Blog / After Us

Virus X and Ending the Forever War

April 14, 2020 - By Jason Oliver Chang

(Action Comics. #363. DC Comics. May 1968.)

In the spring of 1968 Superman contracted “Virus X,” a disease cooked up by Lex Luthor in a prison laboratory. The #363 issue of DC’s Action Comics serial told a four-part story of a viral attack on the hero from planet Krypton. In the comic, the devious Luthor labels Superman as the “Leper from Krypton,” shaming him publicly and striking global fear of a “Virus X” pandemic. Were it not for the penetrating rays of white Kryptonite crystals, brought to him by unexpected allies, the disease might have taken Superman’s life. It nearly did. This Cold War superhero tale drew close parallels with an actual epidemic, in 1957 – the onset of the H2N2 viral infection, then...

The COVID-19 Mirror

April 6, 2020 - By Ljiljana Djukanović

Late mornings in Spain are particularly grim during the COVID-19 confinement. That’s the time of the day when the entire nation listens to the daily broadcast of the COVID-19 press conference. One hour of densely packed updates: new death and infection counts, modeled predictions, new confinement measures, social initiatives. . . Every day is deadlier than the previous one, and every day seems to bring more stringent isolation measures. By April 3^rd, Spain had registered more than 10,000 COVID-19-related deaths and it had become the country with the highest number of infections.

During one of these press conferences, in mid-March, it was announced that the government had just bought 600,000 rapid COVID-19 tests from a Chinese company. These rapid tests were meant...

Dispatches

April 4, 2020 - By Erri De Luca

(Photo: Nicoletta Dosio in Torino, March 30, 2020. La Stampa)

March 31, 2020

My cousin Mario has told me about our Grandmother Emma’s memories of the so-called Spanish flu. Between 1918 and 1920, it killed tens of thousands of people across the world, a world that, at the time, had a total population of roughly two billion. Back then, head counts weren’t so precise or neurotic.

This viral form of influenza left young and old with...

The Consolation of Philosophy

March 30, 2020 - By Gabriele Ferraris

I haven’t left my house since February, but now I’ll have to do it. I have to get to a bank machine. Yes, even in these dark times of COVID-19, we Italians still get fined by mail. I’ll pay up, but you should know that I happen to have a philosopher for a brother. Not some placid guy who takes life philosophically. A real philosopher, the kind that hold debates about world systems and publish philosophical tomes.

To be precise, in a book titled The Tunnel of Tickets, my brother the philosopher tells the story of a minor personal mishap. He tells it in order to explain a philosophical theory that I, the dimwit brother, can...

Corona Virus and the Animal Within Us

March 28, 2020 - By Om Prakash Dwivedi

Modern society, as Byung Chul Han, incisively points out, is a “burnout society,” for it is driven and governed by the unequal structures of capitalism and its deep desire to immunize itself from others—races, cultures, nations—thus making a palpable distinction between the self and the other, the known and the unknown, the native and the alien, so forth and so on.

We live in an age of achievement and progress; the lack of it, therefore, entails panic and depression. The present pandemic crisis of COVID-19 could be a direct result of man’s desire to walk away with deepened pockets. The thing about...