Ancestors & Enemies

Who and how we mourn tells us a particular society's story. Sarah Royalty Pinkelman muses on how history will judge us on our treatment of COVID's death toll. Read on:

By Sarah Royalty Pinkelman

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A modern, brutal graphic—tiny dots of ink cover a rectangle, like a channel that can't transmit a signal. The February 2021 New York Times graphic of a half million U.S. lives lost to COVID-19 needs doubling, wet ink, folded in half in a kindergarten art project. Not oblong, those dots, like rice or the bacillus bacteria. Roun…