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A Monthly Culture Matrix For the Cosmopolitan Traveler

Radio Influenza


Wellcome Collection / Online

In 2018, rather presciently, Jordan Baseman—an artist with expertise in archivally-sourced, experimental portraiture—constructed a timeline of the Spanish Influenza using a series of daily broadcasts from British newspapers. “I wanted it to sound like a broadcast from a dystopian future,” Baseman recently explained to NPR. With the advent of the coronavirus, the parallels between then and now are pointed, and, according to Baseman, both disheartening and very human. “I’m living in this odd rerun of the project,” he says. —E.C.

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