Annalee Newitz' Virtual Book Tour

Author Annalee Newitz recently went on a virtual book tour to promote her new book, Four Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. I blogged about it and some of her ideas last month and in January.  

She recently wrote about the tour and how weird it felt in her weekly newsletter.

I thought it would be really relaxing to do a book tour from home because there would be none of that airport nonsense, nor lonely hotel rooms. But instead it was equally as exhausting, but for different reasons. It’s hard to maintain energy and enthusiasm during a book reading and discussion when you can’t hear or see your audience. I missed meeting new people and visiting new bookstores; I even missed the smell of permanent markers during the signings. 

Like many of us at this point in the stay-at-home grind, I’m starting to understand fully what it means to be part of a social species. There’s a feeling you get when you’re in a room full of people, all talking and thinking about the same thing together. It’s warm and prickly and sometimes awkward. It’s a rush. It’s silly and fun. There’s a fundamental sense of purpose that I never feel when I’m alone. I miss it. I miss you. I can’t wait until we’re all hanging out together again.

She's also included links to recordings of some of the events, each focused on one of the cities described in her book. I've just listened to the reading and talk on Pompeii and it's fascinating. She also has just published an article in the New York Times that suggests that we can learn from the disaster relief program that was organized by Emporer Titus after the Pompeii disaster.

Within one generation of the eruption, many refugee families of liberti had names that were indistinguishable from their freeborn neighbors’. That made them eligible to vote and run for political office, unhampered by prejudice against people coming from slaves.

This didn’t represent a complete turnaround in Rome’s attitudes toward slavery, nor did every libertus wind up rich as Faustus and his family. But there’s no doubt that the government’s relief program changed the fortunes of marginalized people for the better and bolstered the Roman economy in the process.

We can still see our modern concerns reflected in this ancient disaster. Everyone in our nation wants a quick return to business as usual, complete with some infrastructure upgrades and new jobs. But for the descendants of slaves, and for other historically disadvantaged groups, this relief effort could also provide opportunities for social mobility. The good news is that historical evidence suggests we can have all this and more — so long as our politicians are willing to be as generous as a Roman emperor once was, some 1,950 years ago.