The Ripple Effects of a Pandemic
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2020
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
For most of us, the speed and intensity of the coronavirus pandemic has come as a shock. But not for Lawrence Wright. A staff writer and the author of nonfiction books about Scientology and Al Qaeda, Wright recently wrote a novel—yet to be published—called “The End of October,” about the spread of a novel virus that eerily resembles the outbreak of COVID-19. Wright looked to illnesses of the past to try to understand their enduring consequences, and he mapped those ripple effects onto our contemporary circumstances. “The End of October” is a work of fiction and firmly in the thriller genre, but what he imagined in it turns out to be eerily close to what we are experiencing now. “I read the paper and I feel like I’m reading another chapter of my own book,” he tells David Remnick.
Lawrence Wright’s “The End of October” is due out in April.
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| 1:11.5 | This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick. |
| 1:16.1 | Now, for most of us, the speed and intensity of the pandemic came as an incredible shock, |
| 1:21.8 | but maybe not for Lawrence Wright. Larry is a terrific journalist, the author of major books about Al Qaeda and the Church of |
| 1:29.8 | Scientology, among others. And he's been a staff writer since 1992. Larry has been imagining a |
| 1:35.8 | virus like COVID-19, teasing out its consequences for a book that he's called The End of |
| 1:41.6 | October. Now, this book is not journalism. The end of October |
| 1:45.1 | is fiction, very much a thriller, but the circumstances certainly ring familiar. |
| 1:52.7 | Larry, you're talking to me from a studio in Austin, Texas, where you've lived for a long time, |
| 1:57.3 | and Austin is the home of South by Southwest, this huge music and film and technology |
| 2:03.9 | festival, and was one of the first big events to be canceled. Tell me about the mood in Austin where |
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