Travel

After losing her grandmother to COVID-19, marketing executive Tamika Hall then had to take over for vanishing hospice services in Harlem and help lead her father to the best death she could. It seems to me that the story of this pandemic is as much as anything, a story of the failure of technology. Not just the big healthcare failings or smaller infrastructure glitches like the busy signals I’ve been getting while trying to make calls from my New York apartment, but social technology, the innovations that we built to specialize society and to put distance between us and some of our oldest enemies: sickness, fear, death. Those social technologies seem to have withered away in so many places when we needed them most. That is what happened to Tamika Hall, who lost her father to cancer and her...