What I felt wasn’t writer’s block, but writer’s languish: I wrote, yes, but everything that I put on the page seemed to lack life and energy. What preoccupied me was the collapse of infrastructure, and of homeostasis, that we had witnessed during the worst of the crisis in the United States, and then, around the world. When my frustration reached its crest, I near-regurgitated an essay, later published in the New Yorker. It was part cri de coeur, part plea for change, part autopsy of what I had witnessed in the middle of the pandemic. Medicine, I wrote, isn’t a doctor with a black bag. It’s a
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