Language Is a Virus, and People Could Die
The COVID pandemic seemed to accelerate the spread of new viral media, but viruses mutate, pop culture replicates, and everything’s a cover song.
covid-19
Louise Erdrich’s ‘The Sentence’ Is a Ghost Story and Epitaph for the Covid Shutdown
Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence becomes a way to acknowledge the surrealism that has always pulsated just beneath the surface of American life.
The Making of Our “Viral Underclass”
The Viral Underclass digs into capitalism, Big Pharma, “Gay-Inc.” and other factors surrounding Covid-19 and HIV that force a greater toll on the already marginalized.
Guitarist Nate Mercereau Transcends in Finding Solace in Isolation
The pandemic has yielded a number of lockdown musical creations, but guitarist Nate Mercereau captures the sadness and quiet joy better than most.
Did the Pandemic Shutdown Change Hollywood for Good?
The entertainment industry had to change when COVID-19 closed almost all its operations. Media scholar Kate Fortmueller considers the lasting effect.
‘Chrono Trigger’ and Coping with Pandemic Trauma through Video Games
Coping with the COVID-19 shutdown via a video game, where I have control over the apocalyptic outcome, was what I needed. Chrono Trigger delivered.
On Peter Gabriel’s “I Have the Touch” in a Time of Forbidden Touch
Peter Gabriel’s “I Have the Touch” perfectly captures the agonizing isolation that so many of us have been experiencing throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Culture/Economics/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Love in the Time of Coronavirus/SAVE/ IGNORE: popular
COVID-19 and Our Purgatory of Consumerism
Our pandemic quarantine has become the sublime enactment of Baudrillard's theory of consumption – that modern consumption, with its myth of individual liberty and choice, is in fact 'de-socialising'.
How Musicians Are Surviving the Pandemic — and the Music Industry
Nine US-based musicians discuss surviving and adapting to the changing music industry in our extraordinarily challenging time of pandemic shutdown.
Is Trump’s COVID-19 Diagnosis Ironic?
Just hours before tweeting that he was COVID positive, Trump recorded a speech wherein he opined that "The end of the pandemic is in sight."
For Don DeLillo, ‘The Silence’ Is Deafening
In Don DeLillo’s The Silence, it is much like our post-pandemic life – everything changed but nothing happened. Are we listening?
The Story of Life in 10 1/2 Species (excerpt)
If an alien visitor were to collect ten souvenir life forms to represent life on earth, which would they be? This excerpt of Marianne Taylor's The Story of Life in 10 and a Half Species explores in text and photos the tiny but powerful earthling, the virus.