By Meng Xia/The Conversation

Starting on January 25, novelist and poet Fang Fang has posted 60 daily diary entries about life and death in her hometown of Wuhan to WeChat, China’s most popular social media platform.
Born in 1955, Fang has a long and respected career as a writer of poems, novels and novellas. She won the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2010, and was elected president of the government-funded Writers Association of Hubei Province in 2007. But her work has rarely been translated into English.
Her diaries were read widely in China but their reception was mixed. Some readers celebrated Fang for voicing people’s struggles in lockdown, others criticized her viewpoints. In her diary, Fang wrote* about her persistence: “I’m never too old to lose the strength of criticizing.”
News of publication of her translated diaries in English and German only the inflamed debate in China. But in any language, Fang Fang’s unfolding recording of the pandemic will be valuable for the globe’s understanding of our shared memories of this time.

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Posted on May 19, 2020

By Rory Mir/The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Responding to the threat of COVID-19, science advisers from 12 countries have signed on to an open letter urging scientific publishers to make all COVID-19 research freely available to the public through PubMed Central or the World Health Organization’s COVID Database.
This is an emergency call for open science, the movement to make tools, data, and publications resulting from publicly funded research available to the public. Among the signers of this open letter was the director of the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kelvin Droegemeier, who is reportedly shaping an executive order to require similar availability for all federally funded research starting on the first day of publication.

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Posted on May 14, 2020

By SIU Press

“Barry B. Witham reclaims the work of Manny Fried, an essential American playwright so thoroughly blacklisted after he defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1954, and again in 1964, that his work all but completely disappeared from the canon,” the SIU Press says.
“Witham details Manny Fried’s work inside and outside the theatre and examines his three major labor plays and the political climate that both nurtured and disparaged their productions.
“Drawing on never-before-published interview materials, Witham reveals the details of how the United States government worked to ruin Fried’s career.”

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Posted on May 12, 2020

By Dan Falk/Undark

Aside from the U.S., few countries have been hit as hard by COVID-19 as Italy, where nearly 30,000 people have died since the first cases were reported at the end of January.
As his country went into lockdown in March, Italian physicist and novelist Paolo Giordano began to think about how the pandemic was altering society. His essay “How Contagion Works: Science, Awareness, and Community in Times of Global Crises,” composed as the pandemic unfolded day by day, has now been published as an e-book by Bloomsbury.

Giordano, 37, is the author of four novels, including the international bestseller The Solitude of Prime Numbers, and is the youngest novelist to win Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize for fiction. (Previous winners have included Primo Levi and Umberto Eco.)
For this installment of the Undark Interview, I spoke with Giordano about his perspectives on the pandemic, which range from the mathematical to the personal, as we struggle to come to terms with our new reality. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Posted on May 8, 2020

By David Rutter

This is a warning to my local library: I am coming. I am coming very soon.
The timing of this event hinges solely on some moderation of the COVID-19 trauma, which is not only deadly but emotionally draining. We all are tired of it. Tired of worrying about it, thinking of it, working to avoid being infected with it.
One of these days, civilization will return, and libraries will reopen.

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Posted on May 5, 2020

By Mission Point Press

Robert Giles, author of When Truth Mattered, will share profits from his book with the GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit journalism organization.
Giles’ book recounts the shooting of Kent State students during an anti-Vietnam War rally 50 years ago and how his staff at the Akron Beacon Journal covered the tragedy that rocked the nation. Four students died and nine were wounded from bullets fired by soldiers of the Ohio National Guard.
The GroundTruth Project is committed to supporting a new generation of journalists in enterprise reporting projects on issues of social justice. Giles will donate 10 percent of the book’s profits to GroundTruth each year.

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Posted on May 4, 2020

By SIU Press

From 2014:
“In the past 10 years, we have seen great changes in the ways government organizations and media respond to and report on emerging global epidemics. The first outbreak to garner such attention was SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). In Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic, Huiling Ding uses SARS to explore how various cultures and communities made sense of the epidemic and communicated about it. She also investigates the way knowledge production and legitimation operate in global epidemics, the roles that professionals and professional communicators, as well as individual citizens, play in the communication process, points of contention within these processes, and possible entry points for ethical and civic intervention.”

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Posted on April 28, 2020

By Dan Falk/Undark

As an expert on the history of immigration in the United States, and as a historian of medicine, Alan M. Kraut is all too aware of the complex connections between the arrival of new people on American shores, and the fear of illness and disease – something he explored in detail in his 1995 book, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the ‘Immigrant Menace’.
Kraut, who teaches at American University in Washington, D.C., is currently working on a book about the role of xenophobia and nativism in American history. In 2017, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.
For this installment of the Undark Interview, I spoke with Kraut about the long and multi-faceted interplay between immigration and issues of health and medicine, from the earliest days of American nationhood to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Posted on April 24, 2020

The Threat? New Lethal Viruses

Editor’s Note: Steve Eckardt, who owns the home I moved into two months ago, dropped this on my “desk” the other day and I was gobsmacked. He wrote it circa 1994 and published it in an obscure corner of the Internet where it is no longer to be found, at least in this form. I’d like to say the prescience is remarkable, but it turns out we were warned over and over that this was on the horizon.
Still, the themes struck here are so eerily familiar – warnings that the viruses under discussion are not simply like flus; the role of social interdependence in their deadly spread; the likelihood of originating from zoonotic transfer – that I thought Eckardt was pranking me; is this how he’s been spending his time during the lockdown, I thought?
I’ve done the slightest bit of editing – adding a few commas here and there – but otherwise I’ve tried to leave it in its original form just for the sake of it. I’d say “enjoy,” but instead you may find yourself weeping in a corner by the time you get to the end. Oh well!
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EXTERMINATION: NEITHER FIRE NOR WATER THIS TIME
By Steve Eckardt
If the four riders of the Apocalypse came spinning out of the turn at Arlington right now, Pestilence would be leading the field. Welcome to the new world of new, lethal viruses – pathogens of such unprecedented virulence that they are poised to wipe out all human life.
This is not a fantasy world, or even just a possible world. A simple review of the scientific literature on the subject will tell you that this is our world. (The best synopsis is an October 26, 1992 New Yorker article by Richard Preston, upon which much of this piece is based. Preston’s work is in the process of being released as a Random House paperback entitled The Hot Zone.

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Posted on April 23, 2020

By Rand McNally

With the COVID-19 virus keeping most people indoors for an extended period of time, Rand McNally faithfully submits its antidote: A new edition of the classic Rand McNally Road Atlas – for imagining, planning, and ultimately navigating that dream road trip.
The atlas – available at store.randmcnally.com, various online vendors, and soon to be at bookstores and other retailers – contains updated state and province maps and enhanced content. Now in its 97th edition, the 2021 Road Atlas also includes new inset maps of the more recently named national parks.

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Posted on April 21, 2020