Blog / After Us

What Do We Have to Lose?

March 25, 2020 - By Valery Glod-Gransewicz

Painting: “I am Joy” by Omileye Achikeobi-Lewis. Part of the Peace Am I series.

Three days into my own family’s version of self-quarantining, I began seeing headlines claiming the drug hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) might lessen the effects and viral load of COVID-19. Plaquenil is the most commonly prescribed drug for Lupus patients. Lupus is a chronic, auto-immune disease with the potential to impact multiple organ systems. While I haven’t personally required Plaquenil to keep my own Lupus under control since 2008, I’m more...

Predictions for Post-COVID-19 World

March 15, 2020 - By Tabish Khair

Increased xenophobia, greater marginalisation of workers

I am interested in examining not what has been done or not done to tackle the Covid-19 threat, but what its consequences might be – apart from the immediate one, which is the tragic loss of lives and livelihoods.

One of the long-term consequences of the pandemic was visible right from the start when strongly racist remarks were made about the Chinese on social media, and in some cases Chinese people were beaten up or threatened. The fact that this particular outbreak occurred in China was used to sneer at Chinese cultural and eating habits, despite the fact that the virus was passed on from live animals to humans. The only way to avoid a virus is to stay away from all animals (including humans...

My Anthropocene

February 21, 2020 - By Giacomo Sartori, Translated by Frederika Randall

(Editor’s note: With this post from the Italian novelist Giacomo Sartori, the Massachusetts Review inaugurates “After Us,” a new blog series that will focus on the climate crisis and the ongoing, devastating toll wrought on our planet and all of its creatures by the human species.)

It was beginning to rain in Genoa, just as I left the bookfair where I’d come to take part in a roundtable about literature and the Anthropocene. In the following days Genoa was deluged with rain and floods that brought the city to a standstill, floods caused by heavy construction on the hills above that has shorn the mountainside of its natural defenses so that every few years the rivers swell up and dump their muddy load downstream.

We can certainly...