“TB’s parallel journey with capital,” as the investigative journalist Vidya Krishnan put it, appears in outbreak after outbreak.

But as a friend once told me, “Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”

“death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing.”

People who are treated as less than fully human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis. But it’s not because of their moral codes or choices or genetics; it’s because they are treated as less than fully human by the social order.

But most human experiences are processes, not events.

If the pale, thin, wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked beauty standard has proven astonishingly durable, the conflation of whiteness with consumption would prove even more devastating to human health and equity.

The British Empire was in the business of resource extraction, and the systems built to support that business were resource-extraction systems.

We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.

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