Things Lost and Won During the Plague

In early March of this year, I was attending a conference in Austria, giving a minicourse about my work on the g-theorem. The virus had made its way from its origin in China to Italy, and a few of the Italian participants were worried about their families. We heard that countries were closing their borders and, as people tend to do when they are getting nervous, many were making jokes, while others were getting scared about getting back to their country (indeed, Trump announced that the US would be closing it’s borders that week).