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June 24, 2020
Drug Money | The Race for a Vaccine
Noah Kulwin
Speaking at a biotechnology conference on June 9 via livestream, Anthony Fauci told the virtually assembled audience that the novel coronavirus pandemic had turned out to be his worst nightmare. Among the few bright spots, America’s best-known immunologist observed, was the pharmaceutical industry’s commitment to developing a vaccine: “The industry is not stupid.” After all, Fauci reasoned, “there’s going to be more than one winner in the vaccine field because...
June 24, 2020
“More Precisely Revolution” | Notes from the Protests Worldwide
Deshawn McKinney, Henry Shah, Kaamya Varagur, Lily Bou, Shaj Mohan, Zuneera Shah
After a season of lockdowns and social distancing, people are taking to the streets. The U.S. has seen large-scale and widespread uprisings after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the latest in a series of Black victims of police brutality. Solidarity protests calling for racial justice have spread across the world. Meanwhile, uprisings continue in Hong Kong, Pakistan, India, and elsewhere. In an ongoing series, The Drift is...
June 24, 2020
The Cure and the Disease | Social Darwinism from AIDS to Covid-19
Erik Baker
It was not how anyone expected Bill Hamilton to die. In 1999, Hamilton was celebrating his fifteenth year as a research professor in evolutionary biology at Oxford, where he had cultivated a reputation for unconventional, mathematically sophisticated theorizing. He had recently received both the Crafoord Prize and the Kyoto Prize, arguably the two most prestigious awards for scientists in fields not eligible for the Nobel. His wife had moved out,...
June 24, 2020
“A Worldwide Mutual Pact” | An Interview with Wendy Brown
The Drift
There are limits to the utility of theory in a crisis. So far, Covid-19 has not exactly occasioned a mass embrace of the mountains of leftist ideas—both theoretical and practical—that have been prepared for such a moment; instead, we’ve witnessed a hardening of the preexisting order, in which the old injustices have only become more grotesque. Meanwhile, the intellectual class has tweeted, blogged, and otherwise emerged from the proverbial woodwork...
June 24, 2020
Nature’s Revenge Porn | Animal Documentaries at the End of the Earth
Rebecca Panovka
Google “nature’s revenge,” and the internet free-associates straight to Covid-19. The first several search results read like a back-and-forth debate: coronavirus does, or else it doesn’t, represent an ecological spin on divine retribution. The pope has an opinion on the matter, as does the lead guitarist from Korn. Also in the fray is an organization called The Turtle Conservancy, which weighed in decisively with a March 26 post titled “Mother...
June 24, 2020
What’s Going On | The Vexed History of “Night Life” in The New Yorker
Phillip Golub
Museums shuttered, Broadway gone dark, orchestras furloughed—now that nothing remotely cultural is going on about town, The New Yorker’s “Goings On” section seems like a relic of a distant past. In fact, it already was one. A feature that has run continuously since the magazine’s first issue, “Goings On” was last updated in 2016, when editor David Remnick announced a parade of new online features: a revolving display of articles,...
June 24, 2020
Party Politics | The Last Days of Queer Club Culture
Simon Wu
Qipaos over jockstraps, Sailor Moon with a necktie, gym socks. The look is a little self-Orientalizing, but fun, like if Pearl River Mart made a clubwear line. Sookie Sterling, an artist and drag queen, dons a Chinese headdress. Later, on Instagram, the image is captioned “Gung Hei Fat Choy,” with five red emojis. There are other, less classifiable looks, too: a sexy-biker-turned-ballerina talks to an orange, bedazzled cowboy in silk...
June 24, 2020
The Lotus on Marina Bay Speaks | Poetry
Zoë Hitzig
I am master of the evening lightshow. Come 8 o’clock, sun gone, The people belong to me & my electric arsenal. They quit their shiny surfaces & sharp objects. Take off their pointing typing fingers, abandon their minute-made stances until tomorrow. For now it is time to watch lightforms dance color across glass & marinawater. Watch them gather, nod to greet each other, newly deferent. Here the black-iris bulb blinks...
June 24, 2020
Grosseto | Fiction
Moira McCavana
Unwanted items used to migrate to the dining room of my uncle Enzo’s apartment as though of their own accord. I never once saw Enzo or his wife Gabriella go in there. And so it became a shadow room whose items, in sum, cobbled together a crude portrait of our lives. On our side, however, the absences of those objects continued to exist: in my mind there remained a cavity...
June 24, 2020
Chaos, Aggregated | A Pandemic Novelist Takes to Twitter
Madeline Conway
Like many non-essential workers whose screen times have increased in tandem with boredom and generalized anxiety, Rachel Graham of San Diego starts her day by opening Twitter in search of an update on the coronavirus outbreak. First, she checks her notifications—mostly alerts to tweets from journalists covering the disease and virologists and epidemiologists studying its spread. She looks through her direct messages, where like-minded EID (emerging infectious disease) junkies send...
