Writer, Editor, Historian
Last weekend, in lieu of the cancelled American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) meeting, some of the smartest historians of medicine out there gathered for a virtual conference called “Pandemic, Creating a Useable Past: Epidemic History, COVID-19, and the Future of Health.” The archived webinar isn’t up yet,
The title of this week’s newsletter is both painfully obvious and a bad pun. Access to and control of people and resources—that is, power—is a form of privilege, perhaps the only form of privilege that ultimately matters. But on a more mundane note, regular, dependable access to electrical power is
There’s no formal newsletter this week. I was going to make a valiant effort, on the theory that some issues of a weekly column will inevitably be kinda half-assed, but when someone at a meeting I attended this weekend said “Newton invented calculus during a plague,” and someone responded to
Yesterday, the New York Times ran an extraordinary reported piece tracing how Vladimir Putin’s network of Russian propagandists have been sowing and spreading disinformation about health for more than a decade. Many of these claims, amplified via social media, internet chat boards, and RT, have something or another to do
How are you all doing? These are grim times. All I want to do is knit, work out, watch adaptations of Jane Austen novels, and learn the best substitutes for eggs. I’m also taking an oddly real comfort in reading about fake spies. I love spy novels and spy movies,
I’ve been thinking in recent days about the lasting consequences, both obvious and subtle, of large-scale, single-minded public investments. During World War II and the Cold War, the US government poured almost unimaginable sums into scientific and technical research in the name of defeating Communism. Historians estimate that the US
Last week’s post asking historians to temporarily take a seat struck a chord with some readers. Toward the end, I mentioned that historians of science are, “by nature, skeptical of expertise.” This resonated with my fellow historians of science and medicine, but I suspect it may have caught some of
Before I committed to writing this newsletter, I sketched out a list of 15 “starter” topics for the new few months. None of them anticipated a global pandemic. As I type this, the city where I live—Philadelphia—is a few hours into a more-or-less voluntary lockdown. No one’s attempting to keep
The environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon has a powerful phrase that I find useful for our times: slow violence. As Nixon explains in his book by the same name, “I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time