rabid a cultural history of the world's most

“It’s terrible that these Philly mobs have turned violent,” he said

He said the mobs started as a kind of playful social experiment meant to encourage spontaneity and big gatherings to temporarily take over commercial and public areas simply to show that they could. Hodge, of Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper's Magazine (New Press, 2008)īill Wasik is credited with introducing the notion of a flash mob in 2003, said in 2010 that he was surprised by the violence of some of the gatherings. Wasik is the author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture (Viking, 2009). Wasik revealed himself in 2006 to be the inventor of the flash mob, having anonymously organized the first recognized examples in New York City during the summer of 2003. He has also contributed to McSweeney's and served as Editor of The Weekly Week. ~ Emily Z.Bill Wasik is a senior editor of Wired Magazine, and was previously a senior editor at Harper's Magazine. After reading this book I know more about why we vaccinate our animals, ourselves, and our children medicine has taken some amazing leaps and we owe those scientists our lives.

I would recommend this book to any student of history- or anyone interested in the pathology of disease. Rabid is a fascinating book that describes the virus through time- how people dealt with it and how ultimately the vaccination came about through the work of Louis Pastuer. Rabid describes the fight of a high-school girl as recently as 2004 in Wisconsin- she beat rabies, but just barely. But rabies still poses a real threat- unvaccinated victim, leaving the disease to run its course (the symptoms don’t appear for as much as 30 days) are left with a horrible fight for life that often takes years of recuperation, that is if they survive at all. Most of us come into contact with rabies at our pets semi-annual rabies vaccinations at the vet. But there’s another virus, one that has always been around, that used to (and in some parts of the world, still does) boast a 100% kill rate: Rabies.

Modern medicine has made us a comfortable people- it’s easy for us to forget the ravages of polio, measles, and whooping cough because most of us have never seen the disease.

Rabid a cultural history of the world's most