Life in the time of coronavirus

What we call culture is basically the act of sharing air with strangers. Restaurants, theatres, small stores and large ones, concert venues—all are reopening, and, like victims of a traumatic injury relearning the steps that once seemed second nature, we are remembering how to dance.

That's Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. I'm afraid the dance is going to be called off again in the near future because too many idiots refused to get vaccinated and the Delta variant is steamrolling through our defenses, but I love that description of culture as “the act of sharing air with strangers”--it's a phrase that wouldn't have resonated so deeply a year and a half ago.

Now we know how much we are at the mercy of those strangers with whom we share our breath, and how vulnerable that sharing can make us.