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Posts Tagged ‘COVID-19’

Post-pandemic, what will have changed?

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 13, 2021 | 2 Comments »

When we look back at this time a few decades hence, what changes will we take the pandemic of 2020-21 to have ushered in? How will it have transformed work, recreation, travel and transportation, food, politics, and everything else? The following are some initial thoughts toward a hopeful eco-justice based perspective on how the world […]

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The [Real]: on Rothko, music, & the Global Trends 2040 report

Posted in Anthropocene, Manifestos & auguries, Music & soundscape, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 15, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

Fans of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings frequently comment on the spaciousness, immersiveness, and liminality of those works: the way you can stand in front of them and feel as if you are being bathed in some transcendent force that is irreducible to anything else. Great art is (supposed to be) like that: it simply […]

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Letter to a vaccine skeptic

Posted in Cultural politics, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 12, 2021 | 1 Comment »

The following distills the essence of my responses to questions from a vaccine (and Covid) skeptical friend. I share it in case it’s useful for others (and because it updates a few things I’ve written before on the topic). I’m not an epidemiologist and the comments on the science of the pandemic are those of […]

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Hydroxychloroquine, and other things (an STS perspective)

Posted in Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2020 | 4 Comments »

The Covid-19 pandemic has offered all kinds of interesting case studies for those who study controversies in science, technology, and medicine. Hydroxychloroquine is one of them. It’s a bit unusual in that it highlights how the left-liberal mediasphere has sometimes followed similar trajectories as more commonly found on the (Trumpist) political right. But it’s interesting […]

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Diagnosing Trump-like derangement syndrome

Posted in Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

The Covid-19 situation in the United States, which has become the epicenter of new infections because of its flawed and chaotic response to the pandemic, is seen by some around the world as an emergency case of its own, requiring some sort of defensive response by countries that could become similarly infected. The Week‘s Ryan […]

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Covid-19 conspiracies and the media: or, Toward an epidemiology of media trust

Posted in Media ecology, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 17, 2020 | 4 Comments »

The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives of what the crisis is and means, and how it should be addressed. The UN and the World Health Organization have called this an “infodemic,” that is, an epidemic (or pandemic) of information that, in its confusing diversity, has made it […]

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Flow, river, flow… (a Covid-era tribute)

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 11, 2020 | 7 Comments »

One of the most frustrating things about losing a family member during this pandemic has been the mandatory self-quarantine — the one that’s been imposed on me for crossing a national border to get here (to the Toronto area where my father was living up until a few days ago), and on my sister who […]

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Pandemic epistemology 2

Posted in Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

I’ve been haunted by Ed Yong’s description of science from the Atlantic article “Why Coronavirus is So Confusing,” which I shared a few days ago: “This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our […]

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Pandemic epistemology

Posted in Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 30, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

One of the silver linings about the coronavirus pandemic is that it has made some people, and even institutions, more generous (at least temporarily). Among them are popular and academic journals that have removed their paywalls and offered their publications for free. (I shared one of my own articles in that category yesterday. The irony, […]

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More on pandemic politics & future scenarios

Posted in Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , , , , , , on April 6, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

There’s a lot of interesting thinking going on in response to the coronavirus pandemic and how it will “change everything.” Here’s the beginning of a curated sampling. It takes for granted that there will be suffering, a lot of it, unequally distributed and with a preponderance of it coming down on first responders and low-wage, […]

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Pandemic politics: on disaster capitalism, socialism, and environmentalism

Posted in Academe, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 30, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

This was originally posted over a week ago, but then taken down by request as it was being considered for publication elsewhere (but not published there). A shorter version of it appeared yesterday at VT Digger. The school I work for, the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, recently undertook a […]

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How to welcome a guest

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 15, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

The outbreak of Coronavirus is a good opportunity to think about how we treat guests whose novel appearance amidst us may pose hardship, but whose continuing presence is undeniable.

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