Digested week: Don’t worry about the plague, go and read some Anne Carson

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.

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