The narrator of Charlotte Wood’s new novel has shed her life to live with nuns. The world intrudes in the form of COVID, a mouse plague and recovered bones, delivered by someone from her past.
A Uighur woman protests before a group of paramilitary police in western China’s Xinjiang region.
Ng Han Guan/AP
China’s Xi Xinping had trialled his COVID lockdown measures on what he callously called the ‘virus’ of the Uighurs, writes Stan Grant. COVID lockdowns are now over, but the trace of tyranny remains.
This whirlwind tour of social history describes how infectious diseases have shaped humanity at every stage. It suggests reducing inequality will give us our best chance of surviving future plagues.
The black rat, or ship rat, was thought to have helped transmit the Black Death.
Shutterstock / Carlos Aranguiz
Nights of Plague is set on a fictional island in the early 20th century. Is it an allegory of empire’s fall; a contemplation on corruption and East-West tension or a reflection on pandemic life?
Tombstones investigated in new research, most from 1338.
P.-G. Borbone/Nature
Churches’ struggles to respond to the plague and constant warfare in the 14th and 15th centuries helped shape the kinds of Christianity in the world today.
In Blood Quantum, Indigenous survivors are immune to a plague that transforms others into zombies.
(Elevation Pictures)
Indigenous stories of survival in fictional post-apocalyptic landscapes draw from actual events and experiences. These stories preserve histories and the possibility of hope.
Anti-Asian attacks killed nine people in 2021, including 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee, seen in a photo held by his daughter Monthanus Ratanapakdee.
AP Photo/Terry Chea
A scholar of ancient Greek literature goes back to the account of Greek historian Thucydides on the spread of plague and finds parallels in the American response to the health crisis today.
The Black Death is believed to have been the most devastating pandemic in Europe’s history. Now paleoecologists and historians have cast doubt on how bad it was.
Science has made a strong case for the year 536 as being one of the worst in human history, a year punctuated by volcanic eruptions, drought, famine and plague - and a year long winter.
Halloween, with its mix of the macabre and the playful, provides a moment to reflect on how closely life and death are interwoven – especially in the COVID era.
Games can help players practice important skills related to civics and public life, like communication, empathy and compassion, critical thinking, and problem-solving.