The Wall Street Journal - 28.03.2020 - 29.03.2020

CULTURE|SCIENCE|POLITICS|HUMOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 28 - 29, 2020 |C1

Jeb Bush

onlocalitiesleadingthewayC2

Terry Teachout

ontheperformingartscrisisC2

W. Bradford Wilcox

onthefamily-centeredmarriageC2

Joyce Carol Oates

onnewformsofstorytellingC3

Bee Wilson

onthereturntodiningtogetherC3

Carrie Cordero & Richard Fontaine

ontheeraofhealthsurveillanceC3

Walter Isaacson

onspurringbiotechinnovationC4

William J. Burns

onrenewingU.S.statesmanshipC4

Sal Khan

ononlineeducationthatworksC4

David Byrne

onconnectingamidisolationC5

Rahm Emanuel

onWashington’scrucialfailureC5

Kim Scott

onshowinghumanityatworkC5

Amy Compton-Phillips

onmedicine’snewfrontierC6

Gerard Baker

onthebacklashtoglobalizationC6

Jamil Zaki

onnewhabitsofkindnessC6

INSIDE

Tourists at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat.

ALAMY

ARealDigital

InfrastructureatLast

REVIEW

Roaring Back

The second life of

Tiger Woods

Books C12

The Paranoid Style in

American Fiction

Canonizing

Robert Stone Books C7

Never Taking Travel

For Granted Again

MITCH BLUNT

LIKE OTHER AMERICANS,technologists

are trying to do their part to support the

front-line pandemic response. They are

creating virus data sets, focusing comput-

ing resources on the search for vaccines,

tracking the virus’s spread, improving the

distribution of critical health care sup-

plies and facilitating online educational

tools—work for which my philanthropy,

Schmidt Futures, is providing support.

This effort reflects the entrepreneurial,

results-driven ethos of today’s tech sector.

But every American should be asking

where we want the nation to be when the

Covid-19 pandemic is over. How could the

emerging technologies being deployed in

the current crisis propel us into a better

future?

Consider big data and novel manufac-

turing. The government lacks a strong

grasp of complex supply and distribution

chains for life-critical medical equipment

and other goods. Specialists in big data an-

alytics should now turn to modeling these

networks to develop real-time tracking and

data visualization platforms to better in-

form policy decisions. The predictive main-

tenance and additive manufacturing that

are gaining traction in the military should

become more prominent in health care.

Some hospitals are already using 3-D

printers to fabricate respirator valves, and

it’s saving lives. Companies like Amazon

know how to supply and distribute effi-

ciently. They will need to provide services

and advice to government officials who

lack the computing systems and expertise.

We should also accelerate the trend to-

ward remote learning, which is being

tested today as never before. Online, there

is no requirement of proximity, which al-

lows students to get instruction from the

best teachers, no matter what school dis-

trict they reside in. There are already use-

ful online learning tools, but they need to

be more equitably distributed. Struggling

school districts, community colleges and

career technical training institutes could

benefit if network connectivity becomes

more affordable and applications become

accessible to a wider range of learners.

Science and engineering labs will also be

prompted to think of new ways to inte-

grate young talent; there will be experi-

ments in remote internships

and apprenticeships.

The need for fast, large-

scale experimentation will

also accelerate the biotech

revolution. Synthetic biol-

ogy and AI-enabled com-

puter modeling will help us

to discover and test more

new drugs. Companies and

research centers are putting

algorithms to work on large

data sets to find correla-

tions that would take hu-

man researchers years of

painstaking laboratory

work. As researchers show

more results, government agencies like the

FDA will face pressure to quicken the trial

and vetting process for new drugs, and

funding agencies will need to give re-

searchers more flexibility to follow the

discoveries wherever they lead.

Finally, the country is long overdue for

a real digital infrastructure. Government

at every level should move to cloud, mo-

bile and web-based software and start

treating data as a strategic asset. It’s now

painfully obvious that these tools are es-

sential for effective action. Moreover, the

American people will need that infra-

structure for their daily lives. If we are to

build a future economy and education

system based on tele-every-

thing, we need a fully con-

nected population and ul-

trafast infrastructure. The

government must make a

massive investment—per-

haps as part of a stimulus

package—to convert the

nation’s digital infrastruc-

ture to cloud-based plat-

forms and link them with a

5G network.

The American people are

problem-solvers and innova-

tors, and we have the op-

portunity today for far-

sighted action. If we invest

strategically and mobilize our society, we

can build the digital infrastructure neces-

sary to enjoy a higher and healthier stan-

dard of living and to solve complex mod-

ern problems like today’s pandemic.

Mr. Schmidt is the former CEO and execu-

tive chairman of Google.

The need

for fast,

large-scale

experiments

to discover

and test new

drugs will

accelerate

the biotech

revolution.

TRAVEL HAD BECOME SO EASY.In the

time before Covid-19, and especially in

the last decade, it was as if the map of

the Earth had folded upon

itself, bringing the furthest

corners close together.

Borders had thinned to

veils, barely there. Once

you got where you were

going, you hardly felt dis-

placed. You could call

home and check your email

easily, pull cash from the

maw of obliging ATMs

anywhere in the world.

Now that we’re locked

in our houses, travel like this seems so

long ago. In fact, travel feels especially

implicated in the current crisis, since the

mobility we’ve enjoyed for the last sev-

eral decades seems to be instrumental in

spreading the disease globally. Before

crisscrossing the world became common-

place, illnesses were usually local. Now

we’ve become the carriers that spread it

world-wide, bringing it along like bag-

gage on cruise ships and airplanes as we

hopscotch around the planet.

The era of easy travel came on gradu-

ally. Thirty years ago, when

I started to travel for my re-

porting, I readied myself

like a soldier. I bought trav-

elers’ checks, refilled my

prescriptions, did the neces-

sary battery of vaccinations

and tetanus boosters, paid

any upcoming bills and said

purposeful goodbyes, be-

cause unless there was an

emergency, there would be

no connection to home.

When things went well, travel back then

was immersive in a way it would never be

again. Everything familiar was blotted

out, allowing you to experience the new-

ness of the place.

But when things went badly, it could

be really scary. In 1998, I went to Bhutan

to visit a friend. My flight was diverted to

Kolkata because the airport in Bhutan

was closed; we didn’t have visas to enter

the country, so we were stripped of our

passports, deposited in an airport hotel

and ordered to stay in our rooms until we

were summoned back to the airport. I

didn’t have a cellphone (they were rare

and expensive at that time). There was no

internet. For the first time in my life, no

one had any idea of where I was. I don’t

present this as an ideal travel scenario—

it was upsetting and harrowing—but it

made me realize how profound leaving

home really is and what it really means

to be away from the familiar.

Since then, the world has become

much more fluid, and the convenience of

traversing the globe has slightly dulled

the dazzle of the experience. Travel is a

little less astonishing when, for instance,

you can be on a game trail in South Af-

rica and get a text from your son’s school

saying his lunch order for next month is

due. But is convenience why we travel?

Isn’t part of the purpose to step out of

our ordinary lives?

Now no one is traveling, even to the

corner cafe, because of the coronavirus

pandemic. In the modern era, humankind

has probably never been as housebound

as it is right now. When the restrictions

ease, we will certainly start traveling

again. The impulse to explore the world is

so powerful that it will roar back in time.

We won’t shed the handy things that

have made travel so much more comfort-

able than it was in the past, but we will

have gone through a reckoning. That

folded map of the world has been ironed

out a bit by this pandemic. Things feel

distant again, literally unreachable, and

we might never again take accessibility so

much for granted. We may find ourselves

once more awed by the very notion that

we can go from here to there, from our

own worlds into others, and savor it more

fully, as something nearly lost can be

treasured anew.

Ms. Orlean is a staff writer for the

New Yorker.

In the last

decade,

borders had

thinned to

veils, barely

there.

How Will

The

Pandemic

Change

Our World?

The Covid-19 outbreak has already upended

American life. As the crisis deepens, it will transform

the way that we think about family and business,

health care and high tech, politics and the arts.

Leading figures in these and other fields discuss the

challenges and opportunities of our uncertain future.

Crossing the globe had never been easier, until the

coronavirus reminded us of the real meaning of distance.

BYERICSCHMIDT

American innovation can bring us tools

and solutions that will outlast today’s crisis.

BYSUSANORLEAN