David Rowell

In the winter we watched the earliest footage out of Wuhan, China, as if it were a foreign-language sci-fi movie we’d stumbled across. Unsettling, certainly, but we let ourselves see the novel coronavirus as just one more development — like that protester standing in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square — that could happen only in China.

In 1972, when I was 5 years old, my parents drove my brother and me to Disney World. It had opened only the year before, but even then it was fast becoming a standard American sojourn.