But Covid … Covid was different. It scrambled my personal world, as it did all of our worlds. For the first four months, while I was still living in New Jersey, I was confined to our home with our neuroatypical son, trying in vain to help him learn online, and, more important, to soothe his porous soul, which could not help but absorb the terror that surrounded us. Ambulances picked up our neighbors, the virus tore through our friend group. I was still lucky—I wasn't on the front lines in the Covid wards, but neither was I protected from the pandemic with my usual reportorial distance. I woke up every morning exhausted and stared at my various screens in a stultified daze. For the first time, this was not someone else's shock. And then the shocks kept coming.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how journalists and trauma-adjacent professionals maintain detachment, and how collective crises erode that boundary.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 19