There’s a splendid article by James Parker in The Atlantic: “End Meeting For All.” I hope it’s not behind a paywall. If it is, I’m sorry, but please do consider subscribing to The Atlantic, the journalistic and essayistic source that’s meant more to me during this pandemic than any other periodical (it’s hard to know what to call anything anymore).

Beginnings are important, and this one goes bang like a Christmas cracker:

Zoom, for most of us, arrived last year. And didn’t it feel right on time? Eerily on the button. As if the nine-foot locusts that run the universe, in a spasm of insect whimsy, had given us simultaneously a deadly, denormalizing virus and a new medium of human communication in which to freak out about it.

The rest of the article is even better.

Parker writes that there’s poetry in Zoom. Oh yes indeed there is. It’s my Magic School Bus. It’s my inner world, my radio studio, my theatre of the mind, the place where I can be Captain Trips and my students can too (and regularly are, in the chat).

I love it because I don’t have to use it very often to do things I really didn’t enjoy much in the before times, like meetings I wished would end very soon already. Instead, Zoom for me becomes a distillation of the inner life, made visible, brought forward into a participatory space. I know I’m lucky in this regard.

I invested in a ring light, a good webcam, a new audio interface, a very modest green screen setup. In a simple twist of fate, I had asked for a broadcast-quality microphone for my birthday in 2019. It’s a honey: an ElectroVoice RE20, the kind I’d worked with many times back in my radio days. (A great microphone tends to stay in style.) It was here just in time for 2020 … and all that followed.

Photo by Dan Lefebvre

For good measure, I hung a sign outside the little room where I Zoom, one I bought several years back on one of my irregular pilgrimages to Abbey Road Studios. Every time I go into the room to convene a learning community, I see this sign, and it reminds me that unexpected wonders may emerge, today, or any day.

Our learning portal. Welcome. Photo CC BY-NC-SA by Gardner Campbell

That’s the boost I get as I prepare to meet my students. That’s the sight that tells me it’s magic time.

See you tomorrow.