A series in which I gently suggest that I’m not the only person to be frustrated, though it certainly feels that way. Quebec Smallpox Epidemic of 1776 Why isn’t Quebec part of the United States? Yes, it’s due to one of your favorite Terrible Things: smallpox. Notorious baddie Benedict Arnold was up north in the […]
Read More Things Have Always Been TerribleA series in which I reflect on all the bad things that have happened to people, in order to gain perspective on stupid shit that goes wrong. Middle East Black Death Epidemics You know Aleppo, Syria, where things were recently terrible? In October 1348, they had 500 deaths a day from the Black Death. THINGS […]
Read More Things Have Always Been Terrible“It’s important for a writer to know what’s going on in her mind,” Erica Jong told the New York Times reporter. The feature is “Sunday Routine,” and I was reading it in my pre-getting up cell phone reading, which is NPR stories, the NYT, WaPo, and perhaps CNN. I mean, that’s fine for Jong to […]
Read More In Her MindUgandan-Tanganyikan Sleeping Sickness Epidemic of 1900-1909 The Congo River basin hadn’t been a bustling place. It got bustling in the late 1800s, when riverboats started zipping around. When you go from not bustling to bustling, you get new diseases. They got trypanosomiasis, the prettiest little terrible disease you’ve ever met. Can we blame colonialism? Lately […]
Read More Everything Has Always Been Terrible
Going On 