Living under Quarantine: Links
Links bind us. And now, as so many of the things that normally bind us—workplaces, schools, places of worship—are being transported online, “linking” to something can be a genuine reprieve and a gesture of connectedness. I have assembled here a modest set of hyperlinks that may offer you enjoyment, edification, or simply a way to while away some idle hours.
If you happen to have most of your books locked in your closed down office (dammit!) or if you are just looking for something new to read, there are more free resources now than ever. The Internet Archive has begun the National Emergency Library, which makes 4 million e-books available for free checkout to all. The Digital Public Library of America has well-organized materials for history lessons for parents who unexpectedly find themselves homeschooling. Lessons on subjects as diverse as the raid on Harper’s Ferry or the birth of the comic book have both primary text resources and guided lessons.
Shakespeare is always topical, or at least he can be forced to be so, as when The Guardian reminds us that King Lear was (maybe) written under quarantine conditions. But there can be great solace in great art. The Folger Shakespeare Library has made available their recording of Aaron Posner’s 2008 staging of Macbeth for free online until July, along with full cast audio recordings of seven Shakespeare plays. And one might also follow Sir Patrick Stewart’s Twitter, where he is reading one of Shakespeare’s sonnets each day (though he skipped the fifth because it was “too hard”).
Want to be somewhere else? Google Art Project has long been a hidden gem, offering free ultra-high resolution photographs of some of the world’s most prized art collections. Tour the Uffizi in Florence or pop into Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors to see the equipment that Google used to create these virtual tours.
Zooniverse is a crowdsourcing website for a variety of very different ongoing research projects. You can help digitize anti-slavery manuscripts, find rural homes in satellite images over sub-Saharan Africa for an electrification project, or watch cameras of birds’ nesting behaviors. There are many projects, some of which are even simple enough for kids to participate in.
McMansion Hell is Kate Wagner’s award-winning and very funny architectural blog. While you can easily sink a few hours here just laughing at her biting wit as she takes down the pretensions of the McMansions that dot the American cul-de-sac landscape, you might also learn quite a bit about architectural history and theory. Most recently, she is doing a series on the rise of Brutalism.
Image of the popular browser game Agar.io
If you are already someone who plays video games, you may be faring slightly better with long stretches of unexpected time. If you are a complete n00b, there are a variety of browser-based games that, while posing a challenge, are friendly to non-gamers. Town of Salem is an online multiplayer game, similar to the popular children’s game mafia. But the online version requires skill, cunning, and some patience as you try to discover who in colonial New England is a normal townsperson and who is in the—Puritan mafia? Less commitment is the very popular Agar.io, a game where you try to survive as a tiny bacterium while larger organisms attempt to swallow you. The more you swallow, the slower you get, but the harder you are to swallow! Want to fire up your brain and improve your chess chops? Lichess is an excellent, free, and open-source chess site that allows you to play short online blitz games, study openings, solve tactical puzzles, or learn the basics of the game. And finally, if you want to see what the coronavirus really looks like, try downloading the crowdsourced protein-folding game, Fold It. It’s possible that your solutions to the puzzle may help researchers looking for new treatments.
Finally, if all you want to do is be outside for a bit but you are unable to do more than isolated personal exercise, or, if in Paris, walk your chien for the septième time today, then check out the variety of live wildlife feeds from all over the world at Explore.org. There is a beauty there that may sometimes elude our senses.
