Sunlight is the best disinfectant

And other lies we tell ourselves in the digital age

Empathy means
laying yourself down
in someone else’s chalk lines
and snapping a photo.

—Solmaz Sharif

I’m old enough to remember how journalists, various academics and analysts made much of the fact that the Vietnam War was “the first televised war,” that it happened “in people’s lounge rooms” and that this proximity—the visceral reality of death and destruc…