JAD: Okay, so the 1918 flu is kind of famous for being forgotten. It wasn't widely taught in schools. You won't find it written about in a lot of novels and plays. But what I didn't realize is that it wasn't just forgotten after the fact, it was ignored in the moment as it was happening. And there are a lot of reasons for this. I mean, you had censorship in certain countries. You had self-censorship in this country, journalists feeling like maybe they had to keep morale up and stay focused on the war. Not to mention there wasn't much anyone felt that they could do about the flu. It was even kind of familiar, came around every year. And that year there was just more of it. But on top of that, and this is what I find interesting, they didn't even know what it was. Like, think about a couple months ago, March, coronavirus. Immediately, you began to see these illustrations in the paper of this spiky ball. My kids started drawing pictures of the spiky ball. We all had something we could visualize. Back then, they had no picture of the enemy. They didn't even know the flu was a virus. It was truly invisible.
JAD: And yet this tiny unseen unspoken of force was reshaping human history in all kinds of surprising ways. This show began with a simple question. What happens afterward, after this? And Molly Webster, who you'll hear from later in the program suggested well, let's look back at what happened after that one. And that's what we're gonna do today. As we enter the summer of coronavirus and look forward to the fall, we have five stories of how the invisible hand of that flu has continued to guide and shape us for the last hundred years and has left the world a very different place.