This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
The US was not prepared for a pandemic, but it was prepared for war. When President Trump declared a national state of emergency on March 13, 2020, he transformed the coronavirus from a “hoax” into an “invisible enemy.” In his daily press conferences, President Trump has repeatedly and explicitly announced the United States’ war against the virus. Similarly, in the …
This article is part of the following series: After the End of Disease
…Early Elegy: Smallpox
by Claudia Emerson
- The world has certified itself rid of
- all but the argument: to eradicate or not
- the small stock of variola frozen,
- quarantined—a dormancy it has
- refused, just once, for a woman behind a sterile
- lens, her glass slide a clearest, most
- becoming pane. How could it resist slipping
- away with her, that discrete first
The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature
University of Chicago Press, 2014, 368 pages.
The Closed World of the Open Mind
In Jamie Cohen-Cole’s hands, the concept of the open mind becomes an effective historiographical tool with which to trace some of the intersections of the social sciences and American political culture …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology