This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Figure 1: Writing and thinking in anticipation of writing: notes stacked in files next to a computer (Warkwick’s desk).In the early days of freedom after a long lockdown in Sydney, I visited Warwick Anderson at his light-filled house perched at the top of a hill looking over rusted industrial relics to the shimmer and glare of the city. …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Within days of discovering SARS-CoV-2, laboratory scientists and epidemiologists were speculating on whether the virus might take fecal passage, and thereby spread through contamination with bodily waste. But the fecal-oral route of transmission quickly proved a dead end, an etiological cul-de-sac. The pressure to inquire into shit, however, is always difficult to resist. Before long, experts in wastewater …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Sydney’s Bondi Beach in January 2012. Photo: Alex ProimosAs sometimes happens in Sydney in late March, toward the end of summer, that particular Friday was brilliantly hot and sunny, drawing crowds to the eastern beaches, especially Bondi. An exceptionally large stretch of sand, an outspread stage in a natural amphitheater, popular with backpackers and other foreign visitors, the beach …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Can a virus ever prompt good philosophy? Within weeks of its emergence, SARS-CoV-2 was galvanizing celebrity European philosophers and social theorists, most of them men in a vulnerable age demographic, to reflect publicly and plentifully on the meaning of the pandemic. These days, it seems, an epidemic demands urgent philosophical inquiry, and lots of it—personal protective equipment for the mind, …
On February 8, 2019, a symposium organized by Nancy Rose Hunt on the scholarship and career of Luise White was held at the University of Florida. In the nearly twenty years since the publication of White’s Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (University of California, 2000), her thinking at the intersection of anthropology and history continues to …
Some years after beginning our research for Intolerant Bodies, I told my co-author Ian R. Mackay that finally I was learning the immunology I should have known as his intern in 1984. “Indeed,” was the cutting response. I knew better than to protest that most ordinary medical doctors comprehend few of the technicalities of immunology, especially the intricacies and …