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 plants… aston­ish­ing 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

From Ted-Ed comes a video that answers a time­ly ques­tion: How fast can a vac­cine be made?

They write: “When a new pathogen emerges, our bod­ies and health­care sys­tems are left vul­ner­a­ble. And when this pathogen caus­es the out­break of a pan­dem­ic, there’s an urgent need for a vac­cine to cre­ate wide­spread immu­ni­ty with min­i­mal loss of life. So how quick­ly can we devel­op vac­cines when we need them most? Dan Kwartler describes the three phas­es of vac­cine devel­op­ment.” Explorato­ry research, clin­i­cal test­ing, and man­u­fac­tur­ing.

When you’re done, you can watch their relat­ed video: When is a pan­dem­ic over?

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