Everything You Need To Know About Viruses: A Quick Visual Explanation of Viruses in 9 Images

It’s a great time to tune in to what sci­en­tists are try­ing to tell us.

It’s true that we’ve received a lot of con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion over the last four months with regard to how to best pro­tect our­selves and oth­ers from COVID-19.

Sci­en­tists and health care pro­fes­sion­als have a learn­ing curve, too.

Their bul­letins evolve as their under­stand­ing of the nov­el coro­n­avirus grows, through research and hands-on expe­ri­ence.

There are still a lot of unknowns.

Some peo­ple take any evi­dence-based mes­sag­ing updates regard­ing masks and re-open­ing as proof that sci­en­tists don’t know their ass­es from their elbows.

To which we might counter, “If that’s the case, please take a minute from berat­ing the poor gro­cery store employ­ee who asked you to fol­low clear­ly post­ed state man­dat­ed pub­lic health prac­tices to edu­cate us. For­get the econ­o­my. For­get the elec­tion. Blind us with some sci­ence. Pre­tend we don’t know any­thing and hit us with some hard­core facts about virus­es. We’re lis­ten­ing.”

(Crick­ets…)

Sci­ence writer Dominic Wal­li­man, founder of the Domain of Sci­ence Youtube  chan­nel, may have a PhD in quan­tum device physics, but he also had the humil­i­ty to real­ize, ear­li­er in the pan­dem­ic, that he didn’t know much about virus­es:

So I did a load of research and have sum­ma­rized what I learned in… nine images. This video (above) explains the key aspects of virus­es: how big they are, how they infect and enter and exit cells, how virus­es are clas­si­fied, how they repli­cate, and sub­jects involv­ing viral infec­tions like how they spread from per­son to per­son, how our immune sys­tem detects and destroys them and how vac­cines and anti-viral drugs work.

Wal­li­man ani­mates his 10-minute overview with the same bright info­graph­ics he uses to help stu­dents and laypeo­ple wrap their heads around com­put­er sci­ence, biol­o­gy, chem­istry, physics, and math.

The virus video has been fact-checked by immu­nol­o­gist Michael Bramhall and biol­o­gist Christoph von Arx.

And how refresh­ing to see trans­paren­cy with regard to human error, pub­lished as a cor­rec­tive:

In slide 9 tox­in vac­cines are for bac­te­r­i­al infec­tions like tetanus, not virus­es. 

For those who’d like to learn more, Wal­li­man has tacked a whop­ping 15 links onto the episode’s descrip­tion, from sources such as Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­canNatureStan­ford Medicine’s Scope blog, and the Nation­al Cen­ter for Biotech­nol­o­gy Infor­ma­tion.

Down­load a free poster of Domain of Science’s Virus­es Explained in 9 Images here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Spring Break vs. COVID-19: Map­ping the Real Impact of Ignor­ing Social Dis­tanc­ing

A Chill­ing Time-Lapse Video Doc­u­ments Every COVID-19 Death on a Glob­al Map: From Jan­u­ary to June 2020

The Case for a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income in the Time of COVID-19

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est project is an ani­ma­tion and a series of free down­load­able posters relat­ed to COVID-19 pub­lic health Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

What Happened When Americans Had to Wear Masks During the 1918 Flu Pandemic

Med­ical pro­fes­sion­als have had a par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult time get­ting peo­ple in the Unit­ed States to act in uni­son for the pub­lic good dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. This has been the case with every step that experts urge to curb the spread of COVID-19, from clos­ing schools, church­es, and oth­er meet­ing places, to enforc­ing social dis­tanc­ing and wear­ing masks over the nose and mouth in pub­lic spaces.

The resis­tance may seem symp­to­matic of the con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal cli­mate, but there is ample prece­dent for it dur­ing the spread of so-called Span­ish Flu, which took the lives of 675,000 Amer­i­cans a lit­tle over a hun­dred years ago. Even when forced to wear masks by law or face jail time, many Amer­i­cans absolute­ly refused to do so.

“In 1918,” writes E. Thomas Ewing at Health Affairs, “US pub­lic health author­i­ties rec­om­mend­ed masks for doc­tors, nurs­es, and any­one tak­ing care of influen­za patients.” The advi­so­ry “grad­u­al­ly and incon­sis­tent­ly” spread to the gen­er­al pub­lic, in a dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al cli­mate, in some impor­tant respects, than our own, as Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan med­ical his­to­ri­an J. Alexan­der Navar­ro explains.

Nation­wide, posters pre­sent­ed mask-wear­ing as a civic duty – social respon­si­bil­i­ty had been embed­ded into the social fab­ric by a mas­sive wartime fed­er­al pro­pa­gan­da cam­paign launched in ear­ly 1917 when the U.S. entered the Great War. San Fran­cis­co May­or James Rolph announced that “con­science, patri­o­tism and self-pro­tec­tion demand imme­di­ate and rigid com­pli­ance” with mask wear­ing. In near­by Oak­land, May­or John Davie stat­ed that “it is sen­si­ble and patri­ot­ic, no mat­ter what our per­son­al beliefs may be, to safe­guard our fel­low cit­i­zens by join­ing in this prac­tice” of wear­ing a mask.

Despite the civic spir­it and gen­er­al­ized pub­lic sup­port for mask wear­ing, pass­ing local mask ordi­nances was “fre­quent­ly a con­tentious affair.” Debates that sound famil­iar raged in city coun­cils in Los Ange­les and Port­land, both of which reject­ed mask orders. (One offi­cial declar­ing them “auto­crat­ic and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.”) San Fran­cis­co, on the oth­er hand, brought the police down on any­one who refused to wear a mask, impos­ing fines and jail time.

These mea­sures were adopt­ed by oth­er cities, as well as abroad in Paris and Man­ches­ter. “Fines ranged,” Navar­ro writes, “from US$5 to $200,” a huge amount of mon­ey in 1918, and a good amount for many peo­ple out of work today. Even in cities that did not impose harsh penal­ties, “non­com­pli­ance and out­right defi­ance quick­ly became a prob­lem.” Much of the resis­tance to wear­ing masks, how­ev­er, came lat­er, after a first wave of flu infec­tions sub­sided. When pre­cau­tions were relaxed, cas­es rose once again, and new mask man­dates went into effect in 1919.

San Francisco’s Anti-Mask League formed in protest, attract­ing some­where between 4,000 and 5,000 unmasked atten­dees to a Jan­u­ary meet­ing. Some of their objec­tions rest­ed on an ear­ly study that found scant evi­dence for the effi­ca­cy of com­pul­so­ry mask-wear­ing. How­ev­er, a lat­er com­pre­hen­sive 1921 study by War­ren T. Vaughn, notes Ewing, found that the data was too sketchy to draw con­clu­sions: “The prob­lem was human behav­ior: Masks were used until they were filthy, worn in ways that offered lit­tle or no pro­tec­tion, and com­pul­so­ry laws did not over­come the ‘fail­ure of coop­er­a­tion on the part of the pub­lic.’”

Vaughn con­clud­ed, “It is safe to say that the face mask as used was a fail­ure.” Many behav­iors con­tributed to this out­come. As we see in the pho­to­graph at the top of anony­mous Cal­i­for­ni­ans wear­ing masks and hold­ing a sign that reads, “Wear a mask or go to jail,” many did not wear masks prop­er­ly, leav­ing their nose exposed, for exam­ple, like the woman in the cen­ter of the group. Notably, instead of social dis­tanc­ing, the group stands shoul­der to shoul­der, ren­der­ing their masks most­ly inef­fec­tive.

The kind of masks most peo­ple wore were made of thin gauze. (“Obey the laws and wear the gauze. Pro­tect your jaws from sep­tic paws,” went a jin­gle at the time.) The mate­r­i­al was­n’t at all effec­tive at clos­er dis­tances, where today’s quilt­ed cot­ton masks, on the oth­er hand, have been shown to stop the virus a few inch­es from the wearer’s face. Still, masks, when com­bined with oth­er mea­sures, were shown to be effec­tive when com­pli­ance was high, though much of the evi­dence is anec­do­tal.

What can we learn from this his­to­ry? Does it under­mine the case for masks today? “We need to learn the right lessons from the fail­ure of flu masks in 1918,” Ewing argues. The over­whelm­ing sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus is that masks are some of the most effec­tive tools for slow­ing the spread of the coro­n­avirus, and that, unlike in 1918, “Masks can work if we wear them cor­rect­ly, mod­i­fy behav­ior appro­pri­ate­ly, and apply all avail­able tools to con­trol the spread of infec­tious dis­ease.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Japan­ese Health Man­u­al Cre­at­ed Dur­ing the 1918 Span­ish Flu Pan­dem­ic Offers Time­less Wis­dom: Stay Away from Oth­ers, Cov­er Your Mouth & Nose, and More

What Hap­pened to U.S. Cities That Practiced–and Didn’t Practice–Social Dis­tanc­ing Dur­ing 1918’s “Span­ish Flu”

The His­to­ry of the 1918 Flu Pan­dem­ic, “The Dead­liest Epi­dem­ic of All Time”: Three Free Lec­tures from The Great Cours­es

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

Nursing Home Residents Replace Famous Rock Stars on Iconic Album Covers

Deserved­ly or not, British care homes have acquired a rep­u­ta­tion as espe­cial­ly drea­ry places, from Vic­to­ri­an nov­els to dystopi­an fic­tion to the flat affect of BBC doc­u­men­taries. Mar­tin Parr gave the world an espe­cial­ly mov­ing exam­ple of the care home doc­u­men­tary in his 1972 pho­to series on Prest­wich Asy­lum, out­side Man­ches­ter. The com­pelling por­traits human­ize peo­ple who were neglect­ed and ignored, yet their lives still look bleak in that aus­tere­ly post-war British insti­tu­tion kind of way.

One can­not say any­thing of the kind of the pho­to series rep­re­sent­ed here, which casts res­i­dents of Syd­mar Lodge Care Home in Edge­ware, Eng­land as rock stars, dig­i­tal­ly recre­at­ing some of the most famous album cov­ers of all time. This is not, obvi­ous­ly, a can­did look at res­i­dents’ day-to-day exis­tence. But it sug­gests a pret­ty cheer­ful place. “The main aim was to show that care homes need not be a sad envi­ron­ment, even dur­ing this pan­dem­ic,” says the pho­tos’ cre­ator Robert Speker, the home’s activ­i­ties man­ag­er.

“Speker tweet­ed side-by-side pho­tos of the orig­i­nal cov­ers and the Syd­mar Lodge res­i­dents’ new takes, and the tweets quick­ly took off,” NPR’s Lau­rel Wams­ley writes. He’s made it clear that the pri­ma­ry audi­ence for the recre­at­ed cov­ers is the res­i­dents them­selves: Iso­lat­ed in lock­down for the past four months; cut off from vis­its and out­ings; suf­fer­ing from an indef­i­nite sus­pen­sion of famil­iar rou­tines.

Speker does not deny the grim real­i­ty behind the inspir­ing images. “Elder­ly peo­ple will remain in lock­down for a long time,” he writes on a GoFundMe page he cre­at­ed to help sup­port the home. “It could be months before the sit­u­a­tion changes for them.”

But he is opti­mistic about his abil­i­ties to “make their time as hap­py and full of enjoy­ment and inter­est as pos­si­ble.” Would that all nurs­ing homes had such a ded­i­cat­ed, award-win­ning coor­di­na­tor. Res­i­dents them­selves, he wrote on Twit­ter, were “enthused and per­haps a bit bemused by the idea, but hap­py to par­tic­i­pate.” When they saw the results—stunning Roma Cohen as Aladdin Sane, defi­ant Sheila Solomons as Elvis and The Clash’s Paul Simenon, casu­al Mar­tin Stein­berg as a “Born in Eng­land” Springsteen—they were delight­ed. Four of the home­’s car­ers got their own cov­er, too, posed as Queen.

Res­i­dents, Speker said, were real­ly “hav­ing a good gig­gle about it.” And we can too, as we bear in mind the many elder­ly peo­ple around us who have been locked in for months, with maybe many more months of iso­la­tion ahead. Not every­one is as tal­ent­ed as Robert Speker, who did the mod­els’ make­up and tat­toos him­self (with hair by a care home man­ag­er), as well as tak­ing all the pho­tographs and edit­ing the images to con­vinc­ing­ly mim­ic the pos­es, com­po­si­tion, light­ing, font, and col­or schemes of the orig­i­nals. But let’s hope his work is a spark that lights up nurs­ing homes and care facil­i­ties with all sorts of cre­ative ideas to keep spir­its up. See sev­er­al more cov­ers below and the rest on Twit­ter.

via the BBC/NPR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peo­ple Pose in Uncan­ny Align­ment with Icon­ic Album Cov­ers: Dis­cov­er The Sleeve­face Project

The His­to­ry of the Fish­eye Pho­to Album Cov­er

Dyson Cre­ates 44 Free Engi­neer­ing & Sci­ence Chal­lenges for Kids Quar­an­tined Dur­ing COVID-19

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

Watch the Famous James Baldwin-William F. Buckley Debate in Full, With Restored Audio (1965)

When James Bald­win took the stage to debate William F. Buck­ley at Cam­bridge in 1965, it was to have “a debate we shouldn’t need,” writes Gabrielle Bel­lot at Lit­er­ary Hub, and yet it’s one that is still “as impor­tant as ever.” The propo­si­tion before the two men—famed prophet­ic nov­el­ist of the black expe­ri­ence in Amer­i­ca and the con­ser­v­a­tive founder of the Nation­al Review—was this: “The Amer­i­can Dream is at the Expense of the Amer­i­ca Negro.”

The state­ment should not need defend­ing, Bald­win argued, because it is so obvi­ous­ly true. The wealth cre­at­ed by hun­dreds of years of slav­ery has passed down through gen­er­a­tions of fam­i­lies. So too has the pover­ty. These divi­sions have been stren­u­ous­ly main­tained by Jim Crow, redlin­ing, and racist polic­ing. “Prof­its from slav­ery,” write Stephen Smith and Kate Ellis at APM Reports, “helped fund some of the most pres­ti­gious schools in the North­east, includ­ing Har­vard, Colum­bia, Prince­ton and Yale,” which hap­pened to be Buckley’s alma mater and was found­ed by an actu­al slave trad­er.

Slave labor fund­ed, built, and main­tained near­ly every part of the for­ma­tive uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem in the ear­ly U.S., and built the wealth of many oth­er pow­er­ful insti­tu­tions. Bald­win says it is “awk­ward” to have to point out these facts. Rather than recite them, he per­son­al­izes, speak­ing, he says, as “a kind of Jere­mi­ah” in nam­ing crimes gone unre­dressed for too long: “I am stat­ing very seri­ous­ly, and this is not an over­state­ment. I picked the cot­ton, I car­ried it to the mar­ket, and I built the rail­roads under some­one else’s whip for noth­ing. For noth­ing…. The Amer­i­can soil is full of the corpses of my ances­tors. Why is my free­dom or my cit­i­zen­ship, or my right to live there, how is it con­ceiv­ably a ques­tion now?”

Buckley’s response drips with con­de­scen­sion and con­tempt. He begins with a stan­dard con­ser­v­a­tive line: deplor­ing the acts of a few “indi­vid­ual Amer­i­can cit­i­zens” who “per­pet­u­ate dis­crim­i­na­tion,” but deny­ing that his­toric, sys­temic racism still exists. He then cites “the fail­ure of the Negro com­mu­ni­ty itself to make cer­tain exer­tions, which were made by oth­er minor­i­ty groups dur­ing the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence.” He damns an entire group of peo­ple with plat­i­tudes about hard work while also declar­ing loud­ly that race has noth­ing to do with it.

This contradiction—engaging in racist scape­goat­ing while claim­ing not to see race—was part of the strat­e­gy of “col­or­blind” con­ser­vatism the Nation­al Review adopt­ed after the pas­sage the Civ­il Rights Act. Pri­or to the ear­ly six­ties, how­ev­er, Buck­ley had been a stri­dent seg­re­ga­tion­ist who pub­licly defend­ed insti­tu­tion­al­ized white suprema­cy rather than claim­ing it had dis­ap­peared. In 1957, he wrote an edi­to­r­i­al titled “Why the South Must Pre­vail” and argued that white south­ern politi­cians must “take such mea­sures as are nec­es­sary to pre­vail, polit­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly” over black cit­i­zens.

Buck­ley had not fun­da­men­tal­ly changed in 1965, though he posi­tioned him­self as a mod­er­ate mid­dle ground between lib­er­als and seg­re­ga­tion­ists like Strom Thur­mond, whom he con­sid­ered crude. His posi­tion amounts to lit­tle more than a defense of dom­i­na­tion, couched in what his­to­ri­an Joshua Tait calls the “racial inno­cence of intel­lec­tu­al con­ser­vatism” that delib­er­ate­ly ignores or dis­torts his­tor­i­cal truths and present real­i­ties. “Bristling at Baldwin’s claim that the Amer­i­can econ­o­my was built by the unre­mu­ner­at­ed labour of Black peo­ple,” writes Joss Har­ri­son, “Buck­ley cries: ‘My great grand­par­ents worked too!’”

The debate “now stands as one of the arche­typ­al artic­u­la­tions of the divid­ing line between US pro­gres­sives and con­ser­v­a­tives on ques­tions of race, jus­tice and his­to­ry,” writes Aeon, who bring us the full ver­sion above with restored audio by Adam D’Arpino. Buck­ley responds to Baldwin’s pow­er­ful rhetoric with insults, out of con­text “facts and fig­ures – as well as an ad hominem shot at Baldwin’s speak­ing voice.” He pro­pos­es that one road to equal­i­ty lies in dis­en­fran­chis­ing poor South­ern whites as well as black cit­i­zens.

Buck­ley dis­plays a “com­plete igno­rance of the prob­lems faced by black Amer­i­cans in soci­ety,” writes Har­ri­son. Such igno­rance, “allied with pow­er,” Bald­win said else­where, con­sti­tutes “the most fero­cious ene­my jus­tice can have.” For Bald­win, Buck­ley’s atti­tude sim­ply con­firmed the “great shock,” that he mov­ing­ly describes in his debate state­ment, “around the age of five, or six, or sev­en, to dis­cov­er that the flag to which you have pledged alle­giance, along with every­body else, has not pledged alle­giance to you.”

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why James Baldwin’s Writ­ing Stays Pow­er­ful: An Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Author of Notes of a Native Son

Great Cul­tur­al Icons Talk Civ­il Rights: James Bald­win, Mar­lon Bran­do, Har­ry Bela­fonte & Sid­ney Poiti­er (1963)

James Bald­win: Wit­ty, Fiery in Berke­ley, 1979

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

A Chilling Time-Lapse Video Documents Every COVID-19 Death on a Global Map: From January to June 2020

The sto­ry of the Coro­n­avirus, at least in the US, has swung between a num­ber of rhetor­i­cal tics now com­mon to all of our dis­course. Called a “hoax,” then giv­en sev­er­al racist nick­names and dis­missed as a “noth­ing burg­er,” the pandemic—currently at around 3 mil­lion cas­es in the coun­try, with a U.S. death toll over 130,000—has now become the “new nor­mal,” a phrase that pops up every­where you look.

“This fram­ing is invit­ing,” writes Chime Asonye at the World Eco­nom­ic Forum. It con­veys “the idea that our present is okay because nor­mal is reg­u­lar,” and we’re all sup­posed to be get­ting back to reg­u­lar life, accord­ing to the pow­ers that be, who don’t seem par­tic­u­lar­ly trou­bled by the dead, sick, and dying or the con­tin­ued threat to pub­lic health.

But pre­tend­ing things are nor­mal is sim­ply a form of a denial, a mal­adap­tive and unhealthy response to trau­ma as much as to dis­ease. “Allow­ing our­selves to cope means not nor­mal­iz­ing our sit­u­a­tion,” writes Asonye, “but giv­ing our­selves the time to tru­ly process it.” We are all liv­ing in the midst of pro­found loss—of loved ones, liveli­hoods, future plans and present joys. Asonye adds:

Psy­chol­o­gists advise that it’s impor­tant to iden­ti­fy the loss­es we are feel­ing and to hon­our the grief sur­round­ing us through meth­ods like med­i­ta­tion, com­mu­ni­cat­ing our strug­gle, and express­ing our­selves through art or by keep­ing a jour­nal. In uncer­tain times, the ‘new nor­mal’ frame rein­forces an under­stand­ing that the world and our emo­tions should by now have set­tled. Sur­round­ed by uncer­tain­ty, it’s okay to admit that things are not nor­mal. It’s okay to allow our­selves to grieve or to be scared. It’s okay not to be com­fort­able with what is going on.

How do we process if we can­not admit that there is a problem—a mas­sive prob­lem that requires our lives to change, even if we’re feel­ing fatigued and worn out? Though we may have grown cyn­i­cal­ly accus­tomed to the cal­lous, cor­rupt response of cer­tain gov­ern­ments to human suf­fer­ing, the “over­whelm­ing scale” of the pan­dem­ic, as James Beck­with writes on YouTube, marks the coro­n­avirus as decid­ed­ly not nor­mal. It may be the kind of cat­a­stro­phe the world has not wit­nessed in over a cen­tu­ry.

Inspired by artist Isao Hashimoto’s “Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explo­sion Since 1945,” which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here, Beck­with used the same visu­al pre­sen­ta­tion to map the over 500,000 lives lost to the virus since the first Jan­u­ary out­break in Chi­na. “The virus grows, con­tin­u­ing to work its way through­out the world until the end of June—where this piece ends but the real virus has not,” he writes. “It is like­ly a sequel will need to be made.” Though he admits the ani­ma­tion “may be upset­ting to some peo­ple,” Beck­with, like Asonye, rec­og­nizes the impor­tance of admit­ting the full scope.

Watch­ing the virus spread, and kill, over the past six months hits much hard­er than read­ing the dry facts. The video is ded­i­cat­ed to “every per­son that trag­i­cal­ly lost their lives to COVID-19.” Beck­with would like it “to be under­stood and seen by as many peo­ple around the world as pos­si­ble,” so that we can all have a shared under­stand­ing of what we’re fac­ing togeth­er (and maybe come to an agree­ment that this can­not be the “new nor­mal”). “Some­times there are no words for ter­ri­ble events like this,” Beck­with writes, but he would like help trans­lat­ing the video descrip­tion into oth­er lan­guages. You can con­tact him via his YouTube or Insta­gram chan­nels to vol­un­teer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

The His­to­ry of the 1918 Flu Pan­dem­ic, “The Dead­liest Epi­dem­ic of All Time”: Three Free Lec­tures from The Great Cours­es

Watch “Coro­n­avirus Out­break: What You Need to Know,” and the 24-Lec­ture Course “An Intro­duc­tion to Infec­tious Dis­eases,” Both Free from The Great Cours­es

Inter­ac­tive Web Site Tracks the Glob­al Spread of the Coro­n­avirus: Cre­at­ed and Sup­port­ed by Johns Hop­kins

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

Vintage Science Face Masks: Conquer the Pandemic with Science, Courtesy of Maria Popova’s BrainPickings

If you don’t floss or brush your teeth, they will rot and fall out. If you don’t eat fruits and veg­eta­bles, you will get scurvy or some oth­er hor­ri­ble dis­ease. If you don’t use pro­tec­tion… well, you know the rest. These are facts of life we most­ly accept if we care about our­selves and oth­ers because they are beyond dis­put­ing. But the idea of wear­ing a cloth mask when in pub­lic dur­ing a viral pan­dem­ic spread through droplets from the nose and mouth—a prac­tice endorsed by the CDC, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion, sci­en­tists at Stan­ford, Johns Hop­kins, and pret­ty much every oth­er research uni­ver­si­ty—has become some kind of bizarre cul­ture war.

Maybe some walk around mask-less because they’ve inter­nal­ized the idea that the coro­n­avirus is “over,” despite the fact it’s spread­ing at around 50,000 new cas­es per day in the US, and poten­tial­ly head­ing toward dou­ble that num­ber. Maybe some feel it won’t affect them because they aren’t elder­ly or immuno­com­pro­mised, nev­er mind that virus­es mutate, and that the nov­el (mean­ing “new”) coro­n­avirus has already demon­strat­ed that it is far less dis­crim­i­nat­ing (in pure­ly bio­log­i­cal terms) than pre­vi­ous­ly thought. (In Flori­da, the medi­an age for COVID-19 has dropped from 65 to 37 years old.) Nev­er mind that spread­ing the virus, even if one is not per­son­al­ly at high risk, com­pro­mis­es every­body else.

Are masks uncom­fort­able, espe­cial­ly in hot, humid weath­er? Do they muf­fle speech and make it hard to have sat­is­fy­ing face-to-face inter­ac­tions? Well, yes. But con­sid­er your hour­long masked trip to the gro­cery store against the 12 or 24 or 48 or what­ev­er hour-long shifts med­ical per­son­nel are pulling in emer­gency depart­ments across the coun­try.

It real­ly is the least we can do. And we can do it in style—masks went from scarce, with armies of home­bound neigh­bors sewing home­ly stacks of them, to tru­ly over­abun­dant and fash­ion­able, on the rack of every gro­cery, phar­ma­cy, and con­ve­nience store. It couldn’t be eas­i­er.

If you’re con­cerned about look­ing like every oth­er masked weirdo out there, con­sid­er these masks cre­at­ed by Maria Popo­va of Brain Pick­ings, which she intro­duces with ref­er­ences to Rebec­ca Elson’s poem, “Anti­dotes to Fear of Death.” The sci­ence of pub­lic health may demand that we are grim­ly prac­ti­cal at the moment, but Popo­va wants to remind us that sci­en­tif­ic think­ing is equal­ly invest­ed in the expe­ri­ence of awe and the love of life. By wear­ing these masks, we can com­mu­ni­cate to oth­ers, those who may be feel­ing despon­dent over the sea of masked faces in pub­lic places, that there is beau­ty in the world and we can ful­ly expe­ri­ence if we get through this. Popova’s masks, print­ed and sold by Society6, illus­trate the won­ders of sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty with “won­drous cen­turies-old astro­nom­i­cal art and nat­ur­al his­to­ry illus­tra­tions.”

These include “trea­sures like the Solar Sys­tem quilt Ella Hard­ing Bak­er spent sev­en years craft­ing… gor­geous 18th-cen­tu­ry illus­tra­tions from the world’s first ency­clo­pe­dia of med­i­c­i­nal plantsaston­ish­ing draw­ings of celes­tial objects and phe­nom­e­na…trail­blaz­ing 18th-cen­tu­ry artist Sarah Stone’s stun­ning illus­tra­tions of exot­ic, endan­gered, and now-extinct ani­mals; some graph­i­cal­ly spec­tac­u­lar depic­tions of how nature works from a 19th-cen­tu­ry French physics text­book; Ernst Haeckel’s heart­break-foment­ed draw­ings of the oth­er­world­ly beau­ty of jel­ly­fish…William Sav­ille Kent’s pio­neer­ing artis­tic-sci­en­tif­ic effort to bring the world’s aware­ness and awe to the crea­tures of the Great Bar­ri­er Reef; and art from the Ger­man marine biol­o­gist Carl Chun’s epoch-mak­ing Cephalo­pod Atlas — the world’s first ency­clo­pe­dia of crea­tures of the deep.”

Society6 is donat­ing a por­tion of its pro­ceeds to World Cen­ter Kitchen, and Popo­va is donat­ing to The Nature Con­ser­van­cy. You can pur­chase your own vin­tage sci­ence illus­tra­tion mask here and see some of these illus­tra­tions in their orig­i­nal con­text at the links fur­ther down.

Anti­dotes to Fear of Death

Some­times as an anti­dote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quench­ing dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pep­per hot and sharp.

Some­times, instead, I stir myself
Into a uni­verse still young,
Still warm as blood:

No out­er space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drift­ing like a bright mist,
And all of us, and every­thing
Already there
But uncon­strained by form.

And some­time it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ances­tral bones:

To walk across the cob­ble fields
Of our dis­card­ed skulls,
Each like a trea­sure, like a chrysalis,
Think­ing: what­ev­er left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Solar Sys­tem Quilt: In 1876, a Teacher Cre­ates a Hand­craft­ed Quilt to Use as a Teach­ing Aid in Her Astron­o­my Class

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

The Phe­nom­e­na of Physics Illus­trat­ed with Psy­che­del­ic Art in an Influ­en­tial 19th-Cen­tu­ry Text­book

The Bril­liant Col­ors of the Great Bar­ri­er Revealed in a His­toric Illus­trat­ed Book from 1893

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

The Ayn Rand Institute Takes a Loan from Paycheck Protection Program: Like Rand Herself, Her Followers Don’t Walk the Talk

ayn-rand-social-security

Image via YouTube, 1959 inter­view with Mike Wal­lace

Final­ly bow­ing to pub­lic pres­sure, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has revealed which com­pa­nies received loans from the Pay­check Pro­tec­tion Pro­gram (PPP) cre­at­ed to sup­port small busi­ness­es dur­ing COVID-19. To no one’s sur­prise, the pub­lished list report­ed­ly includes a host of priv­i­leged enti­ties: the ship­ping busi­ness owned by Mitch McConnel­l’s wife Trans­porta­tion Sec­re­tary Elaine Chao; busi­ness­es asso­ci­at­ed with mem­bers of Con­gress (from both par­ties); the law firm of David Boies; elite pri­vate schools like Sid­well Friends and Saint Ann’s; Grover Norquist’s Anti-Tax Group; the law firm run by Trump’s long­time per­son­al lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz; bil­lion­aire Kanye West’s com­pa­ny, Yeezy; the fine art stu­dio for mil­lion­aire sculp­tor Jeff Koons, a ven­ture that rais­es mon­ey for Trump’s cam­paign and the RNC, etc.

Add to the list the Ayn Rand Insti­tute–an orga­ni­za­tion named after Ayn Rand, the Russ­ian writer who exalt­ed the self-reliant indi­vid­ual and crit­i­cized social wel­fare pro­grams that sup­port the vul­ner­a­ble. As she wrote in The Virtue of Self­ish­ness, “The right to life means that a man has the right to sup­port his life by his own work (on any eco­nom­ic lev­el, as high as his abil­i­ty will car­ry him); it does not mean that oth­ers must pro­vide him with the neces­si­ties of life.” In short, if you can’t make it, you’re on your own.

Rand’s polit­i­cal the­o­ry col­laps­es when it con­fronts every­day real­i­ty. At the end of her own life, Rand, suf­fer­ing from lung can­cer, had to grudg­ing­ly rely on social secu­ri­ty and medicare to make ends meet. Now, reports Reuters, the insti­tute bear­ing her name has request­ed (and appar­ent­ly received) “a Pay­check Pro­tec­tion Pro­gram (PPP) loan of up to $1 mil­lion.” All while show­ing no grat­i­tude to the Amer­i­can tax­pay­er. The Ayn Rand Insti­tute deemed the loan “par­tial resti­tu­tion for gov­ern­ment-inflict­ed loss­es.” (Also see their lat­est jus­ti­fi­ca­tion here.) Some will con­sid­er that spin–a way to jus­ti­fy accept­ing gov­ern­ment largesse.

Watch­ing Ayn Rand talk below, it seems like a prin­ci­pled Ran­di­an would have gone, hat in hand, to a pri­vate char­i­ty instead.

via Lithub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Ayn Rand Col­lect­ed Social Secu­ri­ty & Medicare, After Years of Oppos­ing Ben­e­fit Pro­grams

Christo­pher Hitchens Dis­miss­es the Cult of Ayn Rand: There’s No “Need to Have Essays Advo­cat­ing Self­ish­ness Among Human Beings; It Requires No Rein­force­ment”

The Simp­sons Take on Ayn Rand: See the Show’s Satire of The Foun­tain­head and Objec­tivist Phi­los­o­phy

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Thomas Jefferson’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandson Poses for a Presidential Portrait

We hold these truths to be self-evi­dent: that all men are cre­at­ed equal; that they are endowed by their Cre­ator with cer­tain unalien­able rights; that among these are life, lib­er­ty and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness…  —Thomas Jef­fer­son, 3rd Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca

He was a bril­liant man who preached equal­i­ty, but he didn’t prac­tice it. He owned peo­ple. And now I’m here because of it. —Shan­non LaNier, co-author of Jefferson’s Chil­dren: The Sto­ry of One Amer­i­can Fam­i­ly

Many of the Amer­i­can par­tic­i­pants in pho­tog­ra­ph­er Drew Gard­ner’s ongo­ing Descen­dants project agreed to tem­porar­i­ly alter their usu­al appear­ance to height­en the his­toric resem­blance to their famous ances­tors, adopt­ing Eliz­a­beth Cady Stanton’s lace cap and sausage curls or Fred­er­ick Dou­glass’ swept back mane.

Actor and tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ter Shan­non LaNier sub­mit­ted to an uncom­fort­able, peri­od-appro­pri­ate neck­wrap, tugged into place with the help of some dis­creet­ly placed paper­clips, but skipped the wig that would have brought him into clos­er vis­i­ble align­ment with an 1800 por­trait of his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand­fa­ther, Thomas Jef­fer­son.

“I didn’t want to become Jef­fer­son,” states LaNier, whose great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand­moth­er, Sal­ly Hem­ings, was writ­ten out of the nar­ra­tive for most of our country’s his­to­ry.

An enslaved half-sis­ter of Jefferson’s late wife, Martha, Hem­ings was around six­teen when she bore Jefferson’s first child, as per the mem­oir of her son, Madi­son, from whom LaNier is also direct­ly descend­ed.

She has been por­trayed onscreen by actors Car­men Ejo­go and Thandie New­ton (and Maya Rudolph in an icky Sat­ur­day Night Live skit.)

But there are no pho­tographs or paint­ed por­traits of her, nor any sur­viv­ing let­ters or diary entries. Just two accounts in which she is described as attrac­tive and light-skinned, and some polit­i­cal car­toons that paint an unflat­ter­ing pic­ture.

The mys­tery of her appear­ance might make for an inter­est­ing com­pos­ite por­trait should the Smith­son­ian, who com­mis­sioned Gardner’s series, seek to entice all of LaNier’s female and female-iden­ti­fy­ing cousins from the Hem­ings line to pose.

While LaNier was aware of his con­nec­tion to Jef­fer­son from ear­li­est child­hood, his peers scoffed and his moth­er had to take the mat­ter up with the prin­ci­pal after a teacher told him to sit down and stop lying. As he recalled in an inter­view:

When they didn’t believe me, it became one of those things you stop shar­ing because, you know, peo­ple would make fun of you and then they’d say, “Yeah, and I’m relat­ed to Abra­ham Lin­coln.”

His fam­i­ly pool expand­ed when Jefferson’s great-great-great-great-grand­son, jour­nal­ist Lucian King Truscott IVwhose fifth great-grand­moth­er was Martha Jef­fer­sonissued an open invi­ta­tion to Hem­ings’ descen­dants to be his guests at a 1999 fam­i­ly reunion at Mon­ti­cel­lo.

It would be anoth­er 20 years before the Thomas Jef­fer­son Foun­da­tion and Mon­ti­cel­lo tour guides stopped fram­ing Hem­ings’ inti­mate con­nec­tion to Jef­fer­son as mere tat­tle.

Now vis­i­tors can find an exhib­it ded­i­cat­ed to her life, both online and in the recent­ly reopened house-muse­um.

Truscott laud­ed the move in an essay on Salon, pub­lished the same week that a year­book pho­to of Vir­ginia Gov­er­nor Ralph Northam in black­face pos­ing next to a fig­ure in KKK robes began to cir­cu­late:

Mon­ti­cel­lo is com­mit­ting an act of equal­i­ty by telling the sto­ry of slave life there, and by exten­sion, slave life in Amer­i­ca. When my cousins in the Hem­ings fam­i­ly stand up and proud­ly say, we are descen­dants of Thomas Jef­fer­son, they are com­mit­ting an act of equal­i­ty…. The pho­to­graph you see here is a pic­ture of who we are as Amer­i­cans. One day, a pho­to­graph of two cousins, one black and one white, will not be seen as unusu­al. One day, acts of equal­i­ty will out­weigh acts of racism. Until that day, how­ev­er, Shan­non and I will keep fight­ing for what’s right. And one day, we will win.

Watch a video of Jef­fer­son descen­dant Shan­non Lanier’s ses­sion with pho­tog­ra­ph­er Drew Gard­ner here.

See more pho­tos from Gardner’s Descen­dents project here.

Read his­to­ri­an Annette Gor­don-Reed’s New York Times op-ed on the com­pli­cat­ed Hem­ings-Jef­fer­son con­nec­tion here.

via Petapix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

John Trumbull’s Famous 1818 Paint­ing Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence Vir­tu­al­ly Defaced to Show Which Found­ing Fathers Owned Slaves

Meet “Found­ing Moth­er” Mary Katharine God­dard, First Female Post­mas­ter in the U.S. and Print­er of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence

Hamil­ton Mania Inspires the Library of Con­gress to Put 12,000 Alexan­der Hamil­ton Doc­u­ments Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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