Q _ You immersed yourself in the study of plagues during a pandemic. What was that like?
_ Actually, I didn’t set out to write this book. I had written a chapter on whether COVID-19 would increase the likelihood of future political violence for an academic book in Europe. In the process, I became fascinated by the legacies of pandemics. Since COVID-19 was keeping me off airplanes, I traveled back and forth in time through books and research reports, exploring post-pandemic landscapes, comparing them to what was happening here and now. Like any explorer,
