One particular loss in the present emergency is Georg Simmel’s discussion of the case for cities, in his 1902 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’…it presents crucial arguments against the break-up of urban life that is envisioned by some contemporary Utopians: the case against the 15-minute city needs to be heard… Simmel composed this lecture… Read More »
No English government has tried to regulate the people’s Christmas since 1655 and 1656 – and that did not go well. After the English Civil War, the country was divided into regions administered by Major-Generals – religious zealots who thought Christmas should be a time for sobriety and reflection rather than joy and celebration. Their… Read More »
I have just posted a link to a lengthy video interview with Dr Clemens Heni, a German political scientist, which you can access on YourTube via my video page. If you are interested, there are two other interviews in text available online. These formats make it possible to give a more reasoned account of my… Read More »
Humans have lived with infectious diseases for at least 15,000 years. Many of these are shared with animals. They infect us, we infect them and, from time to time, there is a new crossover, as with Covid-19…. Humanity has a long history of dealing with these things. What history shows us is that the only… Read More »
…policies have been made by people with very narrow life experiences and imposed on others with whom there is ‘no intercourse and no sympathy’…This indifference is as true of our scientific and medical elites as of our politicians and public servants. Although STEM disciplines have traditional been ladders of social mobility, we are seeing the… Read More »
Let us first understand that ‘disease’, ‘illness’ and ‘infection’ are not categories that are given to us by nature. They are human moral judgements about the undesirability of the impact of certain microorganisms on ourselves, and a few favoured plant and animal species that are particularly relevant to us. Most of the sciences that study… Read More »
Somewhere along the line we have lost a sense of proportion about the Covid-19 pandemic. At the beginning, we were rightly concerned that a novel virus, to which human populations had never been exposed, might represent an existential threat to our species. This justified rapid, and often poorly-evidenced, actions to interrupt transmission of the infection.… Read More »
21 May 2020 PANELISTS: 2:00 Samuel Veissière (McGill): Introductory remarks on the ‘infodemic’, the role of the Internet, and pre-existing social pathologies 2:15 Cécile Rousseau (McGill): Symptoms – Virtue – War 2:30 Stefan Ecks (Edinburgh): The importance of social science in pandemic epidemiology 2:45 Robert Dingwall (Nottingham Trent): The three social pandemics: fear, explanation and… Read More »
In the midst of the present chaos, it is easy to forget that the world has had pandemics before and that they have come to an end. Can we learn anything from these experiences that might help us in dealing with Covid-19? Note first that no pandemic has actually wiped out humanity. While this may… Read More »
Going Viral is a podcast developed by Mark Honigsbaum, a journalist and historian to look at issues around infectious disease outbreaks. The current focus is on Covid-19, with a historian’s interest in the longer-term context of the immediate UK government response. Richard Horton has been arguing that rapid action should have followed the publication of… Read More »