What Submarine Crews and Astronauts Can Teach Us About Isolation
By Anna Russell
April 9, 2020
Torpedo room of USS Growler Submarine.
The torpedo room of the U.S.S. Growler, a submarine that is docked in New York City as part of the Intrepid Museum.Photograph by AlexCorv / Alamy
At the end of the first week of lockdown in London, my neighbors and I stuck our heads out of our windows, or stood in our doorways banging pots and pans, to applaud the nation’s nurses, doctors, and care workers for doing daily battle with the virus we had all come to fear. We’d been inside all week, the weather tauntingly, insultingly beautiful, without hearing so much as a minor argument or a loud takeout order on our silent block. But there were signs of polite strain. In our local park, joggers held out their arms to keep others at a distance, like odd, flightless birds. Little baggies of dog poop had accumulated in mounds, with dog-waste bins removed and collection staff reduced. The children who lived on the ground floor of our building made us a robot out of cardboard Amazon boxes. We wiped it down with Dettol and hoped they wouldn’t come again.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-submarine-crews-and-astronauts-can-teach-us-about-isolation
