Join The New Republic for a livestream of our Salon book series featuring Nicola Twilley, Geoff Manaugh, authors, and Laura Marsh, TNR’s literary editor, as they talk about Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine.

You can purchase Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine here!

Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley explore the history and future of quarantine, from the Black Death to Big Data.

Quarantine has shaped our buildings, cities, and borders for centuries, yet as a concept, it remains both feared and misunderstood.

In Until Proven Safe, journalists Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley climb through the ruins of quarantine hospitals in Venice, Dubrovnik, and Malta, don hard hats to visit a new federal quarantine facility in the heart of the United States, and attend simulated pandemics—one eerily similar to Covid-19—in New York and Washington, D.C.

Although quarantine, at its heart, works by separating people suspected of illness from those known to be well, even this simple distinction leads to entire realms of philosophical uncertainty, ethical risk, and the potential abuse of political power. What if we don’t know we are infected? Quarantine has been an effective medical tool for 600 years, but it is also an unusually poetic metaphor for any number of moral and religious ills: It means waiting to see if something hidden inside you will be revealed.

You must remain in quarantine—until proven safe.

Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean to the hallways of the CDC, to the corporate giants hoping to disrupt quarantine today armed with surveillance technology and Big Data.

Yet quarantine is more than just a medical tool: The authors also drop deep below the earth's surface to tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility in the New Mexican desert, strip down to nothing but protective Tyvek suits to see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet with NASA’s planetary protection officer, tasked with saving the earth from extraterrestrial infections.

The result is part-travelogue, part–intellectual history, an exhaustively researched trip that could not be more urgent or timely—and a book as compelling as it is definitive.

GEOFF MANAUGH is the author of the New York Times bestseller A Burglar’s Guide to the City, as well as the architecture and technology website BLDGBLOG. He regularly writes for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Wired, and other publications.

NICOLA TWILLEY is co-host of the podcast Gastropod, which looks at food through the lens of history and science, and an award-winning contributor to The New Yorker. Manaugh and Twilley live in Los Angeles.

LAURA MARSH is the literary editor of The New Republic and co-host of the TNR podcast The Politics of Everything. She has written for The New York Review of Books, Dissent, Bookforum, The Times Literary Supplement, and Literary Review. Previously she was an editor at The New York Review of Books.

Note:  This is a free Zoom event. You will be notified before the talk with the link to connect to the event. 

You can purchase Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine here!