The Virus Without a Vaccine
John D. Inazu
We are also in the throes of an information virus.
What if the purpose of education has nothing to do with social mobility?
It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that meat consumption has risen as fewer Americans participate in or even think about the slaughter that allows it.
Who will emerge as the new elite from this particular moment’s cast of winners and losers?
My quarrel with M.F.K. Fisher was part of a larger quarrel I’ve been having with myself ever since we went to ground in March.
Mother Nature sees you not as a soul shimmering with intelligence but as one solution to the problem of metabolism.
The COVID crisis has changed our perceptions of assisted living communities, perhaps permanently.
The solitude of sickness is not a waste of time but rather a compression of it, a bundle the size of a pill bottle.
The point of reopening is not to free voluntary workers but to place more into the category of “mandatory worker.”
To make promises, to stand by one words, to be answerable for them, is to open oneself to blame.
Our exploitive relationship to the natural order is greatly magnifying the possibility of spillover and increasing virus virulence.
Efforts to protect public health can often lead to selective punishment and prejudice.
How do we more lastingly move beyond the impasses we have reached on a host of ethical issues at the heart of our highly politicized culture wars?
It is precisely at such moments of technological dependency that one might consider interrogating one’s relationship with technology more broadly.
The return to normalcy will be long, and we might even change our mind along the way.
There is a risk that we will compensate for the current sense of crisis and isolation with too much closeness.
In France, wearing a COVID-19 mask will mean a real revolution in norms governing behavior in its public space.
Why should anyone focus on the life of the mind when individual and societal survival is threatened?
We can’t take CEOs’ high-flown gestures at face value.
Anxiety teaches nothing but possibility, but I, at least, am a finite being.
What happens to a culture—a social order—and the beliefs that sustain it, in the face of a microscopic enemy that has little regard for borders, power, class, or celebrity?
Our world is increasingly discontinuous with the twentieth century.
People should always be glad when something derails us from our routine, and this is truly a massive derailment, a derailment into peace.
Ghost stories and other tales of horror concern unpredictable, sometimes ambiguous or indescribable, forces that display hostility or at best indifference to us.
Any channel through which we can still communicate is good. It’s just not enough.
As far back as Aristotle, we’ve known that material inequality makes the good life easier to get.
Must we pit the health of the economy against the lives of the many people projected to die if strong measures are not taken against the spread of the coronavirus?