What do you miss most about church during enforced isolation? It might be the socializing, or the preaching, or the excellent Sunday school series that was interrupted. 

I miss the singing. 

At the time I’m writing this, COVID-19 is officially a pandemic, folks are going cancel-crazy, and nobody knows how bad it will be. 

What will be the score a few weeks from now? I wish I could ask my future self if it’s safe to fly, or if the kids are back in school, or if the shelves are stocked with toilet paper and chicken soup again. Or if I’m struggling to breathe and someone I know is dead.

Most of us don’t think about architecture unless it slaps us in the face. That may say more about bland, blocky public buildings than we’d like to admit, but several years ago I was slapped by the central public library in a Midwestern university town. The entrance, opening to a four-story atrium, resembled an upended, corrugated, glass-and-aluminum Dixie cup. The main body of the building, constructed of native red granite, sloped slightly inward, decorated with random strips of window.

When Billy McFarland, CEO of Fyre Media Inc., developed the Fyre app as a tool for booking music acts, he dreamed up a doozy of a promotion with rapper Ja Rule: Fyre Festival 2017, two weekends of sun, fun, and rock ’n’ roll on Norman’s Cay, a private island in the Bahamas. A promotional video of bikini models and speedboats promised an experience “on the boundaries of the impossible.”

Since joining Facebook about 10 years ago, I’ve collected a number of left-wing Facebook friends. Some I know personally, others only by casual friending sometime in the past. Though I seldom engage, they’re still on my feed because I want to know what they’re thinking.

State Rep. Ben Baker, of Missouri House District 160, is concerned about the kind of books kids may encounter at the local library. “I want to be able to take my kids to a library and make sure they’re in a safe environment,” where objectionable material can’t slip by a parent’s notice. To that end, his House Bill 2044 attaches the “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act” to a routine funding measure.

“This book started with an image: a very formal butler standing on a stoop of a normal suburban house, on the first day of the oldest kid’s sixth-grade year, in the rain,” explained Gary D. Schmidt, author of Pay Attention, Carter Jones (Clarion Books, ages 10-12). “That whole image was there before anything else, and obviously, the question is: Why is he there?”