Topic · across the network

Epidemics

Contagion at scale, and the politics it exposes.

13: briefs
6: subjects
10:54: average
142 min: in total

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books.briefs Books

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12:00

The Plague

Albert Camus · 1947

Camus's 1947 novel of collective crisis. It's not really about a plague: it's an essay on solidarity, responsibility, and what keeps you acting when survival makes sense but meaning does not.

film.briefs Film

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13:00

Lars von Trier’s 1987 metafictional horror Epidemic follows two screenwriters drafting a script about a plague while a real outbreak begins to mirror their fiction. Shot on 16mm, structured across five days, and starring von Trier and Niels Vørsel as themselves, it treats narrative as a vector and authorship as contagion — the second instalment of the Europa trilogy.

history.briefs History

All 2 in history →

10:20

Spanish flu

1918–1920

The 1918–1920 flu pandemic was caused by H1N1. Earliest documented cases were in Haskell County, Kansas, in March 1918. It infected ~500 million people. Death estimates range from 17 million to 100 million. Wartime censorship created the false impression that Spain was the origin. Its unusually high mortality among young adults likely resulted from immune overreaction compounded by war-induced malnourishment and overcrowding. Geographic origin remains indeterminate.