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

By Dan Falk/Undark

If you’ve been reading popular physics books for a while, then you know the name Brian Greene. The Columbia University professor is known for a series of popular science books, beginning with 1999’s The Elegant Universe, that have brought string theory, the nature of space and time, and the question of parallel universes to a wide audience. With his new book, he casts a much wider net, seemingly positioning himself in the territory claimed by the likes of Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari.
With Until the End of Time, Greene is asking Pinker and Harari to hold his beer. The book covers a stunning array of human thought: There’s still plenty of physics, but we find that Greene also has a great deal to say about evolution; the origins of human culture; the dawn of art and music and storytelling and religion; the puzzle of consciousness; the paradox of free will. It’s an ambitious undertaking, to say the least.

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Posted on April 18, 2020

By Cory Doctorow/Boing Boing

Wendy Liu grew up deeply enmeshed in technology, writing code for free/open source projects and devouring books by tech luminaries extolling the virtues of running tech startups; after turning down a job offer from Google, Liu helped found an ad-tech company and moved from Montreal to New York City to take her startup to an incubator.
As she worked herself into exhaustion to build her product, she had a conversion experience, realizing that she was devoting her life to using tech to extract wealth and agency from others, rather than empowering them. This kicked off a journey that Liu documents in her new book, Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism, a memoir manifesto that’s not just charming – it’s inspiring.

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Posted on April 15, 2020

By Kelsey D. Atherton via New America

Where is the president in Blade Runner?
Beneath the 1982 neo-noir’s trappings of genetically engineered human automatons is a story about corporate power over and indifference to life, and alienation in the face of wealthy apathy to the plight of workers.
Replace the Tyrell Corporation with Amazon and reframe the replicants as “essential service employees,” and suddenly you have a world of workers terrified that their jobs are inherently a death sentence – moving straight from fiction to reality.

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Posted on April 10, 2020

By History in Five

“Bart Ehrman unveils the history of the afterlife, and what most people don’t realize about where our beliefs about eternal torment and reward originated.”

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Posted on April 7, 2020

‘A Real Page-Burner‘

“Most people sit down to write the best book ever written. Tillock has somehow managed to write the worst.”

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Posted on April 6, 2020

By Michael Schulson/Undark

Each year, governments around the world pour vast sums of public money into scientific research – as much as $156 billion in the United States alone. Scientists then use that funding to further human understanding of the world, and occasionally to make compelling discoveries about everything from whale brains to dwarf stars to the genetic underpinnings of deadly cancers.
But often, this research – despite being subsidized with taxpayer money – ends up being published in exclusive journals that sit behind steep paywalls with three- and four-figure subscription fees, accessible to only a tiny fraction of the public.
The power of these scientific publishers – with names even lay readers might recognize: Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, among a handful of others – is substantial. According to one estimate, just four corporations now publish close to 50 percent of scientific papers. Together, they control the copyright to much of the world’s scientific literature, charging billions of dollars each year for access to that body of knowledge – and securing hefty profits in the process.

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Posted on April 4, 2020