Spanish Flu: A Warning from History

in History | March 12th, 2020

Two years ago historians marked the 100th anniversary of the Spanish Flu, a worldwide pandemic that seemed to be disappearing down the memory hole. Not so fast, said historians, we need to remember the horror. Happy belated anniversary, said 2020, hold my beer. And so here we are. As I write this, the President wheezed through an Address to the Nation which calmed no fears and sent Dow futures tumbling. I scrolled down my news feed to see that Tom Hanks and his wife both have it. Our god is an amoral one, and its noodly appendages touch all.

So let’s put our current moment into perspective with this 10+ minute history on the Spanish Flu from Cambridge University. Here are the numbers: it killed 20 million people according to contemporary accounts. Later scientists and historians revised that number to somewhere between 50 to 100 million.

“This virus killed more people in the first 25 weeks than HIV/AIDS has killed in 25 years,” says h istorian of medicine Dr. Mary Dobson. And unlike our current COVID-19 strain, this strain of flu went after 20 to 40 year olds with a vengeance. The symptoms were graphic and unpleasant–people drowning in their own phlegm, blood shooting out of noses and ears, people dropping down dead in the street.

Where did it start? Certainly not in Spain–it gained that nickname because the first cases were recorded in the Spanish press. One theory is that it started in Kansas and found its way overseas, from barracks to the frontlines. It might has come from birds or pigs, but scientists still don’t know how it jumps from species to species and how it quickly evolves within humans to infect each other.

Right now, it seems like COVID-19 can subside if countries can work quickly, like in China. But history has a warning too. As Europe and America celebrated Armistice Day at the end of the war, the flu seemed to be going away too. Instead it came roaring back in a second wave, deadlier than the first.

Some famous folks who got the virus but survived included movie stars Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, right at the height of their fame; President Woodrow Wilson, who was so out of it (though recovering) that some historians blame the weaknesses in the Treaty of Versailles on him. Artist Edvard Munch contracted it (which seems fitting, considering his obsessions) and painted several self-portraits during his illness. Raymond Chandler, Walt Disney, Greta Garbo, Franz Kafka, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Katherine Anne Porter all survived.

Others weren’t so lucky: painter of sensuous, gold leaf paintings Gustav Klimt died from it, as did poet and proto-surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire, and artist Egon Schiele. (And so did Donald Trump’s grandpa).

The Spanish Flu never really went away. There were still cases in the ‘50s, but we humans evolved with it and it became a seasonal type of flu like many others. Flu viruses constantly evolve and mutate, and that’s why it is very difficult to create vaccines that can stop them.

If you’ve read this far, one last thing: GO WASH YOUR HANDS AND STOP TOUCHING YOUR FACE!

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Meaning of Life According to Simone de Beauvoir

in Philosophy | March 12th, 2020

When someone presumes to explain the meaning of life, they usually draw, however vaguely, on religion. Many a philosopher has ventured a secular answer, but it’s hard to compete with the ancient stories of the world’s major faiths. The richness of their metaphors surpasses historical truth; humans, it seems, really “cannot bear very much reality,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets. Maybe we need stories to keep us going, which is why we love Plato, whose myth of the origins of love in his novella, the Symposium, remains one of the most moving in the Western philosophical canon.

Plato’s philosophical project was a story that existentialists like Simone de Beauvoir were eager to be rid of, along with the hoary old myths of religion. The Athenian’s pious idealism “dismissed the physical world as a flawed reflection of higher truth and unchanging ideals,” says Iseult Gillespie in the TED-Ed video above. “But for de Beauvoir, early life was enthralling, sensual, and anything but static.” Material reality is not an imperfect copy, but the medium into which we are thrown, to exercise freedom and responsibility and determine our own purposes, as de Beauvoir argued in The Ethics of Ambiguity.

For de Beauvoir, as for her partner Jean-Paul Sartre, the “ethical imperative to create our own life’s meaning,” precedes any pre-existing meaning to which we might attach ourselves, and which might lead us to deny freedom to others. “A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom,” she wrote, “must be denied.” We might think of such a statement in terms of Karl Popper’s paradox of intolerance, but the idea led de Beauvoir in a different direction—away from the liberalism Popper defended and in a more radical philosophical direction.

De Beauvoir’s existentialist feminism asked fundamental questions about the given categories of social identity that lock us into prefigured roles and shape our lives without our consent or control. She realized that social constructions of womanhood—not a Platonic ideal but a historical production—restricted her from fully realizing her chosen life’s meaning. “Despite her prolific writing, teaching, and activism, de Beauvoir struggled to be taken seriously by her male peers.” This was not only a political problem, it was also an existential one.

As de Beauvoir would argue in The Second Sex, categories of gender turned women into “others”—imperfect copies of men, who are construed as the ideal. Later theorists took up the critique to show how race, sexuality, class, and other stories about human identity restrict the ability of individuals to determine their lives’ meaning. Instead, we find ourselves presented with social narratives that explain our existence to us and tell us what we can hope to accomplish and what we cannot.

De Beauvoir was also a storyteller. Her personal experiences figured centrally in her philosophy; she published several acclaimed novels, and along with Nobel-winning novelists and playwrights Sartre and Albert Camus, made Existentialism the most literary of philosophical movements. But when it came to grand abstractions like the “meaning of life,” the answer all of them gave in their philosophical work was that such things aren’t hovering above us like Plato’s ideal forms. Each of us must figure it out ourselves within our flawed, imperfect, individual lives.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The History of the Plague: Every Major Epidemic in an Animated Map

in Health, History, Maps | March 12th, 2020

All of us have tried to come to grips with the coronavirus in different ways. Here on Open Culture we’ve featured online courses to get you conversant in the science around the pandemic, but readers of this site will also have sought out the most pertinent works of history and literature. That goes especially for those in need of reading material while in states of quarantine or lockdown (self-imposed or otherwise), and any list of recommended books must include Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’ The Plague. (I recently wrote about the experience of reading that last in Korea, where I live, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.) Both fictionalize local outbreaks of the bubonic plague, but how far and wide did that horrific and much-mythologized disease actually spread?

You can see exactly how far and wide in the animated historical map above, created by a Youtuber called EmperorTigerstar. It mainly covers the period of 431 BC to 1353 AD, during most of which the plague looks to have occurred in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa with some regularity. Up until the 1330s, the outbreaks stay small enough that you may have to view the map in fullscreen mode to ensure that you even see them.

But even the most casual students of history know what happened next: the best-known occurrence of the Black Death, whose peak lasted from 1347 to 1351 and which claimed somewhere between 75 to 200 million lives (including roughly half of Europe’s entire population). Rendered, suitably, in black, the plague’s spread comes eventually to look on the map like a sea of ink splashed violently across multiple continents.

The plague hardly died with the 1350s, a fact this map acknowledges. It would, writes EmperorTigerstar, “take years to go away, and even then there would be local outbreaks in individual cities for centuries.” These Black Death aftershocks, “big in their own right,” include the Great Plague of Milan in the 1630s, the Great Plague of Seville in the 1640s, and the Great Plague of London in the 1660s — the subject of Defoe’s novel. When Camus wrote The Plague in 1947, the Algerian city of Oran in which he set its story had experienced its last outbreak of the disease just three years before (at least the fifth such experience in its history). Though harrowing stories are even now coming out of places like modern-day Milan, the coronavirus has yet to match the gruesome deadliness of the plagues featured in either of these books. But unless we understand how epidemics afflicted humanity in the past, we can hardly handle them properly in the present.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

How Schools Can Start Teaching Online in a Short Period of Time: Free Tutorials from the Stanford Online High School

in Current Affairs, Education | March 12th, 2020

Image by King of Hearts, via Wikimedia Commons

A quick note: The Stanford Online High School–an independent high school that operates fully online–has created video tutorials designed for schools that may need to close classrooms and pivot online. “All guidance is platform-agnostic, focusing on the essential steps for preparing to teach online in a short period of time.”

In addition to this videos, the Online High School will host a free webinar today at 2pm California time. You can register here and learn more about the transition to online teaching.

Note: Zoom–which provides a turnkey video conferencing solution–has made its product free for K‑12 institutions during the COVID-19 crisis. This can help schools spin up online courses quickly. More on that here.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Widespread Epidemic Far Worse Than Ebola at Well Over 50 Percent” (2015)

in Current Affairs | March 11th, 2020

What are billionaires afraid of? A wealth tax? Universal healthcare? Immigrants from several specific places in the world? Probably. But if you ask one billionaire, Bill Gates—who has spent the last several years spending money to combat deadly epidemics—he’ll answer with a very detailed description of a global threat to everyone, not just the handful of people in his (un)tax(ed) bracket: Pandemics like the 1918 Spanish flu, as he told Vox’s Ezra Klein in the 2015 video interview above. The disease infected around 27 percent of the world’s population and killed tens of millions of people from every social class.

Such events are highly probable, and we should be prepared for them. “I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic far worse than Ebola in my lifetime at well over 50 percent,” he says. In fact, Gates met with the president two years ago to urge federal action on pandemic preparedness. He was heard and ignored.

Now, as the CDC faces the spread of coronavirus in major cities around the country, it finds itself woefully unprepared for the task. “The truth is we’ve not invested, we’ve underinvested in the public health labs,” director Robert Redfield told Congress in recent hearings. “There’s not enough equipment, there’s not enough people, there’s not enough internal capacity….”

The situation looks bleak, but Gates was “optimistic” despite his predictions. And why shouldn’t he be? Klein wrote: “He’s one of the richest men in the world,” and he also “runs a foundation immersed in the world’s problems” and “can measure them getting better.” But a deadly pandemic remains “the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race,” writes Klein. Maybe Gates should have urged the government to prepare by explaining how it would boost the oil and hotel industries.

For those who can be persuaded by evidence of a possible pandemic’s effect on human lives, Gates modeled how a disease as deadly and infectious as the Spanish flu would act today. “Within 60 days it’s basically in all urban centers around the entire globe,” he says. “That didn’t happen with the Spanish flu.” He explains further in the TED talk above how the “greatest risk of global catastrophe” doesn’t look like a mushroom cloud but like the spiky microscopic ball of the influenza virus, or its equivalent. That may not be COVID-19, but whatever it is, Gates has been warning for years, we are not ready.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Take a Drive Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Angeles with Vintage Through-the-Car-Window Films

in History, Travel | March 11th, 2020

Many claim Los Angeles was “built for the car,” a half-truth at best. When the city — or rather, the city and the vast region of southern California surrounding it — first boomed in the late 19th and early 20th century, it grew according to the spread of its electric railway networks. But for early adopters of the automobile (as well as the many aspirants close behind), its sheer size, easily navigable terrain, and still-low population density made greater Los Angeles an ideal place to drive.

After the Second World War, the days of the Pacific Electric and Los Angeles Railroad, once among the finest urban rail systems in the world, were clearly numbered. Both went out of service by the early 1960s, and for the next few decades the car was indeed king. One theory holds, though with imperfect evidence, that Los Angeles lost its trains because of an automakers’ conspiracy.

Whatever the cause, the long heyday of the automobile and its attendant “car culture” changed mid-20th-century Los Angeles. It left its boldest mark in the city’s architecture, a category that must surely include the swooping concrete of the freeways, but more obviously includes the buildings designed to catch the eye of a human being behind the wheel cruising at speed. We notice at a different scale in a car than we do on foot, and so the structures along Los Angeles’ main roads — especially boulevards like Wilshire, Hollywood, and Sunset — grew more legible to the motorist in the second half of the twentieth century.

That means Los Angeles’ architecture grew ever bigger, bolder, more eye-catching — or, depending on your perspective, ever more garish, ungainly, and impersonal. You can see this transformation captured in action from the car window in the three videos featured here. At the top of the post is a six-minute drive through the downtown Los Angeles of the 1940s, which begins on Bunker Hill, an area originally built up with stately Victorian houses in the late 19th century.

By the time of this film those houses had been subdivided into cheap apartments, and films noirs (such as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly) were using it as a typical “bad neighborhood.” That atmosphere also made it a target for a 50-year “urban renewal” project that, starting in the late 50s onward, scraped the houses off Bunker Hill and rebuilt it with corporate towers and prestige cultural venues.

A through-the-windshield view of Los Angeles in the 50s appears in the video second from the top, a 1957 drive down Hollywood Boulevard. That street and that year stand at the intersection of pre-war and post-war Los Angeles, and the built environment reflects as much the sensibility of the turn of the 20th century as it does what we know think of as “mid-century modern.”

Below that we have a drive through the city so many think of when they think of Los Angeles: the Los Angeles of the 1960s, a seemingly limitless realm of palm trees, brightly colored billboards, and Space Age-influenced towers that pop out even more from their low-slung surroundings when seen from the freeway — in other words, the Los Angeles Quentin Tarantino recreates in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

To get a sense of the greater sweep of change in Los Angeles, have a look at the New Yorker video above (previously featured here on Open Culture) that puts the downtown drive from the 1940s alongside the same drive replicated in the 2010s. Popular culture may associate Los Angeles with the willful erasure of history as much as it associates Los Angeles with the automobile, but traces are there for those — in a car, on foot, on a bike, or going by any form of transportation besides — who know how to see them.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch 85,000 Historic Newsreel Films from British Pathé Free Online (1910–2008)

in Film, History | March 11th, 2020

The “pivot-to-video” moment of a few years back devastated writers everywhere with mass layoffs as companies scrambled to attract projected millions of nonexistent viewers. It’s a story about predatory media monopolies and the proliferation of news, documentary, and opinion video content online. While the sheer amount of video can feel overwhelming, we might remember that people have been getting their news from screens for well over a hundred years.

First came the newsreels. Thousands were produced from the end of the 19th century into the 1960s, when TV became the dominant screen of choice. These were ephemeral, often fragmentary films, not usually preserved in the way of great cinema.

But while “the newsreel may be history,” notes the National Endowment for the Humanities, “vast collections of it remain, much of it unseen.” One such collection resides at the archives of British Pathé, “a treasure trove of 85,000 films unrivaled in their historical significance.”

British Pathé has digitized their collection and made all of it—including more than 136,000 items from the Reuters historical collection—freely available online at their website and on YouTube. You’ll find there exactly the kind of variety Richard Eder described in The New York Times in 1977, a year when people also felt “flooded” by news:

Most of the time [newsreels] were patchy views of a rather scatterbrained reality. Sneezing contests would alternate with politicians cutting ribbons and South Americans rioting.But once in a while there was something unforgettable: the Hindenburg floated loftily into sight and suddenly settled on the ground like burning tinsel; a middle-aged Frenchman wept at Toulon when the fleet was scuttled. The newsreel cameras and the big screen provided an authority to these things that television equipment couldn’t manage. Also there was the effect of waiting a day or two to see a disaster you had read of. World events were discrete, individual, weighty. They did not flood us.

British Pathé produced short documentary films on every possible subject around the world from 1910 to 2008 and might lay claim to capturing more unforgettable historical moments than most any other newsreel service of the era. A tiny sampling of newsreels in their massive digital archive includes the Beatnik makeover from 1963 at the top; a very brief film on Tolstoy; a longer featurette on the Titanic, with interviews from survivors; and a short on the psychedelic Mellotron.

Among the many “British Pathé Unissued” videos, we find the filmed interview clip below with H.G. Wells in the 1930s, in which he proposes disarmament, international cooperation, full public employment, and the nationalization of industry as antidotes to the rising tides of World War and devastating social inequality. The interview was “unused by Pathé editors and not screened in cinemas,” explains a title added at the beginning. One significant shift from the newsreel to the digital age is the unprecedented ability to bypass the censors.

“Before television” and the internet, as the archive description points out, “people came to movie theatres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the forefront of cinematic journalism, blending information with entertainment to popular effect.” If this blend sounds somewhat akin to the mass media world we inhabit today—one filled with proliferating video explainers, short documentaries, talking head conspiracy theorists and every other possible use of the form—perhaps it’s useful to remember that we’ve been living in that world a very long time. It has produced many thousands of artifacts that can tell us where we’ve been over the past 120 years or so, if not quite how we got to where we are now.

Enter the British Pathé collection on YouTube or their website.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Why New Diseases Like COVID-19 Keep Appearing in China

in Health | March 11th, 2020

From Vox comes a short explainer that delves into why viruses like COVID-19 have often first taken off in China. They write:

As of early March 2020, a new coronavirus, called COVID-19, is in more than 70 countries and has killed more than 3,100 people, the vast majority in China. That’s where the virus emerged back in December 2019. This isn’t a new phenomenon for China; in 2003, the SARS virus also emerged there, and under similar circumstances, before spreading around the world and killing nearly 800.

Both SARS and COVID-19 are in the “coronavirus” family, and both appear to have emerged from animals in China’s notorious wildlife markets. Experts had long predicted that these markets, known to be potential sources of disease, would enable another outbreak. The markets, and the wildlife trade that supports them, are the underlying problem of these pandemics; until China solves that problem, more are likely to emerge.

Days ago, China’s wildlife-farming industry was permanently shut down by Chinese officials.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Spanish Flu: A Warning from History

The Meaning of Life According to Simone de Beauvoir

The History of the Plague: Every Major Epidemic in an Animated Map

How Schools Can Start Teaching Online in a Short Period of Time: Free Tutorials from the Stanford Online High School

Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Widespread Epidemic Far Worse Than Ebola at Well Over 50 Percent” (2015)

Take a Drive Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Angeles with Vintage Through-the-Car-Window Films

Watch 85,000 Historic Newsreel Films from British Pathé Free Online (1910–2008)

Why New Diseases Like COVID-19 Keep Appearing in China

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