personal essay

Hindsight is a book about 2020, written by people like you.

It’s rare to look around and say, “This is going to be written about in history books.” But in 2020, that was about the only thing we could count on. It was year unlike any other, for which there was an endless stream of descriptors: “unprecedented,” “the new normal,” “dumpster fire.”

But history books don’t capture the details of what it was like to live in a year when the earth stood still. They can’t describe the way hospital units came to resemble war zones or the way a cough turned heads on the subway.