Why must we treat what are obviously systemic problems as failures of individual morality?

I feel like I am dependent upon the drugs, like I am not self-sufficient in the way that I am supposed to be.

We must also be the cure.

In 2023, the endTB trials—funded by Unitaid, Doctors Without Borders, and PIH—found that around 90 percent of MDR-TB cases could be cured for about $300 per course, a 98 percent reduction in price from the 1990s.

There’s even emerging evidence that one’s microbiome may have a relationship with thought itself through the gut-brain information axis, meaning that at least some of my thoughts may belong not to me, but to the microorganisms in my digestive tract.

History is often imagined as a series of events, unfolding one after the other like a sequence of falling dominoes. But most human experiences are processes, not events.

“Your pleasure signals our death.”

Imagining someone as more than human does much the same work as imagining them as less than human: Either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else’s.

But history, alas, is not merely a record of what we do, but also a record of what is done to us.