For the first year of the pandemic, my wife and I would meet all our groups of friends for weekly Zoom get togethers. We’d talk about what little there was to share: infection rates and hospitalizations, Netflix, the election. Week after week, different heads in Zoom boxes, jabbering about Tiger King, Lysol wipes, Twitter, toilet paper, rinse, repeat. So repetitive that Jenny and I started to suspect that we were living in a computer simulation. That we had gone down in a plane crash and we...