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It’s peak season for fevers and runny noses, and when it comes to the flu, the illness has been rampant this year. In some areas, the flu has been so widespread, schools have even closed to help communities get well. This week, local news outlets have reported school closures in at least 10 states due to higher than normal flu numbers. Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, Ohio, Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee, have all kept kids home in order to disinfect, and allow teachers and students time to get well. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent data, 27 states and Washington, D.C., are experiencing “very high” flu activity levels, while 14 states are seeing “high” flu activity levels. Hospitalizations have been soaring, too. Just last week, there were an estimated 38,255 hospitalizations from the flu. Over the entire flu season, there have been 20 million cases reported, as well as 11,000 flu-related deaths. Dr. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said, per NPR, the flu is peaking for the second time this season. “Influenza activity first peaked around the turn of the new yearlate December, early January. Activity then declined for several weeks in a row, which is usually a sign that the season is on its way out,” Rivers says. “But then it really took an unusual turn and started to rise again. So activity is now at a second peakjust as high as it was at the turn of the new year. It’s unusual.” Still, even in rough flu seasons, school closures due to the flu are rare. However this year, it has felt unavoidable in certain locations, like Northeast Ohio, where a number of schools closed over a staggering number of flu cases. St. Hilary School in Fairlawn, Ohio, addressed its high flu numbers in a post on Facebook, announcing its closure this week, writing, “St. Hilary School will be closed Tuesday, February 4, with over 20% of students and 15% of staff out due to illness,” administrators wrote. “Unfortunately, we are experiencing many of the same illnesses currently prevalent in the general community. We will be disinfecting the building and expect to reopen Wednesday, February 5, but please watch for updates.” While the flu is raging, other illnesses have felt more mild this year. COVID transmissions have been at their lowest yet this season. According to the CDC, only about 4 per 100,000 have been hospitalized during its seasonal peak. Last year, it was twice that at 8 per 100,000. Compared to the winter of 2021-2022, when there were 35 per 100,000, it feels like COVID is taking a backseat to the flu, at least for now.
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László Toth, a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor, emigrates to the United States after World War II in search of a new life. After a rough start, a wealthy businessman recognises his talent and offers him a job that will change his life. This is a very brief summary of Brady Corbets film The Brutalist, which stars Adrien Brody as Toth. While the protagonist of this almost four-hour film is fictional, his story is inspired by many real figures. During the rise of Nazism in Germany, and especially after the de facto demise of the Weimar Republic in 1933, many intellectuals, scientists and other educated people chose to emigrate in search of a more favourable climate in which to work. For many, it was also a matter of life and death. The legacy of Bauhaus Many of these émigrés were architects associated with the Bauhaus, the famous school of design and architecture established in 1919 in Weimar. The institution, which later moved to Dessau and then to Berlin, left a legacy that endures to this day. Bauhaus directors were among those who left Germany in this period. This included architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, who headed the school in Weimar and then Dessau, and designed the new building there. His Dessau successor Hannes Meyer also left, as did Mies van der Rohe, who headed the school in Dessau and Berlin, where the school was closed by the Nazi government. The Bauhaus building in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius. [Photo: Wikimedia Commons] The Bauhaus was an indisputable cornerstone of interwar Germanys cultural, political and social development, and while its architecture course was not established until about halfway through its existence, the school is worth studying from an architectural perspective. While they each had different methods and priorities, the three aforementioned architects espoused a form of modern architecture that reflected a much broader movement that sought to change with only partial success the aesthetics and ethics of architecture, and even of life, at the time. All three taught their students to break with the styles of the past to offer a progressive architecture that met the eras physical, aesthetic and cultural needs. Of course, these men were not the only émigrés from Nazi Germany, but their stories (and those of other Bauhaus figures), can help us better understand this emigration that is often widely misunderstood. The Bauhaus American dream? When we refer to this emigration of German architects and intellectuals (or those culturally linked to Weimar Germany), the first image that comes to mind is emigration to the US, the land of opportunity The Brutalists fictitious architect László Toth does just this. This migration is the best known, certainly the most common, but not the only one. Moreover, it usually inspires images of the individualistic architect, a (male, of course) creative genius who puts his constructive ideals above everything else. This image was popularised by Ayn Rands 1943 novel The Fountainhead, and by the 1949 King Vidor film of the same title, starring Gary Cooper. Gary Cooper and Kent Smith in The Fountainhead, 1949. [Image: Warner Brothers] In truth, the picture is more complex and problematic. While our three architects all have elements in common a commitment to modern and transformative architecture that shaped, and was shaped by, contemporary life they did not all emigrate to the US. Nor did they go at the same time, or with the same aspirations, political and ethical commitment, or prizing their own architecture above all else. Walter Gropius, who was from a well-off family, initially left Germany in 1934 for the UK before settling in Boston, Massachusetts in 1937 as a prominent faculty member of the newly established Harvard University Graduate School of Design. There, in addition to teaching, he set up an architectural practice called The Architects Collaborative. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, undoubtedly the most brilliant of the group, remained in Germany until 1938, where he continued to work in a not entirely hospitable political climate. He eventually settled in Chicago as director of the Illinois Institute of Technology, and began a brilliant career that would make him the US (an perhaps the worlds) defining post-war architect. His work was key to, among other things, developing the corporate office building that would epitomise American expansionist capitalism after the war. Portrait of Lilly Reich. [Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA] Here, it is worth mentioning his longstanding Berlin business partner, designer and architect Lilly Reich, who also taught at the Bauhaus. Until recently Reich was overlooked, both for her direct role in much of Mies van del Rohes work and her individual output. Fortunately, researchers such as Laura Martínez de Guereu are now shining a light on her life and work. For her part, Reich opted to remain in her native Germany. Her status as a woman would undoubtedly have contributed to this decision, though it is difficult to say to what extent. Socialist architectural visions As we can see, there were indeed women architects working in Germany at the time, even if their gender rendered them all but invisible. There were also, undoubtedly, many architects whose profile did not fit the mould of the strong-willed creative genius, but rather that of the progressive, politically committed intellectual. In many cases, these people were very close to communism and the alternative offered by Soviet Russia at the time. Hannes Meyer in 1928 [Photo: Hermann Bunzel/Wikimedia Commons] Hannes Meyer, the least well-known of the three Bauhaus directors mentioned here, chose this other path. His search for the ideal place to work did not include the individualistic, commercialised society of American capitalism, but rather, following his own communist leanings, that of the USSR, where he arrived in the late 1930s. His model was that of the architect fully in service to society, and he shunned any aesthetic or artistic protagonism. He was convinced that this type of architecture could only be practised in a classless society where the means of production belonged to the proletariat. He remained in Moscow until 1936, when the country, under Stalins dictatorship, became increasingly closed off to foreign presence. After returning to Germany, he emigrated again to Mexico in 1939, and worked prolifically for ten years amidst the progressive social and political reform programmes of president Lázaro Cárdenas. He eventually returned to his native Switzerland, where he died in 1954. The émigrés who followed in Meyers footsteps not only wanted to avoid the US, but also sought refuge where they could (or believed they could) best pursue their ideals. Instead of beautiful buildings, they envisioned an architecture that would help forge a new society and a new humanity. In fact, as per the architect and scholar Daniel Talesnik, there was arguably a Red Bauhaus made up of modern architects who, following their escape from Nazi Germany, worked for the Soviet government. These other cases, whose trajectory we have barely sketched here, have been less well known to both the general public and, until recently, to academics. However, this does not diminish their significance, and they deserve a greater place in history than they seem to have been given. José Vela Castillo is a professor of theory, history and architectural projects at the IE School of Architecture and Design at IE University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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From devastating climate change to ongoing wars to the dismantling of the globe’s largest aid agency, theres no shortage of problems facing the world. And now we can add another one to the list: An asteroid could conceivably hit the planet in just under eight years. And while the chances of that happening are very small, they have now nearly doubled. In December, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Chile, developed by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA, discovered the existence of an asteroid known as 2024 YR4. That ATLAS should discover an asteroid is no surprisethere are millions of them in our cosmic neck of the woods alone. However, 2024 YR4 triggered the alarm at ATLAS because theres a not-insignificant chance that the asteroid, which is about the size of the Eiffel Tower, may slam into Earth in 2032. Impact odds are rising At the time of the object’s discovery, NASA calculated that the chance of the asteroid actually hitting Earthwhat it calls the Impact Probabilitywas about 1.3%. That means there was a 98.7% chance that the asteroid would miss us. Or to put that another way, there was a 1 in 83 chance that 2024 YR4 would hit us. Unfortunately, the impact probability of 2024 YR4 has now risen. As a matter of fact, the probability of the asteroid hitting Earth has nearly doubled to 2.3%, according to Sentry: Earth Impact Monitoring, an online tool provided by NASAs Center for Near Earth Object Studies. Now Sentrys Impact Probability rating is classified as 2.3e-2, which means there is now a 2.3% chance of 2024 YR4 slamming into the planet. NASA says this means the odds of impact are now 1 in 43. Yellow Zone warning NASAs Sentry tool also reveals that the asteroid has a maximum hazard rating of 3 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale. Torino is a scale that categorizes the effects an asteroid or comets impact would have on the Earth. The Torino Scale assigns both numeric ratings and color codes to such objects. The Torino Impact Hazard Scale runs from 0 to 10. A 0 rating means that a heavenly object poses no threat to the planet, while a 10 means, basically, were all going to die. (NASA is more tactful in its description of a level 10 event, stating, A collision is certain, capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it, whether impacting land or ocean.) Numerical classifications are further grouped into colors as well. A 0 is white, a 1 is green, 2-4 is yellow, 5-7 is orange, and 8-10 is red. A level 3 rating on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale means that 2024 YR4 is in the yellow zone, which the scale says merits attention by astronomers. A close encounter, meriting attention by astronomers, the Yellow Zones description reads. Current calculations give a 1% or greater chance of collision capable of localized destruction. However, there is some good news: A Yellow Zone warning doesnt mean that impact is a certainty. Most likely, new telescopic observations will lead to re-assignment to Level 0, the zones description continues. But it also notes that Attention by public and by public officials is merited if the encounter is less than a decade away. The asteroid 2024 YR4 is less than a decade away. When might the 2024 YR4 asteroid hit Earth? Even though the odds of 2024 YR4 hitting Earth have risen, it is still much more likely than not that the asteroid will miss Earth entirely. However, if it were to impact Earth, it would likely do so on December 22, 2032. But thats just its first chance to strike Earth. If it misses us then, 2024 YR4 gets more chances in 2039, 2043, 2047, and 2079. You can track NASAs updates about the asteroid by using its Sentry: Earth Impact Monitoring tool. Should I worry about asteroid 2024 YR4? It seems pointless to worry because theres not anything you as an individual can do about 2024 YR4. Besides, the odds are still in our favor that 2024 YR4 will miss Earth. And even if it hits us, it wont be a civilization-ending event, though, depending on where it hits, it could devastate even a large city. And if its any consolation, NASA knows of no other asteroid that has the impact probability rating 2024 YR4 does. “Currently, no other known large asteroids have an impact probability above 1%, NASA said in a January statement. So things will probably be fine in 2032 and beyond. Of course, even if we are spared an asteroid impact, we still have the zombie spiders to worry about.
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