Chronic Symptoms

It’s impossible to imagine that humanity would suffer a global pandemic and come out unchanged. And we certainly didn’t. “America is a harsher place, more self-interested and nakedly transactional. We barely trust one another and are less sure that we owe our fellow Americans anything — let alone the rest of the world. The ascendant right is junking our institutions, and liberals have grown skeptical of them, too, though we can’t agree about how exactly they failed us. A growing health libertarianism insists on bodily autonomy, out of anger about pandemic mitigation and faith that personal behavior can ward off infection and death. And the greatest social and technological experiment of our time, artificial intelligence, promises a kind of exit from the realm of human flesh and microbes into one built by code. We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us.” Five years after the first headlines caught our attention, David Wallace-Wells reflects in the NYT (Gift Article): How Covid Remade America. (Please put on your rubber gloves and wipe down this article with disinfectant before reading.)