This summer, turn off your screens and boldly go out into the real world

We have to put down our laptops, silence our phones and start living our lives again. Call it the Analog Summer.

In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote with gratitude about our screens, which kept us connected when things were locked down. With the world outside stopped, many of us continued working, ­socializing and (somewhat) learning on our screens. But as the benchmark for easing restrictions morphed from “two weeks to flatten the curves” to “not until no one ever dies,” the screens became something else entirely: prisons of sorts.