavirus
    
        COVID-19 Is but One Indication of the Return of the Pandemic Monster
    
George de Stefano

        20 Aug 2020

Recent

Books

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.

Reading Pandemics

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?

Film

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.

Reading Pandemics

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.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

Coronavirus and the Culture Wars

Infodemics, conspiracies -- fault lines beneath the Fractured States of America tremble in this time of global pandemic, amplify splinters, fractures, and fissures past and present.

Reading Pandemics

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.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

'Avengers: Endgame' Faces the Other Side of Loss

Whereas the heroes in Avengers: Endgame stew for five years, our pandemic grief has barely taken us to the after-credit sequence. Someone page Captain Marvel, please.

Reading Pandemics

AIDS Play 'The Normal Heart' Is a Guide During COVID-19 and Political Indifference

When national leadership isn't addressing a pandemic as it should, Larry Kramer, as playwright and activist, pens the only viable response: "Everyone's entitled to good medical care. If you're not getting it, you've got to fight for it."

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

Waiting for the World to Change in the Era of COVID-19

From a GenXer to the GenZs in the time of COVID-19: We know, the waiting is the hardest part.

Reading Pandemics

Parallels of HIV/AIDS in Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America' and COVID-19 in Trump's America

Tony Kushner's Angels in America foreshadows our current state of sick politics and bodies and, in particular, the presence of Trump in a time of plague.

Reading Pandemics

Cookbooks and Contagion: Recipes for Caring from Fannie Farmer

Cookbooks are rarely read as political or even narrative texts. However, alongside the recipes and lists of ingredients is often rich information about the ideologies and social structures that the foods are consumed within.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

Life Isn't Binary and Neither Is the Coronavirus Pandemic

Non-binary thinking offers new routes for adapting to life with COVID-19.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

I Went on a Jewel Bender During Quarantine. This Is My Report.

COVID-19 sure sucked the life out of things. I found some comfort in Jewel. That's right. Jewel.

Reading Pandemics

Pandemic from the Janitor's Point of View

Timothy Sheard's murder mystery One Foot in the Grave explores pandemic in a hospital from the point of view of the lowliest, aka "essential", staff.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

What Will Come? COVID-19 and the Politics of Economic Depression

The financial crash of 2008-2010 reemphasized that traumatic economic shifts drive political change, so what might we imagine — or fear — will emerge from the COVID-19 depression?

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

Little Protests Everywhere

Wherever you are, let's invite our neighbors not to look away from police violence against African Americans and others. Let's encourage them not to forget about George Floyd and so many before him.

Music

"Without Us? There's No Music": An Interview With Raul Midón

Raul Midón discusses the fate of the art in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. "This is going to shake things up in ways that could be very positive. Especially for artists," he says.

Reading Pandemics

Chaucer's Plague Tales

In 18 months, the "Great Pestilence" of 1348-49 killed half of England's population, and by 1351 half the population of the world. Chaucer's plague tales reveal the conservative edges of an astonishingly innovative medieval poet.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

Street Art As Sprayed Solidarity: Global Corona Graffiti

COVID-19-related street art functions as a vehicle for political critique and social engagement. It offers a form of global solidarity in a time of crisis.

Reading Pandemics

Poe, Pandemic, and Underlying Conditions

To read Edgar Allan Poe in the time of pandemic, we need to appreciate a very different aspect of his perspective—not that of a mimetic artist but of the political economist.

Reading Pandemics

Taking a Page About Community and Responsibility from Albert Camus' 'The Plague'

Initially, the city of Oran does not take care of its most vulnerable populations in Camus' The Plague, and as a result, the city suffers for it. This parallels today's COVID-19 world.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

Isolation Odyssey: Behind the Scenes with a Lockdown Orchestra

Scattered throughout the world, members of Opera North's orchestra share how they are enduring the loss of live performance and companionship during the COVID-19 lockdown. They also share a mood-lifting, online isolation performance of a work that everyone knows but not always for the same reasons.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

Matchbox Twenty: Aren't We All a Little "Unwell" in the Time of Coronavirus?

Say what you will about Matchbox Twenty – I know I once did. But during this COVID-19 pandemic, we're all going "crazy" and feeling "a little unwell" in this time of isolation, and I'm turning to their music.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

What Lurks Beneath: 'Jaws' and Political Leadership in the Time of COVID-19

Boris Johnson admires the Mayor in Spielberg's Jaws. Remember him? He was the guy who wouldn't close the beaches -- and sacrifice that revenue source -- during a public crisis.

Culture

Love in the Time of Coronavirus: The Series, the Call for Papers

#Coronavirus #COVID19 #Pandemic: Love in the Time of Coronavirus is a series about art and life and the art of living in these times of global health crisis.

Games

The Politics of 'Pandemic - Legacy'

It’s October, and the world is ruined. And I’m to blame.

Film

Metaphor in a Time of Ebola

The more closely I followed the Ebola coverage, the more the simulacra of contagion in fiction, film, and games seemed inextricably woven into the mainstream media.

Books

On Chasing an Enemy That's Too Small to See

Confronting Contagion tries to capture the 3,000-year history behind a modern scientific breakthrough: the discovery that tiny organisms invade our bodies and make us sick.

Reviews

Lord of the Rings: Conquest

Lord of the Rings: Conquest feels in so many ways like a poorly-thought out genre exercise in service of a fantastic license.

Reviews

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Things like plot, moral compasses, characters and dialogue are all secondary concerns in Mercenaries 2.

Games

Destroy All Humans!

These short dialogues are mainly intended to be parodic and humorous jokes at the expense of the straight-laced and ultraconservative Americans of the past.

G. Christopher Williams

Reviews

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Features

The 100 Best Albums of the 2000s: 100-81

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PM Picks

Collapse Expand Pm Picks

PopMatters is moving to WordPress. We will publish a few essays daily while we develop the new site. We hope the beta will be up sometime late next week.

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."

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.

Throughout Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez depicts love as an infectious disease. Must we quarantine from it?

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.

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.

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.

Infodemics, conspiracies -- fault lines beneath the Fractured States of America tremble in this time of global pandemic, amplify splinters, fractures, and fissures past and present.

Shakespeare's well known romantic tale Romeo and Juliet, written during a pandemic, has a surprisingly hopeful message about defiance and protest.

Whereas the heroes in Avengers: Endgame stew for five years, our pandemic grief has barely taken us to the after-credit sequence. Someone page Captain Marvel, please.

When national leadership isn't addressing a pandemic as it should, Larry Kramer, as playwright and activist, pens the only viable response: "Everyone's entitled to good medical care. If you're not getting it, you've got to fight for it."

From a GenXer to the GenZs in the time of COVID-19: We know, the waiting is the hardest part.

Tony Kushner's Angels in America foreshadows our current state of sick politics and bodies and, in particular, the presence of Trump in a time of plague.

Cookbooks are rarely read as political or even narrative texts. However, alongside the recipes and lists of ingredients is often rich information about the ideologies and social structures that the foods are consumed within.

Non-binary thinking offers new routes for adapting to life with COVID-19.

COVID-19 sure sucked the life out of things. I found some comfort in Jewel. That's right. Jewel.

Timothy Sheard's murder mystery One Foot in the Grave explores pandemic in a hospital from the point of view of the lowliest, aka "essential", staff.

The financial crash of 2008-2010 reemphasized that traumatic economic shifts drive political change, so what might we imagine — or fear — will emerge from the COVID-19 depression?

Wherever you are, let's invite our neighbors not to look away from police violence against African Americans and others. Let's encourage them not to forget about George Floyd and so many before him.

Raul Midón discusses the fate of the art in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. "This is going to shake things up in ways that could be very positive. Especially for artists," he says.

In 18 months, the "Great Pestilence" of 1348-49 killed half of England's population, and by 1351 half the population of the world. Chaucer's plague tales reveal the conservative edges of an astonishingly innovative medieval poet.

COVID-19-related street art functions as a vehicle for political critique and social engagement. It offers a form of global solidarity in a time of crisis.

To read Edgar Allan Poe in the time of pandemic, we need to appreciate a very different aspect of his perspective—not that of a mimetic artist but of the political economist.

Initially, the city of Oran does not take care of its most vulnerable populations in Camus' The Plague, and as a result, the city suffers for it. This parallels today's COVID-19 world.

Scattered throughout the world, members of Opera North's orchestra share how they are enduring the loss of live performance and companionship during the COVID-19 lockdown. They also share a mood-lifting, online isolation performance of a work that everyone knows but not always for the same reasons.

Say what you will about Matchbox Twenty – I know I once did. But during this COVID-19 pandemic, we're all going "crazy" and feeling "a little unwell" in this time of isolation, and I'm turning to their music.

Boris Johnson admires the Mayor in Spielberg's Jaws. Remember him? He was the guy who wouldn't close the beaches -- and sacrifice that revenue source -- during a public crisis.

#Coronavirus #COVID19 #Pandemic: Love in the Time of Coronavirus is a series about art and life and the art of living in these times of global health crisis.

It’s October, and the world is ruined. And I’m to blame.

The more closely I followed the Ebola coverage, the more the simulacra of contagion in fiction, film, and games seemed inextricably woven into the mainstream media.

Confronting Contagion tries to capture the 3,000-year history behind a modern scientific breakthrough: the discovery that tiny organisms invade our bodies and make us sick.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest feels in so many ways like a poorly-thought out genre exercise in service of a fantastic license.

Things like plot, moral compasses, characters and dialogue are all secondary concerns in Mercenaries 2.

These short dialogues are mainly intended to be parodic and humorous jokes at the expense of the straight-laced and ultraconservative Americans of the past.