Like everything else in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, American food has become almost unrecognizable overnight. Grocery stores picked […]
Why We Need to Talk About Death Right Now
I can hear some of you say, “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?” That’s the same question American cartoonist […]
The Deathbed: A New Nursing Clio Series
This past fall, when we began work on a Nursing Clio series about death, we never imagined the world would […]
Pandemic Academic: Mothering from the Home Office
Twelve years ago, Baby #2 fell asleep in her carseat on the way to the hospital for the weekly mother’s […]
The Cruise Ship as Disease Heterotopia
We know the images: cruise ships with sick passengers searching for a place to dock or turned into off-shore quarantine […]
Living in Isolation and Connecting through Reading, 1930–1946
Amid all the dramatic headlines about COVID-19, news stories describe how people now share anniversaries, birthdays, and other occasions with […]
Writing Histories of Intimate Care and Social Distancing in the Age of COVID-19
In hindsight, it was probably a touch of grad school-induced hubris that led me to assert, in an early draft […]
Ordinary Death in a Pandemic
On Tuesday, March 17, 2020, shortly after noon, my mother, Carol Lenoir Price Swedberg, died in home hospice at the […]
Dr. Fauci and My Mom
In these scary times, many of us find comfort in watching Dr. Anthony Fauci on TV. I like seeing Dr. […]
Joking in the Time of Pandemic: The 1889–92 Flu and 2020 COVID-19
As we see with COVID-19, the darkest periods in history expose the best — and worst — of humanity. Some […]
