“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 TerribleA series in which I make you feel less lonely, realizing how much shit humans have lived through. Rio de Janeiro Smallpox Epidemics of 1904 and 1908 A couple years back, I was thinking to myself, no other people on earth are so obsessed with “freedom” that they would demand the freedom to die of […]
Read More Things Have Always Been TerribleA series in which I make you feel less lonely, realizing how much shit humans have lived through. Swedish Poliomyelitus Epidemic of 1911 I didn’t know polio and Sweden went together, but in 1911, they did. There were almost 4,000 cases reported in Sweden in that year, and it was the biggest outbreak of polio […]
Read More Things Have Always Been Terrible
