We’re All Living in the ‘From Now On,’ Now Watching Apollo 13 for the first time, I couldn’t help fixating on how much the world has changed—not in the past half century, but in the past few months. By MARINA KOREN

Mission Control monitors Apollo 13 from Houston
About this time 50 years ago today, three men launched toward the moon on Apollo 13, oblivious to the harrowing turn their journey would take. It’s a big anniversary, the way the anniversary of Apollo 11, which made the first moon landing, was last summer. But it’s difficult to commemorate the half-century anniversary of this mission in the usual ways.

Like nearly everything else, museums are closed. The Smithsonian could project an image of the massive Saturn rocket on the Washington Monument again, but no one would probably come out to see it. So, in the disorienting, social-distancing whirlwind of the past few weeks, I decided to observe the anniversary by engaging in my favorite coping mechanism of the pandemic era: I watched a movie.

Although I’ve been writing about space exploration for several years, I’d never seen Apollo 13, Ron Howard’s Oscar-nominated 1995 film about that fateful mission. Ah, I thought, here’s a good way to forget reality for two hours.

That hope was trampled about two minutes in. There, driving a red Corvette through the suburbs of Houston, was Tom Hanks, one of the first celebrities to come down with COVID-19. The news of his diagnosis in early March, which feels like a thousand years ago, really brought home the frightening reality of the new coronavirus for many Americans. The most recent experience many of us have of the actor is his Instagram posts from quarantine in Australia while he recovered from a fever and chills. In Apollo 13, however, Hanks is young, unwrinkled, and dashing as Mission Commander Jim Lovell.  

The next jolt came soon after. Two days before launch, NASA officials approach Lovell with some bad news: One of the backup astronauts caught the measles from his kid a few weeks earlier, and the entire Apollo 13 crew has been exposed. Lovell and Fred Haise, the lunar-module pilot, are immune because they’d had the infection as children. Ken Mattingly, the third astronaut on the mission, isn’t. He isn’t exhibiting symptoms, but they could show up when the crew is in outer space, hurtling toward the moon. “Jim, that’s a lousy time for a fever,” the director of flight crew operations tells a stunned Hanks.

This really happened. Mattingly didn’t end up getting sick with the measles, but Apollo 13 flew to space without him just in case, finding a last-minute replacement in Jack Swigert.

Astronauts are always quarantined for about two weeks before launch, even today, to prevent exactly this risk. (In the early moon missions, astronauts spent weeks in isolation after coming home, too; back then, doctors worried that the space travelers could bring home moon germs that would threaten us terrestrials.) Space agencies are reevaluating these procedures today in the face of the coronavirus. A recent crew—two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut—faced a stricter isolation than usual before blasting off to the International Space Station from Russia’s launch facilities this past week.

“Had I been in normal quarantine, I probably could have gone out to some restaurants and left the immediate parameters of the Star City area and just been smart about where we went,” Chris Cassidy, the NASA astronaut, told reporters before he launched. “But not this time.”

After Mattingly gets pulled off the mission, a moment played beautifully onscreen by a sad but stoic Gary Sinise, the rest of the action, though stress-inducing, is a welcome reprieve from the present moment, the kind that only a movie with a guaranteed happy ending can bring. Thanks to a manufacturing mistake made years before the mission, the spacecraft’s oxygen tank ruptures, venting the precious gas into space. With a moon landing no longer an option, the crew spends days trying to stay alive on a return trip home rife with even more scares. By the time the capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, I was tearing up, overcome with admiration for NASA’s unstoppable drive and Ron Howard’s casting choices. “Ed Harris crying is making me cry,” I scrawled in my notebook.

Although the film was based on a book by Lovell—who is 92 years old today—it is, of course, a Hollywood version of the events, with some exaggerations for dramatic effect. The real Ken Mattingly once said that NASA engineers had rehearsed many more emergency simulations than the movie implies, and had even simulated some fixes that their movie counterparts appear to make up on the spot. Gene Kranz, the flight director portrayed by Harris, didn’t actually declare that “failure is not an option,” and the film’s most famous line—“Houston, we have a problem,” was delivered a little differently. Haise denies puking after launch.

But on the whole, Apollo 13 is pretty accurate. Lovell’s wife really did drop her wedding ring down the shower drain before her husband lifted off. The astronauts did shiver for days after cutting the heat to conserve power for their trip home. They did build a makeshift air filter out of random items on the ship, including duct tape and socks, so that they could scrub out a buildup of carbon dioxide that grew more dangerous with every exhale. And humanity really was captivated. “Perhaps never in human history has the entire world been so united by such a global drama,” Walter Cronkite says in the film, in his famous, rumbling news-anchor voice.

A news anchor today could say exactly the same thing—though exactly how united we all are is up for debate.

I’m not the only one making connections between a 50-year-old mission and our modern-day pandemic. Haise, who is 86 now, is thinking about them, too. (Swigert, the command-module pilot, died in 1982, at age 51, of cancer.) “The lesson of Apollo 13 is what we had to do to survive,” he told the space historian and writer Robert Pearlman in a recent interview. “We had to be willing to be able to change the norm, if you will, because we had to deal with a lot of new things and new procedures to work around and get through it all. And that's exactly what the world and people are having to deal with today.”

Early on in the film, Lovell hosts a watch party at his home for the first moon landing. After the guests watch Neil Armstrong climb down the lunar lander and step onto the surface on a grainy black-and-white television, Lovell says: “From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon.” As I watched the movie, I couldn’t help fixating on how much the world has changed—not in the past 50 years, but in the past few months. The sight of crowds of happy spectators at Cape Canaveral, gathered to witness the takeoff, triggered an involuntarily cringe. Even small gestures felt sacrilegious, like when Haise, all suited up before launch, spits out his gum in a worker’s hand before someone puts his helmet on. I wouldn’t have thought twice about these moments even a month ago.

We’ve entered a new era. There is no doubt, to use Lovell’s line at the watch party, that we’re living in the “from now on.”

Social Distance: We Can’t Go Back to Normal Everyone wants to get back to the way things were, but maybe that’s the problem. By ALVIN MELATHE

Vann R. Newkirk II has spent a lot of time thinking about disasters. Three years ago, the Atlantic staff writer was on the ground in Puerto Rico covering Hurricane Maria and its political fallout. He spent the past year reporting Floodlines, an eight-part documentary podcast covering the unequal toll Hurricane Katrina took on the residents of New Orleans.

Newkirk noticed a pattern after both events—the desire to return to normalcy, to the way things were before. It’s a pattern he sees emerging in this moment, too.

On this episode of the podcast Social Distance, Vann joins Katherine Wells and James Hamblin to explore what the legacy of the coronavirus pandemic might be—and how its effects will be molded by how the world looks right now.

Katherine Wells: Many people are referencing Katrina right now, sometimes by calling this Trump’s Katrina. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio last week said that this is a Katrina in every city. How do you feel about that comparison?

Vann R. Newkirk II: I’ve never been super gung ho about the “Blank’s Katrina” formulation. I have a bit of a problem with people calling this Trump’s Katrina, because I was [in Puerto Rico] in the days after Maria, hearing people echo the same things that people said during Katrina. If this is his Katrina, what was that?

What we learned about Katrina is that the structural problems, the problems of will and of spirit that led us to the outcomes of Katrina, are not episodic. We make choices every day about who we care about and who we will provide care for. Katrina was an illustration of that, and the coronavirus pandemic will be too.

Wells: There was a narrative that this was a great equalizer, and that the virus didn’t care who you were or where you lived. But there are all of these stories now about disparate outcomes.

James Hamblin: It’s sort of an equalizer in that everybody is a little bit afraid, but some people are definitely at a much higher risk. The percentage of people in New York who have died who are black or Hispanic is twice as high as the number of people who are white who have died.

Wells: One of the things that was so obvious in retrospect about Katrina was that it didn’t create anything new. It just made the existing structures more obvious.

Newkirk: Right. One of the things that’s interesting about Katrina is that even people who believe this happened along the lines of inequality tend to believe that poor, black neighborhoods were flooded more. But that wasn’t what happened. The amount of flooding isn’t really correlated with the likelihood of a person being able to come back to the city in two years. Instead, it was policy that happened after the fact. It was the baked-in inequalities that had not a whole lot to do with the flood itself that affected the long-term outcomes for people. It’s about whether they were going to be able to rebuild, whether they were going to have the wherewithal or the capital to figure out all the insurance stuff, whether they were going to be able to get their grants and loans for coming back, and whether they were going to have advocates for them on the ground.

Hamblin: The analogy I’ve made is that this is a slow-moving hurricane that’s hitting the whole world. There’s time still for places and people to be helped as it’s unfolding. Even as behind-the-ball as we are, and given all our historical precedent and the systems we have in place that are so flawed, what can we do right now to stop some of the damage?

Newkirk: Communities are doing a much better job at providing leadership than the government. In places where state leaders have up until very recently denied that this was a problem, you’ve seen local actors get out there. You see hand-drawn signs in neighborhoods telling people to wash their hands to try to maintain six-foot distance. You see people organizing meals. That, to me, is one super-promising sign. As cynical as we are about government and how we are organized, people still help.

Wells: That was one of the big lessons from looking really closely at Katrina. The narrative at the time was that in a moment like this, chaos reigns. But that is not what happens. People take it upon themselves to help each other. Right now, you hear people are buying guns, and there’s fear that society is just going to collapse.  
  
Newkirk: Our visions of apocalypse are just a reflection of the fact that lots of Americans have not seen disasters up close. I worry about weeks into the disaster, when your efforts at helping keep things together are not being matched by effort at higher levels. That’s when you see the real effects of long-term trauma and mental-health damage. People will get burned out.

All the nice ways that we have been spending our time uplifting loved ones, these are very high-maintenance, high-energy things we have to do. People are really good at doing them in the short term. People are really good at buckling down and supporting each other at doing hard things in hard times. But there is a time limit on that, and it should be the job of the government to take the burden from them when it can.  

Hamblin: There a lot of cops out on the streets, a lot of patrol cars just rolling around New York. It feels like we’re using a lot of resources to patrol for potential crimes, and more resources go toward that and less toward this inevitable rise in people who can’t feed themselves.  

Newkirk: You are what you spend on as a state and as a government. We’ve spent, in so many states, so much on punitive measures, on ways to keep people out of housing or ways to stop people from being “dependent” on the safety net, on ways to incarcerate people who do wrong. Those are going to be the effective systems when everything else falls down. In rural Mississippi, you can’t expect the hospitals to all of a sudden start working when they haven’t before. What we can expect is that cops are going to keep arresting people. People are going to keep contracting diseases in jail and prison, as is already happening. People are going to die that way. That’s just the bottom line.

We’re going to report on things as if they’re new, as if they are sudden manifestations of a nation in crisis. But really, all this is going to do is accelerate all the things that we have been spending on. It’s going to illustrate what we haven’t paid attention to. People like to say this disaster has opened our eyes. But having your eyes closed is a choice.

Wells: We’re all asking this question now: When will this end? When will life get back to normal? I feel like Katrina has a really complicated lesson for us about the aftermath.

Newkirk: I was talking to Andy Horowitz, who wrote a forthcoming book on Katrina, and he talks about how people willfully misunderstand what a disaster is. It's a manifestation, not an abrupt thing. It is so natural to wish to go back to the way things were before, the day before we understood the virus was in Wuhan.

But we should be interrogating that idea. Why do we want to go back there? We understand that the things that exist today are the things that are aiding and abetting this virus. If we know now that the entire construct of our system of prisons and jails is going to create reservoirs of disease that is going to be impossible to fight on a public-health front, why do we accept it as necessary? As bad as the COVID-19 pandemic is, there are lots of nastier germs out there with higher mortality rates that we could have been hit with. What if one of those happens and we still have the same exact system? Why do we want to go back to that?

Wells: Here’s the flip side, though. I’ve heard people say this is an opportunity. The optimistic among us see this is an opportunity to change things. It’s making all of our problems impossible to ignore, so now we can reconstruct everything, which is a lovely thought. But ... what we know about the aftermath of Katrina is that the way social structures were rebuilt ended up alienating and displacing a lot of people who had been there for generations. When people say this is an opportunity to rethink our structures, that scares me. I am worried about the vultures.

Newkirk: I’m worried about opportunism generally. But I think my answer to that would be, the vultures aren’t rethinking anything. They are doing what has been the rule of thumb in America for the past however many decades. They have power and they have money and they are exercising that power and money. That’s not a rethinking. The fact that aggressive, accelerated gentrification seems to follow every single disaster, that’s not rethinking. That is power doing as it will. That’s as mundane as oatmeal.

To me, there is rethinking and there’s changing the way you do things. There’s a next step that seems to be more difficult after a disaster, and that’s changing how we actually respond to these things. It’s realizing that the structures of inequality in America are what’s exacerbating and maybe even creating the problem in some places, and then it’s doing something to permanently change those conditions of inequality.

Wells: Has that ever happened after a disaster?

Newkirk: Well, there’s lots not to love about Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression. But to say that it wasn’t a radical reimagining of society would be untrue, too.

Hamblin: That’s the era I was thinking of too. I think there’s lots of problems with the war comparisons, but it’s closer to that than any natural disaster, because it’s affecting the whole country and whole world. September 11—it affected everybody, but didn't directly topple buildings in every city. But with this, there is no going back. After World War II, no one was asking when we would go back to normal life. The whole world was different.

Wells: I don’t know why I’m such a catastrophist.

Newkirk: You’re afraid that the radical change that is going to happen is going to be one that’s worse for everyone. It’s going to be one where the vultures take over.

Wells: That’s what happened after Katrina, no?

Newkirk: Right. It is a function of modern disaster. The phrase disaster capitalism is true. I watched it happen in Puerto Rico after Maria. It is a fact of modern life. You’re worried, and I’m worried too, that it’s going to be the rule that dictates our big choices that are made in response to this pandemic.

But one reason I can never be a true pessimist about humans is the humans themselves. People, especially when pushed to extreme situations on the brink, have ways of surprising us and doing things that seem impossible. People figure out ways to go up against powers and trends that have until certain points in history been unshakable. That’s where I always place my hope.

For China, the ‘USA Virus’ Is a Geopolitical Ploy In a new era of tinfoil-hat diplomacy, official sources are legitimizing conspiracy theories from the internet. By Renée DiResta Technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory

The coronavirus that became a global pandemic first surfaced late last year in Wuhan, China. But according to one common narrative making its way around Chinese messaging apps, an American soldier was patient zero. “Chinese netizens and experts” are urging the United States to release health information about a U.S. delegate who attended the Military World Games in Wuhan, asserted a February 22 story from Global Times. The publication, an offshoot of the Chinese Communist Party organ People’s Daily, insinuated that a U.S. military cyclist might have brought the disease from Fort Detrick in Maryland. Chatter about American origins of the disease had begun a month earlier, in the wilds of China’s chat services and on tiny YouTube channels. That alone wouldn’t have amounted to much; conspiracies are as common on social media as ants at a picnic, and the small accounts speculating about “bioweapons” and “the USA virus” got little early traction.
But this time, Chinese state media picked up the story from internet chatter and turned it into an international phenomenon involving not only official media channels but influential diplomats as well. State channels with massive Facebook followings backed away from prior acknowledgments that the virus had originated in Wuhan, recasting the idea as merely a theory—just one of many unknowns. Zhao Lijian, the spokesman and deputy director general of the Information Department of China’s Foreign Ministry, speculated to his half-million followers on Twitter that the United States was secretly concealing early 2020 COVID-19 deaths in annual flu counts. In an unusually overt act of tinfoil-hat diplomacy, he shared an article from the notorious anti-American crackpot site GlobalResearch. The headline reads, “COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the U.S.”

While spreading conspiracy theories—stories involving claims that shadowy, powerful interests have secretly engineered events to their own advantage—is a time-honored ploy by which states try to discredit their rivals, the first global pandemic of the social-media era shows just how efficiently wild theories can travel. And as Zhao’s Twitter account shows, state-sponsored propaganda has become deeply entangled with anonymous conspiracy mongering. Authority figures are now legitimizing tropes from the recesses of the internet—and ensuring mass popular awareness of those ideas.

State-sponsored media have long played a role in geopolitical power games. Since World War II, the TV, radio, and print media channels of many governments have created what some experts call “white propaganda”: messaging for which official sources claim authorship. (In gray and black propaganda, the origins are partially or entirely concealed.) In the present day, white propaganda has expanded to include the social-network presences of official channels, as well as the individual accounts of bureaucrats and top politicians. Sometimes, the messages these outlets carry are meant for a regime’s own citizens; other times, the outside world.

Messaging from state media also goes by another, friendlier name: public diplomacy. While academics debate the line between propaganda and public diplomacy, in an interconnected world, having the ability to shape narratives is an imperative. The long-term goal is to make people think favorably of the country and its rulers. In other words, it’s a branding exercise. But in the shorter term, state media channels are also used for more direct advocacy campaigns, convincingly conveying an official point of view on specific issues to those outside its borders. In more heated times, this may extend to smearing an adversary’s government, institutions, or policies. But the narrative manipulation around COVID-19 on China’s official state channels has escalated far beyond spin to outright conspiracy.

From the beginning, the Chinese Communist Party has been struggling to manage both domestic and outside perception of its handling of the outbreak of the disease now known as COVID-19. The coronavirus’s rapid spread within China, and its high death toll, triggered a domestic crisis of confidence in President Xi Jinping’s leadership. Although dissent is often quickly censored, Chinese social-media forums were flooded with comments about Xi being “gutless” for not going to Wuhan, among other criticisms. The situation didn’t play any better internationally: The revelation that the Chinese government knew of the outbreak for two full weeks before taking steps to contain it outraged people worldwide and prompted accusations of a cover-up.

As the crisis has begun to recede within China, with Wuhan exiting lockdown and new infections dropping to a trickle, the Communist Party’s public-diplomacy efforts have gone into overdrive: At the Stanford Internet Observatory, where I work, we gathered months of China’s English-language state-media Facebook posts, identifying key themes that were pushed repeatedly: stories of survival rather than deaths, glowing coverage of the “construction miracle” of new hospitals (whose sudden appearance was framed as the result of patriotic engineering ingenuity, rather than as proof of the need to bolster an overwhelmed medical system), and claims that China had bought the world time through its aggressive containment procedures. One remarkable China Daily article from February 20 boasted, “Were it not for the unique institutional advantages of the Chinese system, the world might be battling a devastating pandemic.” The item also slammed international criticism as the result of “ingrained bias against the country.” Other stories presented a rosy revisionist history. State media coverage of the death of the whistleblower optometrist, Li Wenliang, mourned him as a hero, and entirely neglected to mention his detention by police after he discussed the emerging virus in a chat group of close friends. As the writer Louisa Lim put it in Foreign Policy, “China is trying to rewrite the present.”

The Chinese Communist Party has prioritized “persuasion and information management” for years. It has amassed an extensive white-propaganda apparatus since 2000, building and buying TV, radio, and print media, optimizing localized content and messaging in a wide range of languages. Since 2015, it has invested in building a massive English-language presence for its media properties on the very same social networks it has banned within its own border. The English-language Facebook pages for the state-owned newspaper China Daily and the official Xinhua News Agency have more than 75 million followers each; and the China Global Television Network has a following of 99 million; by contrast, CNN has 32 million and Fox News has 18 million. Part of this growth has come from running paid ads on social-media platforms that China’s own citizens are blocked from using. My team has studied hundreds of state-media ads from Facebook’s recently launched political-ads archive. They are targeted at English speakers worldwide. Throughout 2019, the ads frequently involved friendly images of pandas and kittens, highlighted Chinese art and culture, and amplified feel-good political stories.

In February 2020, they took a different turn. The ads began boosting state media coverage of the coronavirus, with dozens of ads praising Xi for his leadership and emphasizing China’s ability to contain the disease. They incorporated hashtags such as #UnityIsStrength and #CombatCoronavirus, predictions of a quick economic recovery, and stories in which world leaders in Italy, Serbia, and elsewhere express gratitude to China. By March 2020, angry ads appeared in the mix, promoting outraged coverage of President Donald Trump’s use of the term Chinese virus.

Of course, Facebook pages for broadcast media aren’t the Communist Party’s only messaging tool. For years, it has also run peer-to-peer persuasion strategies involving influencers, trolls, bots, and commenter armies. The comment legions—called Wumao, or the 50 Cent Army—have been a shadowy presence on China’s internet and message-board ecosystem for more than a decade. The party has also tried using Twitter bots and Facebook sock puppets, including those uncovered during the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Politico and other investigative journalism teams have reported that similar shenanigans are happening in the coronavirus conversation as well, though attribution remains a challenge; connecting hypernationalist activity back to direct orders from the party is difficult.

That managing the narrative is a top priority for the Communist Party is abundantly clear. Among the nine members of China’s task force for managing the COVID-19 response are the party’s policy czar for ideology and propaganda and the director of its Central Propaganda Department.

Political conspiracy theories appear even in the analog propaganda of decades past. Mark Fenster, the author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, describes them as a “populist theory of power” serving an important communication function: helping unite the audience (“the people”) against an imagined secretive, powerful elite. So when state media in China, for example, create or spread these theories, the elite puppet master is the United States, a geopolitical rival. By exposing the villainy of its adversary, the Chinese Communist Party presents itself as a defender of its people.

The “bioweapon” trope is particularly useful, because it can be readily applied to any disease outbreak. During the Cold War, the KGB’s information-operations department was a notorious practitioner of conspiracy as statecraft. Perhaps its greatest hit was the widely believed claim that a secret U.S. government lab created AIDS. A Soviet telegram explaining the operation may sound familiar to those following COVID-19 news today:

The goal of these measures is to create a favorable opinion for us abroad that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the Pentagon that spun out of control.

That narrative was initially placed in a pro-Soviet Indian newspaper by way of a whistleblower-style anonymous “letter to the editor” in 1983. It spread through newspapers in 80 countries over a period of four years; the Soviets occasionally revived it with relevant twists for whatever local media environment was of strategic interest. But in the era of Facebook and WeChat, these stories become a high-speed information virus themselves, and the murky source of the initial claim disappears as messages spread across chat groups.

State media outlets rarely transmit conspiracies in the form of bold, direct claims. They usually do it through a combination of insinuations: We’re just asking questions, really. This sometimes happens via interviews with conspiracy-theorist guests who claim they’ve been silenced by their own government, or publishing provocative headlines. Russia has elevated this to an art form, with the English-language RT and Sputnik networks regularly featuring those purportedly censored by the American media.

While easy to mock, tinfoil-hat diplomacy serves a purpose for China. Domestically, it’s allowed the Communist Party to distance itself from its own failings by reframing a poorly managed crisis as something that was inflicted on the Chinese people by outsiders. And Chinese state media are far from the only state source “just asking questions” during this pandemic. RT is hosting American kooks who allege on social media that the virus is part of a mass-vaccination campaign masterminded by Bill Gates, while Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is referencing claims that the virus was “specifically built for Iran using the genetic data of Iranians.” Americans aren’t above this kind of rumor mongering. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas darkly noted the existence of a Wuhan “biosafety level-four super laboratory” in comments on Twitter and to the media, speculating that COVID-19 is a Chinese bioweapon. But neither mainstream American media nor U.S. government-sponsored entities such as Voice of America are pushing conspiracies as a public-diplomacy strategy. U.S. leaders are, however, demanding increased attention to the information war: Senators Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, and Cory Gardner are calling for a task force to counter Chinese propaganda, and to provide U.S. embassies with guidance on how to counter false narratives locally.

The tension from the information war between the United States and China on the origin of COVID-19 has resulted in increased political brinkmanship; Trump’s administration has requested that the United Nations Security Council include a statement verifying that the virus originated in China in a COVID-19 resolution. Diplomats have been summoned. U.S. reporters have lost press credentials in China. This is not an ideal state of relations at any time, let alone during a pandemic that requires international cooperation.

But letting these narratives spread unchallenged is also not an option. Social-media companies should be paying far closer attention to the stories they’re allowing state-media propagandists to pay to boost. Allowing misleading narratives to take hold during a pandemic can cause immeasurable harm, and risks turning the major tech platforms into accomplices in the deliberate spread of lies. We must keep the focus on finding cures, not fighting over conspiracies.