Everyone on TV was just going through the motions. It felt like watching the death spiral of civilization.

Lab-Leak Theory and the “Asiatic” Form
What is missing is a motive
I could not direct you to the key evidence that exonerates the Wuhan Institute, and it might not exist. But this is also the crucial point. There are too many lacunae in the lab-leak explanation for the theory to stand on its own: proponents must fill the gaps with their own projections and beliefs.

Digital Rocks
How Hollywood killed celluloid
Eventually DCI scrubbed celluloid film almost entirely from the film industry, ushering in the most significant technological shift since the introduction of sound. The digital revolution transformed nearly every aspect of filmmaking for Hollywood and independent filmmakers. This revolution was invisible, and it was designed to be that way. Its success depended on audiences never noticing at all.
February 21, 2022

Every Soul Ever
It’s on the side of good, it’s basic freedoms, this is important stuff
Some people think it’s fake, her eyes are fine and it’s a trick, and some people think her eyes are legit fucked but not because of the vax, and some people think her eyes are fine but the vax could theoretically do that, and basically every mathematical permutation of these possibilities you can think of.
What will the long-term political consequences of the vaccine mandates be?
Vax 2 the Max
October 15, 2021
Emily Bass, Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, and Laura Cremer in conversation
Watch: A virtual discussion of To End a Plague

Primary Sources
That is not how social isolation works, young lady
That dripping nostril was no ordinary toddler snot. That was when you should have known, and stopped working, and stopped drinking from the — write it — water cooler. Fuck. Fuck. When will the wave of absolutely certain regret and terror arrive. Come on already, I can’t wait anymore.
July 1, 2021

In the Penal Colony
Outsourcing Australia’s detention industry
While private companies should not have been given so much power over Victoria’s hotel quarantine, the program itself illuminates the swiftness with which this country reaches for tools of punitive confinement. Initial evacuations of Chinese-Australians from Wuhan in early 2020 were sent to Christmas Island. Hotel quarantine may be a comparatively benign and expedient manifestation of that impulse, but others during the pandemic have not been so.
June 29, 2021
I said I’d see her once there was a vaccine; she said there’s no vaccine for your personality.
Isolation
June 25, 2021

Freeway Ends
Infrastructure, they’re talking about it a lot more
A billboard whose finer print I can’t read says FREEDOM and the next says EMPIRE (an insurance group) and the next says ESCAPE REALITY (an image of a boat). This road leads to Lake Superior, which might as well be an ocean. 35 takes you to the end of America, or the beginning, depending on whom you ask. But there’s an energy to the ends of things. Cars and trucks are driving very fast.
June 11, 2021

Eclipse, 2021
For the first time in its life, the building exists as a piece of architecture
We’d both separately become fascinated with what we called “ephemeral views,” the opening one gets when a building has been demolished, usually preparatory to the erection of something larger and more looming. These rents in the grid exposed wonders: the back gardens and solaria of brownstone residences ordinarily shielded from street view, the rear buttresses and stained-glass nave of a midtown cathedral, old advertisements painted onto brick walls, a pyramidal shadow cast on a windowless blank wall, a sudden deepening of perspective.
Without a dramatic transformation of this industry, what will old age look like for the rest of us? Indigence for all.