How Contagion Works: Science, Awareness, and Community in Times of Global Crises - The Essay That Helped Change the Covid-19 Debate

We have become accustomed to culture being shaped “somewhere else” — by elected officials, especially national ones; by celebrities; by media. But we are dealing with a virus that is transmitted person to person, in small and large groups of actual people. This is not a virtual crisis — it is a local, embodied one. Local, embodied responses will qu

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Hollywood movies and too many government pandemic plans still presume that most of us are cowards or brutes, that we panic, trample each other, rampage, or freeze helplessly in moments of crisis and chaos. Most of us believe this, even though it is a slander against the species, an obliteration of what actually happens, and a crippling blow to our

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As many commentators have opined, the COVID-19 pandemic has occasioned a “Great Pause,” a “fertile suspension” that opened up “bountiful space and time for deeper wakefulness.” 2 We saw such wakefulness evidenced in the contemplation of community and injustice, the creation of mutual aid networks, and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter. And we sa... See more

The same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable armies and terrorists to engineer even more terrible diseases and doomsday pathogens. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideol

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