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Digested week: Don’t worry about the plague, go and read some Anne Carson | Emma Brockes
The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but at least now I get to say I know a Nobel prize winner
“Anyone worried about pneumonic plague?” This is a friend – a medic – texting me after reading reports at the weekend of the 28-year-old Russian woman who died while working at a “plague research lab” in Siberia. Relying on details from the famously open Russian state guaranteed the presence of a certain dark subtext to the tantalisingly short news item. Namely: lab-grown disease cultivated for reasons unknown and with a 100% mortality rate escapes Russian facility into general population, eight hours’ flying time from London. In other words, we’re all going to die.
