Essays

Long Covid Isn’t as Unique as We Thought—The nagging symptoms long-haulers experience reveal a frustrating blind spot in medicine, by Julia Belluz, reveals lessons for medicine and philosophy of medicine, March 11, 2021

V is for Veracity, by Jenny Reardon, reveals the risks of embracing war metaphors in responding to COVID-19, June 4, 2020

Cleanliness and good hygiene are vested with multiple meanings in this time of pandemic: some focus on caring for others; some are used to label and pressure others as sources of contagion. In addition to analyzing these meanings, Clean in Times of Covid-19: on Hygiene and Pollution addresses the impact on our environment of our ways of being clean to be safe from COVID-19, May 3, 2020

What Our Contagion Fables are Really About, by historian Jill Lapore, The New Yorker, March 23, 2020

Pandemics from Homer to Stephen King: what we can learn from literary history by Chelsea Haith for The Conversation, March 16, 2020

On writing the Great COVID-19 Novel—two essays, both humorous and insightful:

• Someday, We’ll Look Back on All of This and Write a Novel, by Sloane Crosley
• One Pandemic. Thousands of Ledes.—Bill Grueskin invited readers to write the opening line to The Great COVID-19 novel, a version of the annual “It was a dark and stormy night” contest (the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest). Some of the 23,000 responses he received are published in this essay, capturing poignant, frightening, funny, and cynical responses to the pandemic.

Writing the Virus, edited by Andrea Scrima and David Dario Winner, gathers reflections by 31 writers who were invited by the literary journal StatORec to reflect on the pandemic.