“I made a halfhearted joke about how we were embarking on the classic father-son ritual of heading out to the mass vaccination site to protect him from the plague. I meant it ironically, but the truth is that for my son’s generation, proms and plagues will be part of the rituals of growing up. There is a loss of innocence in that, but also a hard-earned realism: the knowledge that rare high-risk events like pandemics are not just theoretically possible but likely, in an increasingly urban and interconnected world of nearly eight billion people.” Steven Johnson in the NYT Magazine (Gift Article): Could Covid Lead to Progress? (Among other things, there are lot of moments like this shared and examined in Please Scream Inside Your Heart which is as much a family story as a news one.)