The Detour: Communities of Contagion

Join us on Sundays at 7:00 a.m. for new episodes of The Detour. Listen live at 99.1 FM in the heart of Portland, or online anywhere at PRP.fm.

In this episode, we explore how community can be a source of mutual contagion, as well as mutual support, with Eula Biss, the author of four books, including Notes from No Man’s Land and On Immunity: An Inoculation. This conversation was originally recorded in 2015, when California had recently removed exemptions for vaccinations, and Portland had just voted no on adding fluoride to city water for the fourth time.

Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had. Her book On Immunity was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, and Notes from No Man’s Land won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism in 2009. Her work has recently appeared in the Guardian, the Paris Review, Freeman’s, The Believer, and The New Yorker.

• You can watch our full 2015 program with Eula Biss on YouTube.
• An excerpt from On Immunity appeared in Oregon Humanities magazine in 2015.

For a full transcript of this episode as well as additional resources and further reading, visit the Oregon Humanities website.