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"It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic" by Jack LoweryIn the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic. Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury’s art and activism from iconic images like the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis.
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Booker Prize–winning author Roddy Doyle’s latest is Life Without Children. The book is a warm and witty portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heartrending short stories.Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief. Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone.
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Jodi Picoult is the author of twenty-five internationally bestselling novels. Her latest, Wish You Were Here, begins in New York City, March 2020 as young art professional Diana O’Toole is about to embark on a trip to the Galapagos with her surgical resident boyfriend-soon-to-be-fiancé. But then a virus that felt worlds away appears in the city.
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Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently “The Book of Aron” and five story collections, including “Like You'd Understand,…
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Although the coronavirus pandemic subsided in the U.S. over the last several weeks, the rapid spread of so-called “breakthrough cases” involving the Delta…
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Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and New Yorker staff writer whose new book, “The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid,” is an…
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The acclaimed Donmar Warehouse production “Blindness” is now being presented at the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square in New York City through July 25.…
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Bestselling author Michael Lewis’s new book, “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story,” is a non-fiction thriller that pits a band of medical visionaries…
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Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. Pandemics, earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises, and wars are not normally distributed; there is…
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Beginning tomorrow, PBS will premiere the first of a four-part series, co-hosted by Steven Johnson titled Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer.…