History's "Viral" Lessons We Keep Ignoring

Quinn: [00:00:00] We've spent the last few years learning up close how a crisis like a global pandemic reveals and deepens all of our faults, inequalities, biases, and outright failures of empathy. But here's the kicker, it's not the first time. Of course, plagues and epidemics have always shown us who we really are. And they've left footprints, good and bad, on our institutions and the stories we tell ourselves.

So why do we keep missing the lessons? Every week, thousands of people ask us the most important question in the world, what can I do? So every week I turn around and ask someone who knows what the hell they're talking about, the very same question, someone who already answered it for themselves, someone working on the front lines of the future in global health, in public health and climate change, AI, any of the [00:01:00] tangled crises we face, we find out why they're doing the work they're doing and what we, you and I, can do to support it, join their work, to fund it, to fight for it, to find our own way to the front lines of the future. I'm your host, Quin Emmett, and my guest today is Edna Bonhomme, a historian, author, and public health expert who looks at disease in captivity through her own personal story of near death illness, Haitian migration, and a lifetime of asking why does our world blame instead of heal? Edna is the author of the new book, A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shaped Us From Cholera to COVID-19. If you've ever wondered how pandemics warp our social fabric and what it would take to heal old wounds and stop repeating the same mistakes, stick around.

For questions or feedback, you can email us at questions@importantnotimportant.com. Let's get into it. [00:02:00]

Edna, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Edna Bonhomme: Thank you for having me.

Quinn: Absolutely. Got the book. I've got the digital version, all of the above. Six plagues, not seven. Not yet. We're working on it though. We'll get there. Hopefully not. Thank you so much for joining us.

Where are you today? You said New York?

Edna Bonhomme: So today I am based in New York City. However, normally I live in Berlin, Germany, where I've been based since 2017.

Quinn: That's awesome. It's a great city. It's a great city. That's super fun. What brings you to New York? Is it all of this?

Edna Bonhomme: Yeah, you're correct to say that part of the reason that I’m in New York City as well as the United States for this month is to promote my book, The History of the World in Six Plagues.

So I started off the book launch in Miami, [00:03:00] where I was born, and I arrived to New York where I also lived for a long time. And it's been a homecoming to see friends, family, and intellectual kin and exchange ideas about not just this book, but the many projects that I and other people that I know are working on.

Quinn: That's awesome. It's always fun to share in friends' work. It's always easier to talk about other people's work than our own. But that's awesome. So, we usually ask this sort of two part question to kind of get this thing going. It is funny. Sometimes I say oh these conversations aren't necessarily about your life history. It's really like, why do you do this work and how can people support your work or find their way into it?

What can they learn from it? What they can, what can they do? This and this. But this book has a lot of you in it on purpose. It starts with you. And so, if you've read the book folks, you might already have the answers to this yourselves, but Edna, I wonder if you can talk us through it.

So the two part question is, why do you have to do this [00:04:00] job? So basically of everyone in the world, why you to do this intimate scholarship? And why do you have to do this work? And again that's in there. But you know why do you feel the need to uncover these histories and speak so openly about your own traumas and your family's story and what that means to these six plagues and how we go forward?

Edna Bonhomme: So one of the things I would say is that I am in conversation with literary greats, even if they're alive or dead. In so far that one person who has had a major influence on me ever since I was quite young is Toni Morrison. And she once said that I wrote the first book because I wanted to read it.

I thought that the kind of book with that subject, the most vulnerable, most undescribed, not taken seriously, had never existed seriously in literature, quote represents what I myself feel for the subject that I just wrote about, which is the [00:05:00] history of epidemics and through my lens but also through thinking about the archive literature and so forth, as someone who is had a circuitous path in terms of being trained in biology for undergrad, have a masters in public health, as well as a PhD in history of science, not only do I have the framework for thinking about knowledge and our relationship to science from the perspective of a microorganism and the innovations that we've had, but I also think about how we as human beings interact with each other, how we feel ill, the ways in which public health decisions are made and how that has been done throughout time. And so, when Covid-19 lockdowns emerged about five years ago, I was really curious to get a sense of how individuals in the 18th, 19th and 20th century really work through various forms of quarantine, confinement, captivity.

And specifically, the [00:06:00] anxiety and fear that I saw arising in various social media platforms or amongst friends. I wanted to get a sense of how people could work through that in a collective sense. And so there are bits of myself in the book primarily because some of the authors that I admired the most whether it's like Joan Didion who is an essayist and brilliant writer to even someone like Jia Tolentino, that there is a bit of their lives integrated into this, a narrative so that people can understand why an issue might be important.

Everyone has been sick at some point in their lives. And in many cases, we recover from those illnesses. And I think the goal of the book is to work through how we manage mostly physical, but also the psychological perspective as well.

Quinn: I appreciate that. You know, this whole thing started with a newsletter and few years ago we gave it this subtitle Science for People Who Give a Shit. And, you either see that on the homepage and go, oh, that's for me. Or you're [00:07:00] like, what is this nonsense? But because of Covid and the myriad side effects of climate and so much else poverty, I mean, you name it, food and water.

I mean, climate touches everything, but, there's fortunately, and unfortunately, many more people who give a shit than ever before. And like you said, so many famous writers, famous artists, people who went on to do things in public health or medicine or even policy, have a leg to stand on. In a sense that they didn't just study it in so many different ways like you did but because they have been a part of that in some way, and sometimes they come to approach that work directly or indirectly or in a more generalist perspective. For folks who haven't read your, again, very intimate book, and not just about yourself, but again, like what you see in, like Virginia Wolf, you know, is throughout and that's wonderful. [00:08:00] Paint the scene for us a little bit about your time being hospitalized for typhoid. Your parents' fears, the language barrier you dealt with that was both you know, exclusive and inclusive in some ways. And how that is really again, planted the seeds for you to do this scholarship, to do this work to help us find a better way forward.

Edna Bonhomme: Yeah, so one of the things that I do in the text is to really lay out how epidemics emerge in different historical contexts from cholera to HIV/AIDS to Ebola and so forth. And one particular disease that I focus on and the way that I integrate myself is thinking about a disease that had not been an epidemic at the time that I got it, that is to say typhoid fever, in the United States in the late eighties. But to think about how even though this illness was not an epidemic in the 1980s it had [00:09:00] been quite debilitating and confusing person is part and parcel of what I was trying to lay out for the reader of the book. Given that, one of the things that I specifically think about is the ways in which I, as a young person who was hospitalized, was trying to make sense of typhoid fever, I did not fully understand the disease. Being hospitalized for a specific amount of time also played a role in terms of my fear and anxiety and confusion.

And as you alluded, my parents being migrants also did not fully at times understand the medical system. So the confusion on many levels, by virtue of being a younger person, by virtue of this disease being quite debilitating, hospitalization and linguistic barriers all played a role in the fear and anxiety that emerged at the time.

Nevertheless, one thing that I would say that I tried to lay out [00:10:00] in the book is I also try to really understand the ways in which hospitalization or being in a bed as a concept, the sick bed can itself be a privilege by virtue of one being able to get the care and attention that one needs. Part of the reason that I and many other people who have been treated for typhoid fever in the Global North survive is because of medical innovation.

It's also because of the facilities that are provided. And, you know, one of the things that I ultimately say, not just in this book, but in other writing that I’ve had, is that I hope that as a society, and globally, we can be able to provide everyone with the same type of top quality care, vis-a-vis universal healthcare, Medicare for all, whatever people wanna call it, so that people are able to survive diseases that had at one point caused a massive death.

Quinn: Sure. No, absolutely. Who was it? Was it the [00:11:00] Secretary General of the UN or the head of the World Health Organization? 2022 ish. Something like that. Simple tweet. I'll find it. Basically talking about how the West thought they were more prepared than they were for something like this because they were so focused on high-end medicine instead of public health, which we'd kind of really let our foot off the gas on, but that's all still relative. Like you said, there's still beds to be had in so many places. You know, even in the UK, which has pillaged its public health system in the past 15 years, like it's still leaps and bounds more than other places that were colonized and then left on their own. Tell me a little bit, because again, it really does matter and so many of these conversations, I try to ground again, not just in like your life story, but to try to help listeners who give a shit for whatever reason, find their way into this, or public health or climate investing, like whatever [00:12:00] the thing is, I want them to hear something that makes 'em go, oh shit.

Maybe that is the thing I didn't think about, is my trigger, is my way into whatever this thing is. By hearing such a diversity of stories. So I do wanna ground it a little more in your upbringing, if you can, can you tell me what the four H Club was?

Edna Bonhomme: So during the 1980s there was an HIV/AIDS crisis, which most people are aware of. And part of what was specifically traumatizing for that period as well as difficult is that there was a lot of confusion as to who was most susceptible to getting HIV/AIDs and in many cases the government that is to say the United States, denying or not actually having the bandwidth acknowledge that many people needed assistance that they needed. Or even to say that there are certain vulnerable groups who have the disease, [00:13:00] nevertheless, when it came to thinking about who was most susceptible to getting HIV/AIDs, whether or not that was true or not there was this perception that there are four different types of people who were most likely to get or have HIV/AIDs.

One of those groups being heroin users. The other homosexuals. The third being hemophiliacs, and the fourth was Haitians. Within that context, the fourth group was the only group that was based off of an ethnicity, and that had a lot to do with scapegoating, more than any biological or physiological difference between Haitians and the rest of the world.

And part of the reason for that scapegoating and that stigmatization had more to do with how the US perceived Haitians as a vector of disease, as being people who were licentious or other characteristics that had very little to do [00:14:00] with the multiplicity of lives and habits that Haitians had. So I talk a little bit about that in the book, but I also at, in one of the chapters, rather than focusing on the four H club, I actually turn towards thinking about how people in prison and more specifically in a women's prison, dealt with the HIV/AIDs crisis through peer counseling, mutual aid, and so forth at Bedford Hills in upstate New York. And part of the reason I wanted to do that is to show that the epidemic took on a different life depending on where people were and that it wasn't always a story of trauma, even if it was quite harmful, but that people used their activism, and they used mutual care in order to provide some type of dignity to the most vulnerable. And in the sense that chapter can hopefully serve as a blueprint for how we as a society can be [00:15:00] more caring to each other and provide the structural foundation for a evidence-based public health approach that also is distributing resources and compassion to everyone.

Quinn: It seems obvious, it is not. Thank you for mentioning the chapter about the women's prison. You talk even more broadly and we've talked about it a bit here as well as the way, any sort of, again, coming back to climate or public health, the way prison conditions are a huge, just, you wanna call it vector, threat multiplier, whatever you'd like for any of these conditions, you know, in Texas how there is, no air conditioning of any kind in so many of these places and the way Covid obviously tore through these places. Huge, complex, monstrous problem. You found a way, going from plantation medicine under chattel slavery to these modern forms of confinement in the immigration detention centers. And you use the word captivity instead of [00:16:00] quarantine or isolation. Again, coming back to your own version and how that felt, not understanding why you were in this bed and not understanding it and all this history, what does captivity capture, I guess, about the lived reality of so many of these epidemic responses? The enslaved women, Haitian migrants like your parents, quarantine Ebola villages in Africa in 2014. Like that I guess these more clinical terms, miss?

Edna Bonhomme: Yeah. So I think one of the first things to acknowledge especially given my public health background is that the importance of something such as quarantine, which is a specific term, referring to the restriction of movement of people, goods and materials, mostly with respect to thinking about preventing the spread of disease or pest of any sort. And the quarantine as a modern concept is something that was developed as far as we can know within the Italian [00:17:00] context, during medieval Europe when the Black Death or bubonic plague rained throughout the 13 hundreds. And so to an extent, the quarantine has served both in a public health context with restricting the movement of people through traits so that disease wouldn't spread, but it's also entered into people's, you know, imagination as a metaphor, as a kind of literary device and so forth. And so, although quarantine means so much, depending on who's saying it's, and it could be misunderstood, I thought that it wasn't a term that was enough to describe the various social processes that have happened in the modern era from the time of the Scientific and Industrial Revolution to the present. So, in a sense, captivity, and what that means with respect to confinement or the political dimensions or even how we see ourselves in relation to choosing [00:18:00] our own form of confinement was significant and important for me. And it is because of that, that I also wanted to look at various institutions, which their original intention isn’t necessarily to prevent the spread of disease. Rather, it could be in the case of chattel slavery and the plantation that forced people into a space and force them to do free labor.

In the case of a concentration camp, also, that could be for all kinds of reasons, medical experiments, and dehumanization, and also forced labor.

In the case of any form of imprisonment, take away people's time, their freedom of movement, their dignity even. And perhaps if, you know, people are trying to be as thoughtful as they can be to think about making amends, which I'm not sure prison is the way or the route towards making [00:19:00] amends. All of this is you know, I wanted to be expansive about these various forms of confinement whether it's by choice or through force and how disease really moves through those spaces, or in some cases, especially if one is thinking about having and finding refuge in one's bed because one is sick, perhaps that is a place in which that confinement can give people the ability to fully rest.

And it's in the flu chapter that I really think about the bed and Virginia Wolfs theorization about the bed, both in her essay writing and as well as in her literature and how we can understand ourselves and how the bed can also be a site of inspiration.

Quinn: It's complicated, right? I mean, we've all been, I mean, I certainly didn't have, typhoid as a child. But you know, we've all had that feeling of influenza and if you've had [00:20:00] it, which was one of the frustrating things at the beginning of Covid when people are like, it's just the flu.

It's like, if you've ever had the real flu, it's not great. You know, it does numbers every year. Even with the vaccines. And the bed can feel like a refuge and a place where you need to go through what you need to go through and turn into feeling like captivity. But at the same time, like you said, it's so complex, but it also seems to be so simple because it keeps happening throughout these six plagues that even how infectious disease works and public health works and any viral benefits to isolation and quarantine, it does seem to always end up in a version of captivity. For some folks, and it seems to be the same folks whether because of, you know, your early childhood in Miami and being basically born into the misinformation about Haitian people and how they're a vector for these things to where we are today. I so easily seems [00:21:00] to find its way there.

There was, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the woman who worked on the mRNA vaccines for so long won the Nobel Prize last year, and her book's great about her childhood. And she said one of her earliest realizations when she finally started to learn about viruses sort of very quickly understood that the viruses are not as much the problem as the people.

Edna Bonhomme: Yeah. Well, one thing I would also add too and one particular institution that has had an influence in ensuring that certain people are confined and not just confined with respect to freedom of movement, but also in their ability to be free and develop and so forth, is colonization, which I talk about in the book on my chapter on sleeping sickness and the legacy of Robert Koch. And it really reminds me of a poet and philosopher who wrote the Discourse on Colonialism that a nation that [00:22:00] colonizes or justifies colonization is already a sick nation or civilization. And this matters in so far that Aimé Césaire, as well as one of his collaborators, Franz Fanon, very much looked at colonization and racism as a whole, as a form, as a disease ultimately, and that is also something I'm trying to like, work through in the book, how the political institutions that confine people, that make people sick, in themselves have a moral complexity and morally diseased and how they perpetuate violence and so forth. And I'm not the first or nor will I be the last to make these comparisons, but it's important to note that these institutions should be questioned, especially if they have a new form, whether it's through highly dependent soft power or foreign aid that isn't effective at building sovereignty or in some cases the ways in which some nations have had to [00:23:00] pay for their freedom or were not compensated when enslaved people were taken elsewhere.

And so, part of what I'm also working through is that I hope that people can be more curious about how longstanding political structures of excavation, free labor, settler colonialism or imprisonment, create a situation that make people not just physically ill, but also psychologically distressed.

Quinn: But that's it. It's choices over time. These are all manmade systems that, like you said, make people sick in a number of different ways. And we're very aware that we don't have to continue with the same versions of these systems, whether, like you said, it's concentration camps or whether it's plantation medicine to do just enough that the slaves could continue working or it's redlining, right? Or whatever it might be. These are all manmade. They’re choices we continue to make at local, state, federal, international [00:24:00] levels from colonization to current countries and communities and the way we treat these folks. And it's one thing to say that everyone should have healthcare and have healthcare insurance. And then it's another to say, why do we keep making all of us sick in so many ways, but especially specific groups that are very much trapped within these systems.

And it has been that way. And the debt there is obviously myriad and manifold and continues to come back to itself. So on that note, when we think about moving forward, when you think about the HIV/AIDs activism, you talked a lot about and ACT Up and the local Ebola responses all these grassroots places and people in ways that communities have really, truly against all odds reclaimed their wellness and their health, which again, is like wholesale health on their own terms. [00:25:00] What are some of those that you feel like might be examples we can actually learn from as we go forward? Because you had this great quote and I wrote it down this morning, you said, Mrs. Dalloway explores what it means to be re-triggered by influenza's prospect, and then a little later how a post pandemic life never allows certain people to feel reprieve. And you know, obviously it's just over five years since everyone got locked up for Covid. Bird flu. Bird flu feels like it's right around the corner. We need these lessons, we need the examples, right? We don't want the glossy version. And obviously you don't do that, but we do need them now more than ever because we're just as unprepared as Ed Yong said, COVID exposed the cracks in the sidewalk, and we haven't fixed any of them. So what have you learned through your experience through working on this book and all of your other work that we might be able to build on before we turn the corner here?

Edna Bonhomme: Yeah, so one of the first things I would like to say is, Ed Yong, who is a science journalis[00:26:00] has done such excellent reporting, not just around Covid, but science as a whole. And I think that his work as well as the work of many other science writers has hopefully allowed and encouraged people to be more curious about the natural sciences and natural world.

Whether it is you know, a sensei fly or a black hole and the origins of the universe.

Quinn: Whatever. Whatever it is that gets you in there, I don't care.

Edna Bonhomme: I hope that people can continue to read about science. Nevertheless, I think that one of the things that I hope this book can also offer people the opportunities to think on the one hand about the challenges about global health.

So long as we live in a world where people are moving and they will be and they will continue to do so, mostly because we are interconnected, we have to also bear responsibility to the outbreaks that [00:27:00] happen to individuals, whether they're in Cambodia, Botswana, or Haiti, and so part of the thing that in writing this book that I was also wrestling with is the fact that most of the diseases that people die from are actually non-communicable diseases.

So long-term chronic diseases, cancer, heart disease, and so forth, do play more of a role in the amount of death that is caused and epidemics to an extent represents states of exception because of the acuteness at which they target people.

Nevertheless, non-communicable diseases, the climate crisis, health inequities, economic instability, all impact, shape, whether or not, how long people live and whether or not they survive a specific and so looking at this information I would say that one of the things that has helped people live longer lives and even just more fulfilling lives is when they have [00:28:00] access to primary and preventative healthcare, where their chronic health is addressed. And also the society is designed so that those who have physical disabilities or other disabilities are able to accommodate and move and function.

Unfortunately, there's heaps of inequalities and unevenness as to who has access some of this material. And in sense, my book, by virtue of it being separated on the first half by pre-1945, in an era where most people didn't quite understand what a bacteria or virus was, when antibiotics were not readily available, and we see how that played out with cholera in the first chapter, sleeping sickness in the second chapter, and flu in the third chapter.

I also wanted to see how the manmade crises in the second half of the book by looking at HIV, Ebola, cholera, and also COVID, [00:29:00] I wanted to show how it's not a lack of information or a lack of resources or even medication to address these outbreaks. It's often and has been a lack of will in the contemporary context. And so the thing that I saw in my research over and over again is that when there is investment and when there is a will we are able to overcome a health challenge and one of the main examples or success stories of that is the eradication of smallpox. When the world actually prioritized that disease and said we're gonna have global vaccination campaigns and ensure that people are able to have the care that they need, it was done. If we could do that with smallpox, I would argue we can do that some other communicable diseases. So the most interesting part of the work that I've done is that I do have hope in our ability to [00:30:00] initiate change. But I think that it isn't just gonna happen by wishing it into existence, but rather through collective action.

Quinn: I mean, I love that, and thank you. You have such a, like a Churchill perspective on it, which is look, I'm gonna tell you how things are. It's not great, but we can't lose hope because look at how far we've come. Look at, like you said, we got rid of smallpox. That's crazy. I mean, look at what happened after Jonas Salk with the polio vaccine, right? We have overcome these tremendous things. I mean, so many children used to die before they were five. And now in the west, in the north, it's much smaller. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it's still really not great, but that's a choice we're making. Right? And when you look at who I guess was most likely to die, where was it were the most fatalities from Covid? It was people with, like you said, these non-communicable, pre-existing conditions, so many of which are due to socioeconomic choices we just made to marginalize people through heat and food and breathing [00:31:00] dirty air and shutting off their water and lack of housing and things like that. And again, like it's not, it's very complicated, but it's also not complicated to start to undo those burdens on the one sense, in the foundational sense, all the way to you know, you talked you quoted Mike McGovern. Talking about the human causes begin with the historic underinvestment in the health sector by the three hardest hit countries and their eight donors, right? Lack of support to national health workers, lack of equipment, all these things, messaging, whatever it might be. Again, like we can do a better job with that. And I do really appreciate, again, your focus on we have options. We have hope. And I know that can be hard to wrap folks' head around but we can do that.

So. On that note, what do you see as sort of as we try to point people towards this question of what can I do? What are specific things? Especially right now as, at least in the US, on the federal level it's a bit of a shit show, on the state and local level, but also in Europe. [00:32:00] Like where are you seeing really tangible, measurable things people can do with their voice to show up with their bodies, to volunteer, to get educated. To be heard. What's working? Give us things to do.

Edna Bonhomme: Yeah, so I've been living in Europe and more specifically in Berlin, Germany since 2017. And during that time I have had access and have seen what can happen when a society has universal healthcare available. But not just that, but free childcare, things such as higher unemployment benefits for people when they need it as well as family centers and so forth. And I bring this up when a society uses the tax money that are, you know, that gets distributed for the benefit of people to be able to live better lives.

And when you have surgery and it's free, that creates a dynamic and a situation [00:33:00] whereby people might be able to breathe a bit more and to feel calm and rested and less oppressed I would say.

Quinn: Yeah.

Edna Bonhomme: And that shouldn't just be happening in Europe. I think that can happen on a global scale. The United States should think about having Medicare for all, a universal healthcare single payer system so that there aren't gonna be tens of millions of people without that basic care, and I think once that is in place I would imagine that then people can start to trust on a whole medicine and science a bit more. And beyond that, I would say that we owe it to each other to provide some type of care, whether or not we can afford it. So I would say on a very basic level, I hope that people can demand and make a case by writing to their MP or senator or congress person, sorry, I said MP.

Quinn: No, that’s alright.

Edna Bonhomme: And to their senator or congressperson to indicate [00:34:00] why we should be advocating for Medicare for All.

But beyond that, I would say on a local level, educate ourselves, read books about you know, health and the history of vaccines or the history of science.

Demand that local libraries carry these books. Go to town hall meetings and city council meetings. This is something that's so wonderful within the US context that there's a lot of local power and authority, and perhaps there could be at the local level, some way to say that we want to guarantee universal health for every resident of the city of Dearborn, Michigan, for example.

Beyond that, states have so much, have a lot of rights and authority, maybe demanding some type of universal healthcare program at the level of the state and really seeing politics, not just within the context of a ballot, but also within the context of people being able to show that they have agency over their lives and coming together and organizing [00:35:00] around issues, not just concerning health, but also those regarding education. And also regarding any form of, you know, the distribution of resources that are part of communities, both at the city level, the town level, and then also at the state level. But beyond that, you know, if people can't protest, if they can't go to a city council meeting, hopefully they can sign a petition.

Hopefully they can encourage a loved one to donate to a campaign that is trying to fight for the improvement of everyone's health and so forth. But at this point, I think that exercising some form of collective action, learning from each other and learning to trust and have hope might be the best step towards then envisioning a future that is better than what we have right now.

Quinn: I think that's amazing. You know, on the one hand, like you said, if we want people to trust in these institutions, again, if they're still around tomorrow or since we got on the phone, if we [00:36:00] want them to trust in medicine and medical providers, we have to give them a reason to do so. We have to look at one of my favorite groups, speaking of Haiti, is Partners in Health.

And I'm a big fan of the late Paul Farmer's work. And I had the woman who runs, Partners in Health now on the show last year. You know. The ability to build community health clinics that really serve people, that establish this baseline of wellness.

So, like you said, people can start to trust, they can have agency, they can help each other, they can make plans for the future, for their children. If we can start to do that, then hopefully we can reach a little higher for some of these things. But like you said it's, I always tell people climate change is, you know, the heat you feel on your back, it's the water you drink, it's the air you breathe, you know, on the local and state level is really where you're gonna see the most impact of any action you're gonna take. And it's, you know, who you're gonna connect with somebody out down the street might have a different political perspective than you, but they're breathing the same air whether they believe where it's coming from or what it [00:37:00] might do or not. So I really do appreciate that.

I think it can go a long way. I think that's really where people could feel like, oh shit, look what we did, you know, we were able to do this and there's really no feeling like that no matter what you're activating and organizing for, it really does go a long way. That's really helpful.

Thank you. I appreciate that perspective. Are there any specific groups you're a really a big fan of that are doing work in Europe or the US or wherever it might be that we can point people towards?

Edna Bonhomme: So I wouldn't necessarily be recommending specific groups except to say that I also have praise for groups such as Partners in Health, which has worked in Haiti, Rwanda, and some other countries. Doctors Without Borders as well has done some excellent work globally, and I would also say that it's important to be also helping to support media in this period and independent media. So I love Democracy Now, the Intercept and Jacobin Magazine within the US context. [00:38:00] All of these publications are asking, you know, very important questions and concerns regarding the state of democracy, but also the state of health.

And in the UK, Novara Media and the Guardian are pretty good as well. So I point that out, the media question because that is also a place that is currently going under attack and we hopefully can continue to fund these programs so that they can exist.

Quinn: Right. No, it's stark. We have to paint it that way. And it really does go a long way. I mean, you were paying for the journalism that really sheds light on these things and helps make sure redlining doesn't happen. Four H doesn't happen. Like all these different things.

People understand, you know, the baseline situation and how it works. One last question before I get you outta here. Is that okay? In all your time with an eight month old what is a book that you've read recently that's not this one, this doesn't count. That's, I mean, it can be anything we like to say it's opened your mind to something you hadn't considered before or [00:39:00] changed your thinking. But honestly, like truly half of the guests are like it's just like books I read with my kids and it makes me happy. So those are totally legit too. That's half mine.

Edna Bonhomme: So, recently I have been quite a voracious reader, which I normally am, but I had a little break before the book promotion.

However I picked up the book, The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş it's such a wonderful book. It was published in 2024, and part of what I love about it is that it follows this unnamed protagonist and her experience in an unnamed city in Europe and what it's like to be a migrant, her and her partner, and the ways in which she's trying to find a home or make a home with her husband and the different people that she's forming community with.

It resonated a lot with me, mostly because of her framing of trying to be a creative person and living that diasporic life was quite familiar. And even just like how to be in the world when you're [00:40:00] moving in and out of multiple languages is something that I feel in Berlin. Even, and perhaps the reason she left the protagonist and the city unnamed is because yeah, she wanted of us who feel out of place to kind of connect with the protagonist and the story. So yeah, The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş.

Quinn: Amazing. We'll put that we got a whole little list on Bookshop and listeners love it. So, that's fantastic. I mean, again, I feel like I could dig into this all day. We didn't even really touch on cholera very much. So much going on in there.

We will definitely include some other resources you mentioned here and like you said, some of the fiction and the writers and things like that for people to dive into, but I can't recommend it enough. The reviews, they're fantastic. It really is, it's something else and it's really necessary to look at how we got to where we are and really why and the choices we can start to make going forward, learning from the people that overcame and persevered through a lot of this, especially individuals like yourself. [00:41:00] So, I really appreciate it. I hope we got that in under nap time.

Edna Bonhomme: Yeah, we definitely did. Thank you.

Quinn: I know that ticking clock feeling.