Don't be scared. Hold the line.

In our latest issue: Resolving to fight the coronavirus, challenging personal demons to reach personal records, and the mysterious decline of a promising coder. [View this email in your browser]( | [Manage newsletter subscriptions](newsletter=wir) [WIRED Special Edition: New Issue] 04.21.20 As we were developing the [May issue of WIRED](, the coronavirus outbreak turned into a worldwide pandemic. So we made some changes: our essayists—[Paul Ford](, [Virginia Heffernan](, [Clive Thompson](—typed up smart essays, reminding us to not be afraid. We also finished up some long-planned, riveting stories: Nick Thompson, our editor in chief, writes about [his mission to run ever-faster marathons](, which meant having to grapple with his past. WIRED senior editor Sandra Upson writes about a [talented coder whose mind slowly began to fray](. But we went to senior correspondent and long-time editor Adam Rogers to write about this moment, because he has elegantly covered science (including a number of epidemics) for us for more than a decade. The letter, below, is informative, calming, beautiful.  “We’ve never shown fear of the future at WIRED. Times of great change, of apparent chaos, are just punctuation—the end of one paragraph and the beginning of a new one. Our stories, our design, even our vocabulary has always encrypted a message: Don’t be scared. Be excited. Living in the future is fun. You’re frightened now. So are we. At the time of this writing, half a million humans are confirmed to have the disease Covid-19. More than 20,000 have died. By the time you read this, those numbers will seem quaint. But our message has not changed. Don’t be scared. Hold the line. Hold, also, to this: When humanity hits a crisis, it always looks to science for help. Not because scientists are perfect, or even smarter on average than other humans, but because science is one of the best ways humans have come up with to reliably understand how the world works and how to fix it when it’s broken. The really important thing about science, though, is that it lets people understand the world together. Scientists don’t just discover things. They write about them in agreed-upon formats, construct experiments and collect data in convincingly logical ways, and use a vast distribution network to share what they know. Science is a force for civilization. You’re scared right now because it seems like that civilization might be falling apart. The leading scientists in the United States seem sidelined. It feels like people who clearly don’t understand something aren’t listening to people who do. Consensus, that feeling of togetherness, shatters. You think you might be alone—not just that you might get sick but that no one is coming to help you. But they are. They will. If we hold the line. Society is about to change, and no one can be sure how. But your fear is also the result of a playbook. Good scientists give an honest accounting of their own uncertainties, but when scientists point out that powerful people are doing dangerous things, those people dilute the critique by emphasizing the uncertainties. It’s a hell of a good juke, and it has been going on for so long—pretending cigarettes don’t cause cancer or that burning petrochemicals doesn’t destroy the planet—that it can seem as if scientists can’t ever really know anything, that we have no real basis for a shared understanding of the world or for any responsibilities to each other. Intensive care units are overflowing. A brand-new disease is killing people we love. But we have to remember that inside that storm, faith—in each other and in the scientists and medical workers who are dedicating their minds, all over the planet, to the work of understanding and fighting this virus—is the antidote to fear. Their work needs time, which means we all have to work, together, to slow the virus’s spread. Covid-19 wasn’t the first killer disease of the 21st century. It isn’t even the first coronavirus—in 2003 and 2004, severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, killed 774 people around the world. Since 2012, Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, has killed 858 people. The numbers seem small now, but they were a signal that a respiratory virus could run the planetary table. Some countries prepared; the United States didn’t. Now we’re all looking to the scientists again. They’re on it. This disease showed up in December 2019. By January 10, the new virus’s genetic sequence was online. Labs around the world soon learned to test people to see if they were infected (a ball quickly dropped by a hobbled American public health system). Now scientists have found dozens of existing drugs that are promising. The first human trials of a vaccine have started. Immunologists have found antibodies that work against the virus and are hoping to test synthetic versions in people by summer. More data will help epidemiologists learn how to let people who’ve been sheltering in place go back to work, to rescue the economy. (That’s going to require a lot of testing to see who’s sick and who has recovered.) We can do this. In the 1950s a sociologist named Charles Fritz jump-started the academic study of disaster with a single, vivid insight: People in crisis help each other. Elites panic about riots and looting, but most of us just try to help the people nearest us. And then we help the ones a little farther out, and then farther again. The center holds; the gyre widens. A government can do things to make all that happen, and in a better timeline, it would. Sadly, we don’t get to choose a timeline. Luckily, we do get to choose a government. Now we’re all in a disaster together, even if physically apart. Things will seem like they are getting worse. Stay home. Don’t spread a virus. Don’t be scared. Buy scientists time. Living in the future is hard, but it will be fun again—maybe even better. We just have to hold the line. —Adam Rogers, Senior Correspondent [illustration of hand pointing on top of a weather vane]( [The Literature of Plagues Gives Us Words to Live By]( [BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN]( [In dark times, we turn to stories in which history might be turned back. But it’s poetry and farce that will lead us through despair.]( [illustration of hands putting together abstract shapes]( [When Government Fails, Makers Come to the Rescue]( [BY CLIVE THOMPSON]( [Need masks and face shields? You got it. A network of tinkerers comes in handy when lives are on the line and the authorities are asleep at the wheel.]( [illustration: person standing in the center of a clock face]( [Stones, Clocks, and What We Should Actually Leave Behind]( [BY PAUL FORD]( [Tomorrow has no use for our monuments. It needs our data—and warnings.]( [man running barefoot on grass]( [To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past]( [BY NICHOLAS THOMPSON]( [After 20 years of long-distance competition, I ran my fastest. All it took was tech, training, and a new understanding of my life.]( [diptych: man walking in a yard and the words %22What Happened to Lee?%22]( [The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder]( [BY SANDRA UPSON]( [Lee Holloway programmed internet security firm Cloudflare into being. Then he became apathetic, distant, and unpredictable—for a long time, no one could make sense of it.]( [Vivek Premi with his followers on motorcycles ]( [The Rise of a Hindu Vigilante in the Age of WhatsApp and Modi]( [BY MOHAMMAD ALI]( [India, the world's largest democracy, has also become the world's largest experiment in social-media-fueled terror.]( [photograph of a woman with a woven, indistinct face]( [Coders Who Survived Human Trafficking Rewrite Their Identities]( [BY LYDIA HORNE]( [At a Bay Area nonprofit, former abuse victims learn to code and level up their futures. A photographer and an artist weave together their stories.]( [Subscribe to WIRED]( [GET WIRED](  [Get unlimited access to our coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.](  [Subscribe to support our journalism.](  [Exclusive offer: 1 year for $10 $5.]( [(image) WIRED Logo]( [(image) WIRED on Facebook]( [(image) WIRED on Twitter]( [(image) WIRED on Instagram]( [(image) WIRED on LinkedIn]( [(image) WIRED on YouTube]( This e-mail was sent to you by WIRED. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, wired@newsletters.wired.com, to your address book. View our [Privacy Policy]( [Unsubscribe]( or [manage your newsletter subscriptions](newsletter=wir)