Hiroyuki Doi’s Circle Drawings

I first saw Hiroyuki Doi’s artwork in 2006 at the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition Obsessive Drawing. The untitled drawing I refer to can be seen at its digitized collection at folkartmuseum.org. The Doi quotes and his biographical background come from a 2013 Japan Times article by Edward Gómez, “Outsider Drawn to the Circle of Life,” from a 2017 Wall Street International review of a Doi exhibition at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, and from a 2016 review in Brut Force by Carrie McGath called “The Inscape in Escape Routes: Five Works by Hiroyuki Doi.” The study “What Does Doodling Do?” was published by Jackie Andrade in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2009.

Whispering

The idea for this review came from a conversation with my friends Enrico Lo Gatto, Craig Lee, and Alex Jimenez. I don’t remember how I learned that cotton-top tamarins whisper, but a 2013 paper in Zoo Biology by Rachel Morrison and Diana Reiss details “Whisper-like behavior in a non-human primate.” The authors noted that a group of cotton-top tamarins whispered (or, technically, engaged in whisper-like vocalizations) when in the presence of a human they didn’t like, which is the sort of detail that reminds me that humans are just primates trying to make the best of a very strange situation.

Viral Meningitis

No book has helped me understand my own pain like Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, which was recommended to me by Mike Rugnetta. The Susan Sontag line about giving illness a meaning comes from Illness as Metaphor. I learned about meningitis, and recovered from it, thanks to excellent care by the neurologist Dr. Jay Bhatt. I know about catastrophizing thanks to a lifetime of doing it. I learned about the scope of viruses from Philipp Dettmer’s brilliant book Immune. If you are interested in the relationship between microbes and their hosts (especially their human hosts), I recommend Immune and also Ed Yong’s book I Contain Multitudes. The Nicola Twilley quote comes from her 2020 New Yorker piece “When a Virus Is the Cure.”

Plague

Most of the quotes from witness accounts of the Black Death in this review are from Rosemary Horrox’s book The Black Death. The book was recommended to me by my friend and colleague Stan Muller, and I’ve gone back to it many times in the last few years. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read, and deeply moving. I’m also indebted to Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. I learned of al-Maqrizi and Ibn Khaldūn’s accounts of the Black Death first from Joseph Byrne’s Encyclopedia of the Black Death. The information about cholera’s history comes from Charles Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years, Amanda Thomas’s Cholera: The Victorian Plague, Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, and Christopher Hamlin’s Cholera: The Biography. The more recent information about cholera and tuberculosis, including their annual death toll, comes from the WHO. For help understanding what drives contemporary cholera outbreaks, I am indebted to John Lascher and Dr. Bailor Barrie at Partners in Health Sierra Leone. Dr. Joia Mukherjee’s An Introduction to Global Health Delivery explores in detail the many ways in which poverty is humanity’s biggest health problem. The Tina Rosenberg quote about malaria is from her 2004 essay first published in the New York Times, “What the World Needs Now Is DDT”; I learned of it via Eula Biss’s book On Immunity. The Margaret Atwood quote is from The Testaments. Ibn Battuta’s story of Damascus is from The Travels of Ibn Battuta, as translated by H.A.R. Gibb.