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“I Can’t Breathe, 2020: The Arts and Sciences of Oxygen” proposes a literary criticism responsive to the existential crises of our time, working at the intersection of the linguistic, the physiological, and the atmospheric. Bringing together disciplines usually kept apart, this crisis-responsive genre remaps the input networks of literature, highlighting human agency on opposing ends of the spectrum. Both senses of the anthropogenic are at work here. Human causation is harm-mitigating as well as harm-bearing. Native American literature and pandemic responses provide a compelling archive for this approach. Often discussed only in terms of harm, this body of evidence in fact also shows harm partly alleviated, suggesting that reparative agency is possible, and that diversifying our investigative lens might be one way to begin. Joy Harjo—poet, musician, and former premed major—is a salient test case. “For Alva Benson” and “Ah, Ah,” like her blog posts, and like her saxophone playing, dwell on the respiratory chemistry of the human body as our precarious common ground. This chemistry integrates the arts and sciences of oxygen as physiological need, survival baseline, and expressive medium, speaking to the burden of the past, and holding out the perils and promise of the future.

Is there room for weaklings in Darwin's theory of evolution? The “survival of the fittest”–that muscular phrase taken from Herbert Spencer–would seem to suggest not. A more nuanced and counterintuitive picture emerges, however, when fitness is remapped: as a form of mutuality between the human and the nonhuman, rather than an exclusively human attribute vested in a single individual. I explore that possibility in the contemporary novel, a genre evolving steadily away from its Victorian antecedent, and circling back to the epic to reclaim an elemental realism, alert to the reparative as well as destructive forces of the nonhuman world. In Barbara King-solver's The Poisonwood Bible and Richard Powers's The Overstory, these nonhuman forces turn the novel into a shelter for disabled characters, granting them a testing ground and a future all the more vital for being uncertain.

Dimock reflects on languages in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic On December 30, 2019, before the World Health Organization (WHO) issued warnings about the coronavirus outbreak that would be known as COVID-19, a Canadian start-up, BlueDot, noticed a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan and flagged it BlueDot doesn't just accept official statistics Kamran Khan, its founder and CEO said that they know that governments may not always be relied upon to provide information in a timely fashion Instead, a machine-learning algorithm using natural language processing combs through a vast database every day, looking for syndromes of over 150 diseases in sixty-five languages Local news stories, medical bulletins, even livestock and animal disease data are all on the algorithm's reading lists When an outbreak is identified, its location is linked to global air-travel data to pinpoint other cities at risk