Kyle Harper On Plagues And Covid

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2022

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kyle Harper is an historian who focuses on how humanity has shaped nature, and vice versa. He’s a Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma and the author of several books, including The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, and his latest, Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. His mastery of the science is only matched by the ease of his prose. If I were to nominate a book of the year, it would be this one (alongside Jamie Kirchick’s Secret City).

For two clips of our convo — on the zombie bloodsucking fleas of the Black Death, and on how Covid doomed the careers of Trump and Boris — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: the bubonic plague’s role in the fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death, flagellants and anti-Semitism, the plague in 17th century London, the Spanish flu, the AIDS crisis, Thucydides, Camus’ La Peste, “The Roses of Eyam,” monkeypox, lab leak, and the uprising over China’s ghastly Covid policy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you.
0:03.0	I'm going to Hi there, dishheads.
0:30.3	Me again.
0:31.9	I apologize for, well, I don't apologize, really, for taking Thanksgiving off.
0:36.6	I've had a rough had a rough 10 days.
0:39.7	I took the Thanksgiving holiday to go home to England and to finally do the memorial for my father who died just as COVID began of a horrible accident.
0:53.8	And also to check in with my mom, who is declining pretty fast, unfortunately.
0:59.3	And it was a tough time.
1:01.1	And then I also have managed to get some bug on the way in London back to the US.
1:08.0	And I hope I make it through the next 48 hours.
1:12.8	Who better to talk about this, my general susceptibility to all sorts of viruses,
1:19.4	than our guest today, who I've really admired for a very long time.
1:23.9	His name is Kyle Harper.
1:25.9	He's a historian who focuses on how humanity has shaped nature
1:29.3	and vice versa. He's a professor of classics and letters of the University of Oklahoma
1:35.2	and the author of several books, including the fate of Rome, climate disease and the end of an
1:41.1	empire, and his latest plagues upon the earth, disease and the
1:46.5	course of human history. Now, just a couple of words about those two books. The first was
1:51.7	incredibly helpful to me in understanding when I wrote an essay about plagues a couple of years
1:56.9	ago for New York Magazine. I think it's easily the most interesting contribution to understanding
2:03.8	how Rome managed to lose its grip than anything I've read since Edward Gibbon. And I know that's
2:11.0	high praise, but he deserves it. And if you have not read Plagues Upon the Earth, Disease in the
	...

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