Pandemic | The Monthly

Pandemic

Influenza

Known Unknowns

By Malcolm Knox

Although it is an everyday virus, there is something about influenza that inspires awe. This microscopic hard-shelled parcel of genetic matter lives in aquatic birds, which have been flying it around in first-class comfort for generations. It is coughed into the air – and across the species barrier – and lodges in the lungs of mammals such as pigs and humans, where it becomes the common f

John Waters

Divine Intervention

By Peter Conrad

Australia’s girdling oceans used to serve as a prophylactic, our defence against the infectious depravity of the northern hemisphere. The Customs Act 1901 fiercely preserved our innocence; during my adolescence in the late 1960s I made an impatient inventory of the prohibited books and films I intended to catch up with as soon as I got overseas. Nowadays culture spreads through the ether li

Recent Books about the Future

Seers

By Bill Bowtell

Chris Patten, Jacques Attali and George Friedman are past masters of the politics of prediction. They are wily, skilful and powerful servants and shapers of state and international policy. They have stood at the very apex of power in their respective countries - Britain, France and the United States - and have influenced the course of events on behalf of the wider Western alliance as well. They are not, therefore, in any sense disintere