Body & Mind Archives - Page 13 of 15

Labor

Will the US Pandemic Response Strengthen Workers?

Worker protections and collective bargaining must be part of any economic recovery plan

March 30, 2020 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

But this rare moment of bipartisanship will turn out to have been a missed opportunity if it does not also reverse the long decline of worker protections and collective-bargaining power in the United States. As Lawrence H. Summers of Harvard University and many others have shown, this trend has contributed significantly to the ...

Will the US Pandemic Response Strengthen Workers?

Democracy

There’s No “Trade-Off” Between Saving Lives and Saving the Economy

A humane society doesn’t trade some lives for others

March 28, 2020 • by Peter Dreier

Nonsense. In February, when he had a chance to take decisive action to get ahead of the virus, Trump told his advisors not to “do or say anything that would further spook the markets.” Trump’s weeks of downplaying the crisis, and his failure to prepare for the looming pandemic, deepened the problem. But having finally acknowledged the ...

There’s No “Trade-Off” Between Saving Lives and Saving the Economy

Kinships

Fragments of Memoir and Other Manuscripts

An excerpt from Honor Moore, “Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury”

March 24, 2020 • by Honor Moore

“This is my oldest daughter.” I look at him and smile. “How do you do -- ” “You’ve got a great mom!” I would have said “a great mother.” I don’t like it when people use “mom” as a noun like that, and what does he know anyway, about this woman. He turns and ...

Fragments of Memoir and Other Manuscripts

Public Health

It’s Time to Rethink Healthcare as a Human Right

COVID-19 has put an urgent campaign agenda at the top of the policy list

March 24, 2020 • by Katie Scofield

Former Vice President Joe Biden focused on what a president could do here and now to control the outbreak. Sen Bernie Sanders called to systematically rethink American healthcare. Sanders rightly pointed out that the outcomes and effects of COVID-19 will be exacerbated by existing problems in the healthcare industry. If people ...

It’s Time to Rethink Healthcare as a Human Right

History

Yes, COVID-19 Is an Emergency: It’s Also a Paradigm Shift

This new challenge must include a demand for justice

March 24, 2020 • by Ian Zuckerman

I believe the answer is yes, in the immediate sense of what must be done. But it’s too early to tell, in the longer sense of whether our aim must be to return to the status quo ante, or undergo more permanent transformations. Either way, the legitimate, temporary suspension of ...

Yes, COVID-19 Is an Emergency: It’s Also a Paradigm Shift

Public Health

How to Slow the Bleeding

Important action in a coronavirus-infected economy

March 19, 2020 • by James Parrott

On Tuesday, the White House announced its support for a large economic stimulus package. That’s certainly needed, but let’s keep the focus where it should be: to head off the epidemic of necessary job loss and business closings before it becomes an economic contagion. Elected officials have asked businesses and workers ...

History

Plague in the Age of Twitter

March 17, 2020 • by Eileen Sperry

COVID-19 has quickly become the outbreak of the digital era. SARS and H1N1 played out on the evening news, but this -- this is happening in real time, in piecemeal, in limited character counts. While epidemics have come and gone before, it feels unprecedented, at least in my lifetime as a 30-something, to ...

North America

The Great Immobility

March 17, 2020 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

Less obvious is the lesson we could come to learn about mobility. At first glance, the restrictions on travel to the United States seem to affirm a common trope: our borders need to be sealed against immigrants who would do us harm. Build the Wall; stop the germs! But there is another ...

Activism

From Mad Cows to Coronavirus

When Government Fails, Grassroots Activism Flourishes

March 17, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

This was bad enough; but in March 1996, Britain’s secretary of state for health announced ten cases of something similar in another species: a new form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) had been diagnosed in human patients. CJD is a fatal disease caused by a rampant protein that eats away the brain cells ...

Democracy

Coronavirus Testing Lag? Not My Fault, Says Trump

The president who insists that he alone can solve all problems runs away from this one. It could be fatal.

March 14, 2020 • by Heather Cox Richardson

This quotation, from Trump’s answer, when a reporter asked him if he took responsibility for the lag in testing for the novel coronavirus, will be in every single history book written about this era. He went on. When PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor asked why he doesn’t take responsibility for ...

Coronavirus Testing Lag? Not My Fault, Says Trump

Literature

“Our War Would Be With a Virus”

The New School poet’s latest collection retraces the losses of the AIDS crisis

March 9, 2020 • by Mark Bibbins

From 13th Balloon What might anyone have made of you and me as babies born into the mess and ferment of the late 1960s Working-class babies born to parents who themselves were babies during World War II Were they worried already about Vietnam or about some other monstrous hand that would grab us from our cribs by our feet and throw us into the war that ...

Interviews

Permission To Be Yourself: An Interview With Mira Jacob

The National Book Critics Circle finalist for her Autobiography, Good Talk

March 6, 2020 • by Mira Jacob and Ramya Ramana

--- Ramya Ramana [RR]: So first I want to say thank you for writing this, from the bottom of my heart because it was just so refreshing to read a story that I could see myself in, and so much of your journey. I felt like I see myself and I ...