Disposable

Starred review from January 6, 2025
Jones, a senior writer at New York magazine, debuts with a disquieting examination of the systemic flaws laid bare by Covid. “What the pandemic did... is strip the world back until its workings are visible to all,” she contends. Drawing on personal accounts from Covid victims and their families, Jones profiles people with disabilities who died alone in overfilled care facilities, frontline workers who couldn’t afford to quit, a prisoner who worked on a hazmat team with no protective gear, and a Haitian immigrant with a precarious housing situation that made care more difficult to access—after she died of Covid, her son remarked that her doctors had been “ready to rush her into the grave.” His statement is only half hyperbole—Jones’s vision of America isn’t one where the poor stumbled into Covid-era tragedy by happenstance but one in which it was intentionally engineered, and she interweaves her account with a mind-boggling assortment of anecdotes and insights that showcase systemic harm and humiliation. They range from an observation that medical programs that forcibly sterilized the poor under the auspices of eugenics in the early 20th century now aggressively collect unpaid medical bills as a similar deterrent to accessing care, to a story about workers at an Oakland McDonald’s who finally walked off the job when they were given dog diapers to use as masks during the Covid lockdown. It’s a ghastly panorama of the American way of life.