Both these columns appeared in the NYT today, but the moral distance between them could not be greater. @nytdavidbrooks ruminates on what the end of covid will mean for his social calendar. @zeynep urges us to step up vaccinating the world before millions more die needlessly. 
I feel like this is the great fork in the road for Americans going into the summer. Do we pretend this pandemic never happened, or do we see it for the global phenomenon it's always been? (Brooks's column here nytimes.com/2021/05/27/opi… and @zeynep's here nytimes.com/2021/05/28/opi…)
There are times that America is capable of astonishing magnanimity. There are foods my mom still can't eat (like canned clam chowder!) because they take her back to the CARE packages that sustained her in early childhood after WWII, full of unfamiliar but life-sustaining food
The question of how to return to our pre-covid lives will answer itself. But saving all those we can from the pandemic will require immediate, sustained, and creative action. It's another one of those moments in American history when the country can choose to look inwards or out
Biden is older than my mom—I hope he also has some memory of the massive post-war relief effort, and the impression that it left in the minds of a generation of Europeans: that America is a land of unimaginable wealth, and willing to share that wealth unstintingly with strangers
A successful planetary effort to vaccinate everyone, everywhere, would imply that we have a fighting chance after the pandemic to coordinate our response to climate change. A retreat into national borders would mean the decline of the United States as a power really is terminal.
Basically Biden's staff bring him NYT press clippings in the morning on a silver tray, and the course of the pandemic hinges on whether some flunkie finds Zeynep's or Brooks's column easier to clip
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