Hi! I’m a sociologist who studies disaster risk management, a professional field that includes preparedness and response to a wide variety of things including disease pandemics like the one we’re all living through right now. I’ve been fielding a lot of questions from friends and colleagues lately, who are concerned about the coronavirus pandemic and don’t really know how to get reliable information.

That’s why I’m launching The CovOdyssey, a periodic email newsletter that will be a roundup of reliable news, information, and commentary about the pandemic, to help you get a sense of what’s going on in the world around you in this especially turbulent time.

I’m calling it The CovOdyssey because by all estimates we’re in for an extremely long and confusing journey through this pandemic, and because as a father of two young boys I’m terminally committed to dad jokes. But also because in this troubling time we need to be like Odysseus, “the many-minded hero,” who can “master every circumstance,” whose “plans are always changing,” who, against a protean train of setbacks is “adaptable [and can] always find solutions.”

This newsletter is for the next few months in which everything is going to seem up in the air, and you can’t stop thinking about touching your face and every cough you hear takes on a weird ominous vibe.

First issue 3.14.20.