The pandemic and this year’s relentless stream of scarier-than-any-true-crime news is doing strange things to many of us. I had two dogs when it started. Now I have three. Desperate times call for desperate measures is what I’m telling people. This new dog was irresistible—as a puppy, she’s almost embarrassingly cute, Hallmarkian in a way…

“Where there are humans, you’ll find flies. And Buddhas,” wrote the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa. The pandemic seems to have sharpened the divide. Here are photographs of men sporting swastikas and toting long guns and Confederate flags, protesting government safety measures in Michigan’s state capitol. But here is the 28-year-old paramedic in Westchester, New York,…