A scientist was somewhere in the South Atlantic when a friend texted him about an outbreak on a cruise: “Please tell me you’re not on this ship.” Plus:

• The future of college could look like OnlyFans
• Writing the Trump years into history
• Why the “art of the ceasefire” is failing

Akash Kapur
A writer who spoke to an M.V. Hondius passenger

It is a measure of how far removed I feel from COVID that, a few weeks ago, when stories started appearing about a hantavirus outbreak on a polar cruise ship, I just skimmed past the headlines. There was war in the Middle East to worry about, A.I. seemed in equal measure fascinating and terrifying, and I had summer plans to make—like arranging air travel, and perhaps even booking an Alaskan cruise.

But during the past week, as I’ve spoken repeatedly with a passenger who had been on that ship, the M.V. Hondius, I’ve been feeling less sanguine. It’s hard to know how much of my unease is rooted in reality, and how much is muscle memory. I don’t want to be alarmist. The World Health Organization “assesses the public health risk as low,” and the rare Andes strain of hantavirus that has killed three people and sickened several others appears to be far less easily transmitted than COVID. Still, as I’ve immersed myself ever deeper in the drama aboard the Hondius—passengers whose conditions deteriorated within twenty-four hours, people dying in isolation far from home, health officials in hazmat suits—I’ve felt a familiar dread, that sensation from the COVID era of living in the maws of history.

“People get swept up in a Bolshevik revolution and you are no longer an individual in control,” the passenger, himself a scientist, told me, speaking of his recent experience. “I’m just flotsam.”

What kept him and his fellow-passengers going, through roughly forty days of illness, death, and enforced solitude on the Atlantic Ocean? The most hopeful parts of our conversations struck another COVID-era note, though a far happier one. The scientist told me repeatedly of escaping to the ship’s deck and surrounding himself with the openness of the ocean, the beauty of volcanic islands, the whales, the dolphins, the flying fish, and, above all, the seabirds. I reached out to him to better understand a deadly virus, but I ended up learning so much about endangered sub-Antarctic bird species. As you read the article, you may experience the same mix of emotions I did. Nature is capricious, often cruel. I hope you’ll also feel wonder and awe—and perhaps a certain measure of solace.

How do you bring an American-history textbook up to date when the country’s past has become a political battleground? As Jill Lepore discovered, it isn’t easy. Read the story »

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