Body & Mind Archives - Page 14 of 16

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 ...

Permission To Be Yourself: An Interview With Mira Jacob

Psyche

I Started Transitioning This Past Summer. The Hardest Part Is the Unearthing of Past Traumas

On trans identity, poetry, and fighting for the dignity of one’s body

February 18, 2020 • by Isa Guzman

i. i say morning off-white ceiling insect corpse light dent fixture twenty-year-old piece of double-sided tape breath breaking mirror sun through gate’s red curtain I say to the ceiling: “I wish I wasn’t here anymore.” My body hadn’t been cooperating with me. I was constantly tired. A long-term relationship had ended. My graduate ...

I Started Transitioning This Past Summer. The Hardest Part Is the Unearthing of Past Traumas

Psyche

Trauma, Transitioning, and “Puberty Book-Ended by Free Fall”

In a new cycle of poems, poet Isa Guzman explores their personal experience of gender-confirmation

February 18, 2020 • by Isa Guzman

1. I think with observable sunsets my mother’s bodily purging calm hums abstracted pigeons awake along a broken wall of context the way the hip doesn’t curve won’t ever the alienating anatomic bone structure of verbs growing winds and winding contours of hysteria anatomical witchcraft another day another extension of empty ...

Trauma, Transitioning, and “Puberty Book-Ended by Free Fall”

Psyche

#MeToo and the Ontological Trauma of Consciousness Raising, Part 1

Reflections and Conversations Across the Gender Divide

February 10, 2020 • by Andrea Singer

It was two years ago that actor Alyssa Milano, in response to the sexual abuse allegations against media mogul Harvey Weinstein, brought activist Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement into the social media mainstream. And it was one year ago that Christine Blasey Ford, in the midst of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court Justice hearing, ...