Download or read book An All Too Human Virus written by Jean-Luc Nancy and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past, pandemics were considered divine punishment, but we now understand the biological characteristics of viruses and we know they are spread through social interaction. What used to be divine has become human – all too human, as Nietzsche would say. But while the virus dispels the divine, we are discovering that living beings are more complex and harder to define than we had previously imagined, and also that political power is more complex than we may have thought. And this, argues Nancy, helps us to see why the term ‘biopolitics’ fails to grasp the conditions in which we now find ourselves. Life and politics challenge us together. Our scientific knowledge tells us that we are dependent only on our own technical power, but can we rely on technologies when knowledge itself includes uncertainties? If this is the case for technical power, it is much more so for political power, even when it presents itself as guided by objective data. The virus is a magnifying glass that reveals the contradictions, limitations and frailties of the human condition, calling into question as never before our stubborn belief in progress and our hubristic sense of our own indestructibility as a species.
Download or read book All Too Human written by Anne McLaughlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people fear air travel, but text while driving? How were the travesties at the Abu Ghraib prison like a nuclear meltdown? What is the best way to throw a rocket at a robot? These are just a few questions addressed by the field of human factors psychology. These scientists use knowledge of how people think and why they act to improve the design of our world. In All Too Human, Dr. Anne McLaughlin introduces the field with vivid and topical stories that hinge on cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and decision-making. From the COVID-19 pandemic, to abandoned SCUBA divers, conspiracy theories, and the travails of online dating, McLaughlin draws on a century of research into the human mind to explain our past and predict our future.
Download or read book Spillover Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic written by David Quammen and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterpiece of science reporting that tracks the animal origins of emerginghuman diseases.
Download or read book Human All Too Human written by Diana Fuss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of what it means to be human has never before been more difficult and more contested. The human, with a complicated social history that his rarely been examined, remains entrenched in traditional Enlightenment thinking. Human, All Too Human considers how we might radicalize our notion of the human. Can the human be thought outside humanism? Any rethinking of the human places us immediately inside an ever-widening field of contrasting labels: animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, living and dead, organic and mechanistic. These and other boundary confusions at the frontier of the human are the subject of this volume, as each essay takes up one of three disputed border identities: animals, things or children. Human, All Too Human examines how we explain our interest in anthropomorphism and our fascination with species categorizations. Essays explore what we mean by things and how the integrity of the human may already be compromised by them. The nine essays in this volume all attempt to rethink the category of the human, challenging some of our most cherished cultural classifications. By inviting us to place the traditions subject of knowledge in the unsettling position of object, these writers interrogate the boundary distinctions that, until now, have exempted the human from the vigilant analysis it so urgently requires. Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, Cora Kaplan, James Kincaid, Harriet Ritvo, David Willis
Download or read book Virus Thirteen written by Joshua Alan Parry and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An irreverent and contagious thriller from debut author Joshua Alan Parry
Download or read book Pandemic Protagonists written by Yvonne Völkl and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2023-04-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first mandatory lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, citizens worldwide turned to »pandemic fictions« or started to produce their own »Corona Fictions« across different media. These accounts of (previously) experienced or imagined health crises feature a great variety of protagonists and their (re)actions in response to the exceptional circumstances. The contributors to this volume take a closer look at different pandemic protagonists in fictional narratives relating to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as in existing pandemic fictions. Thereby they provide new insights into pandemic narratives from a cultural, literary, and media studies perspective from antiquity to today.
Download or read book The Shapes of Epidemics and Global Disease written by Andrea Patterson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-28 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the multifaceted SHAPES (socio-historic, artistic, political, and ecological significance) of global disease. It challenges conventional views of infection and transmission by associating epidemics with ideologies and their accompanying institutions. It argues that the physical threat of epidemics is irrevocably linked to culture, economic resources, social class, and power. Epidemics involve both the infected and non-infected, affect the local and global, and they expose control and neglect. This book provides a radical collaborative approach, drawing contributors from closely related and vastly distant fields in the search for innovative ways to address human suffering, and to find real solutions that may determine whether people live or die. Such an approach is needed within an increasingly interconnected world where both pathological diseases and health behaviors are infectious. Experts from fifteen diverse disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities present case studies from across the world and time, demonstrating the uniqueness of each disease and epidemic in its place, but also the shared experiences that span human life and death. In order to identify, measure and control epidemics, we must understand epidemics more as long biosocial processes than abrupt events in nature or culture. Such methodology examines the meaning we attach to epidemics, as well as their material reality, and provides a more complete understanding of how epidemics shape and are shaped.
Download or read book Philosophy Biopolitics and the Virus written by Michael Lewis and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every aspect of the pandemic was said to be ‘total,’ absolute, and undiscriminating. Its very name implied as much. The virus was everywhere, and a threat to us all. In Philosophy, Biopolitics, and the Virus: The Elision of an Alternative, Michael Lewis identifies three moments within the pandemic that were conceived in such a monolithic way: (1) ‘The Science,’ which had to be unanimous if it was to assume a sovereign role, and to have us ‘follow’ it; (2) ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions,’ which were regarded as the only possible response, without which death and disease would ‘run riot’; and (3) the one sole remedy that could bring about the promised end of the restrictions, to the exclusion of every other conception of medicine, treatment, and care. In each case of seeming universality, dissent immediately identifies you as a friend of the virus. And yet if all of these cases have been revealing their counterproductivity ever since, what are we to make of the elision of alternatives? Is it part of a more general tendency to thrust the questioning of hegemonic notions to the margins of respectable discourse, inhabited solely by the mad, bad, and dangerous to know?
Download or read book Whole Wide World written by Paul McAuley and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-12-07 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science fiction-roman.
Download or read book Stop That Virus written by words&pictures and published by Words & Pictures. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A large venetian blinds format board book introducing children to the concept of immunology.
Download or read book Plagues and Peoples written by William McNeill and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-10-27 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of disease is the history of humankind: an interpretation of the world as seen through the extraordinary impact—political, demographic, ecological, and psychological—of disease on cultures. "A book of the first importance, a truly revolutionary work." —The New Yorker From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, Plagues and Peoples is "a brilliantly conceptualized and challenging achievement" (Kirkus Reviews). Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter was added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his introduction to this edition. Thought-provoking, well-researched, and compulsively readable, Plagues and Peoples is essential reading—that rare book that is as fascinating as it is scholarly, as intriguing as it is enlightening.
Download or read book Deleuze Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of the Global Pandemic written by Saswat Samay Das and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-18 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vital response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this volume connects the neoliberal underpinnings of the pandemic to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. By positioning the worst outcomes of the COVID-19 crisis in terms of neoliberal normativity, contributors argue that we need to understand the pandemic rhizomatically. Construed as an event that deterritorializes the globe, the crisis of the pandemic contains within it the potential for creating new assemblages, alliances, and solidarities to offset the power of the state in building regimes of exclusion, insulation and control. Deleuzo-Guattarian attention towards non-human life finds new meaning in the context of the virus, and our understanding of what constitutes life and inorganic life. Crisis, capitalism, and revolution are read anew through the pandemic and core Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts help to situate the proliferation of new models of mutual aid, sustainability, and care in the context of anti-capitalist critique.
Download or read book How to Prevent the Next Pandemic written by Bill Gates and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments, businesses, and individuals around the world are thinking about what happens after the COVID-19 pandemic. Can we hope to not only ward off another COVID-like disaster but also eliminate all respiratory diseases, including the flu? Bill Gates, one of our greatest and most effective thinkers and activists, believes the answer is yes. The author of the #1 New York Times best seller How to Avoid a Climate Disaster lays out clearly and convincingly what the world should have learned from COVID-19 and what all of us can do to ward off another catastrophe like it. Relying on the shared knowledge of the world’s foremost experts and on his own experience of combating fatal diseases through the Gates Foundation, Gates first helps us understand the science of infectious diseases. Then he shows us how the nations of the world, working in conjunction with one another and with the private sector, how we can prevent a new pandemic from killing millions of people and devastating the global economy. Here is a clarion call—strong, comprehensive, and of the gravest importance.
Download or read book Daniel Defoe s A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid 19 written by Stuart Sim and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year has taken on a new relevance with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through an exploration of two chronologically distant societies in crisis, this study compares the attitudes, beliefs, and conduct of the public portrayed in the book and those in our own embattled Covid era. There are interesting similarities to note, with equivalents to the Covid-deniers and the anti-vaxxers to be found in Defoe's bleak vision of London in the 1660s as it descends into a state of chaos. JPY offers us some uncomfortable truths about human nature that resonate strongly in our own times, revealing how responding to a pandemic can bring out both the best and the worst in our character as we face up to a world where the old certainties no longer seem to apply. Pandemics expose the fault-lines in ideology, putting the social contract at risk - the question they pose is whether we can continue to rely on our current socio-political set-up or whether it requires a radical rethink. There is a pressing need for more debate on this issue, and this project is designed to make a case for that.
Download or read book Viral written by Matt Ridley and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Chan and Ridley write with an urgency...that inspires gripping depictions of what viruses are, how infectious-disease laboratories work and wonderfully lucid descriptions of bats. . . . They powerfully recount how dangerous pathogens can both leak from a lab and emerge in nature." (New York Times Book Review) Understanding how Covid-19 started is crucial for the future of humankind. Viral is the most incisive and authoritative book about the search for the source of the virus. A new virus descended on the human species in 2019 wreaking unprecedented havoc. Finding out where it came from and how it first jumped into people is an urgent priority, but early expectations that this would prove an easy question to answer have been dashed. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the crucial mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not only unresolved but has deepened. In this uniquely insightful book, a scientist and a writer join forces to try to get to the bottom of how a virus whose closest relations live in bats in subtropical southern China somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometres away in the city of Wuhan. They grapple with the baffling fact that the virus left none of the expected traces that such outbreaks usually create: no infected market animals or wildlife, no chains of early cases in travellers to the city, no smouldering epidemic in a rural area, no rapid adaptation of the virus to its new host—human beings. To try to solve this pressing mystery, Viral delves deep into the events of 2019 leading up to 2021, the details of what went on in animal markets and virology laboratories, the records and data hidden from sight within archived Chinese theses and websites, and the clues that can be coaxed from the very text of the virus’s own genetic code. The result is a gripping detective story that takes the reader deeper and deeper into a metaphorical cave of mystery. One by one the authors explore promising tunnels only to show that they are blind alleys, until, miles beneath the surface, they find themselves tantalisingly close to a shaft that leads to the light.
Download or read book The Virus in the Age of Madness written by Bernard-Henri Lévy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A trenchant look at how the coronavirus reveals the dangerous fault lines of contemporary society With medical mysteries, rising death tolls, and conspiracy theories beamed minute by minute through the vast web universe, the coronavirus pandemic has irrevocably altered societies around the world. In this sharp essay, world-renowned philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy interrogates the many meanings and metaphors we have assigned to the pandemic—and what they tell us about ourselves. Drawing on the philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Lacan and Foucault, Lévy asks uncomfortable questions about reality and mythology: he rejects the idea that the virus is a warning from nature, the inevitable result of global capitalism; he questions the heroic status of doctors, asking us to think critically about the loci of authority and power; he challenges the panicked polarization that dominates online discourse. Lucid, incisive, and always original, Lévy takes a bird’s-eye view of the most consequential historical event of our time and proposes a way to defend human society from threats to our collective future.
Download or read book Project Hail Mary written by Andy Weir and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of The Martian, a lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this “propulsive” (Entertainment Weekly), cinematic thriller full of suspense, humor, and fascinating science—in development as a major motion picture starring Ryan Gosling. HUGO AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST BOOKS: Bill Gates, GatesNotes, New York Public Library, Parade, Newsweek, Polygon, Shelf Awareness, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal • “An epic story of redemption, discovery and cool speculative sci-fi.”—USA Today “If you loved The Martian, you’ll go crazy for Weir’s latest.”—The Washington Post Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he? An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian—while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.
