Body & Mind Archives - Page 10 of 15

Public Health

The Fascist Politics of the Pandemic

Around the world, far-right leaders’ responses to the pandemic feature key elements of fascist ideology

May 25, 2020 • by Federico Finchelstein and Jason Stanley

There is nothing like a pandemic to bring out the fascist ideology in countries under far-right rule. In the world's three largest democracies, national leaders are using the COVID-19 crisis to wage war on immigrants and minorities, while testing the limits of common sense. NEW YORK/NEW HAVEN -- In stark contrast ...

Public Health

Pandemic as a Natural Evolutionary Phenomenon

Human beings forget that they will always share the planet with microbes

May 21, 2020 • by Joshua Lederberg

Pasteur and Darwin Charles Darwin’s role in nineteenth-century thought, how that shapes our own thinking about man’s place in Nature, is too well-known and oft-discussed to bear extensive elaboration on my part. His contemporary, Louis Pasteur, is a culture hero, world-renowned for the human benefits of his germ theory of disease: the ...

Pandemic as a Natural Evolutionary Phenomenon

Disability

One Question

May 21, 2020 • by Renée Schultz

When Ian calls from his group home with one question, it usually involves money. Two days ago, when he asked me to buy him a Star Wars DVD, I said “sure.” Even though I don’t want to contribute to the abuse of Amazon warehouse workers, I do want to take ...

COVID-19

Be Strong

An Open Letter to My Students, Children, and Grandchildren

May 14, 2020 • by Eli Zaretsky

Be strong: The virus has laid bare the complete lack of leadership in both political parties and to a great extent in the media as well. Bernie Sanders is the only figure in recent times that one can call a visionary leader, proposing a future that you all will need ...

Democracy

Bolsonaro’s Regime of Chaos and Fear

The pandemic and the collapse of democracy in Brazil

May 14, 2020 • by Daniel Peres

In the third week of April, when asked about the rising death toll, Jair Bolsonaro answered that he didn’t know: “I’m not a gravedigger,” the president of Brazil snapped. When it was called to his attention the following week that the number of Covid-19 deaths in Brazil had exceeded the ...

Public Health

Radical Hope Amid Catastrophe

When a collective culture is threatened with collapse, so are the reference points for defining a good life.

May 14, 2020 • by Vafa Ghazavi

At a Christian Dior factory outside Paris, machines that once filled ornate vials with luxury fragrances are filling plastic bottles with hand sanitizer destined for public hospitals. Men and women who were dossing down on London’s streets have begun sleeping in rooms of the InterContinental Hotels Group after the city’s mayor negotiated a way ...

Higher Ed

Brave New Classroom

Lessons from the first six weeks

May 13, 2020 • by Hannah Leffingwell

What felt at the time like the worst-case scenario has now become our “new normal.” Emails warn of budget catastrophes, lost tuition, low enrollment. Amid fears that this crisis portends the end of higher education as we know it, I've started to wonder whether that is necessarily a bad thing. ...

Democracy

Who Is Trump Really Protecting During the Coronavirus Crisis?

May 12, 2020 • by Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King

Will Trump’s response to the Covid-19 crisis at last damage his claim to be his constituents’ Great Protector? The answer is not obvious. While Trump’s approval ratings first surged, then dropped, as the crisis grew, he has not fallen below where he has been through most of his term. Most ...

Who Is Trump Really Protecting During the Coronavirus Crisis?

Activism

How Do You Protest in a Pandemic?

The challenges of creating a social movement while social distancing

May 12, 2020 • by Jane Desmond

On Thursday, April 15, the traditional day for paying federal taxes, several thousand cars rolled to a stop on the streets in Lansing, Michigan. They surrounded the State Capitol, commencing “Operation Gridlock” to protest Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s extension of the state’s “stay-at-home” order. Blaring horns, waving flags, and sprouting signs ...

History

The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Longer View

Decades of bad policies brought us to this point: we need to reckon with that as a nation

May 7, 2020 • by John Ehrenreich

The highest priority is to get through the current crisis. But then we must think about what went wrong and how to forestall future crises like this. The ideas include reversing President Trump‘s decision to dismantle the federal pandemic response team, supersizing our public health corps, improving our capacity to ...

Public Health

How Dog-Whistle Racism Is Sabotaging the Postal Service

And threatening to gut the Black middle class

May 7, 2020 • by Amy Traub

Since Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first Postmaster General by the Continental Congress in 1775, the United States Postal Service has survived wars, depressions, natural disasters, and crises of all kinds. But it may not survive Donald Trump. The Postal Service faces a $13 billion revenue loss this fiscal year alone, as Americans send fewer letters and packages in ...

How Dog-Whistle Racism Is Sabotaging the Postal Service

Public Health

The Job of Critical Thinking Now

Protest offers a vision of the future that refuses mere recovery

May 7, 2020 • by Joan Wallach Scott

As with those other fault-lines, the problem is not new, as François Hartog reminds us when he writes of “presentism.” Sometime in the twentieth century, we lost our belief in the redemptive power of history and so in the guarantee of a better future. Wendy Brown puts it succinctly: “We know ...