july/august 2001

Somewhere in China, a company recently received an order for boxes and boxes of reusable face masks with G7 UK 2021 embroidered on them. Over the weekend in Cornwall, in southwest England, these little bits of protective cloth were handed to journalists covering the 2021 summit of some of the world’s most powerful industrial economies—so they could write in safety about these leaders’ efforts to contain China.

The irony of the situation neatly summed up the trouble with this year’s G7 summit. The gathering was supposed to mark a turning point, a physical meeting symbolizing not only the beginning of the end of the coronavirus pandemic but also a return to something approaching normalcy after the years of Donald Trump and Brexit. And in certain senses it was. With Joe Biden—the walking embodiment of the traditional American paterfamilias that Trump was not—no one feared a sudden explosion or American walkout as before. Biden is not the sort of person to hurl Starbursts at another leader in a fit of pique. And yet, the reality was that the leaders in attendance were playing their diplomatic games within tram lines graffitied on the floor largely by the former U.S. president, not the incumbent one.

This year, two international teams of economists published papers that offer very different impressions of the future of remote work.

The first team looked at an unnamed Asian tech company that went remote during the pandemic. Just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Working hours went up while productivity plummeted. Uninterrupted work time cratered and mentorship evaporated. Naturally, workers with children at home were the worst off.

The second team surveyed more than 30,000 Americans over the past few months and found that workers were overwhelmingly satisfied with their work-from-home experience. Most people said it exceeded their expectations. “Employees will enjoy large benefits from greater remote work” after the pandemic, the paper’s authors predicted. They said that productivity would surge in the post-pandemic economy, “due to re-optimized working arrangements” at some of the economy’s most successful white-collar companies.

By the time Republicans and centrist Democrats had united late last week to scold Representative Ilhan Omar for a tweet—one of the few pastimes that still draw the two parties together, and something those selfsame chiders would doubtlessly decry, under different circumstances, as cancel culture or censorship—it no longer mattered what, exactly, Omar had said. They had already managed to make a news cycle out of it: mission accomplished.

Now, following Democratic outrage and Republican calls for a floor vote to strip Omar of her committee assignments, let me record the following for posterity: Omar demonstrably did not say what she’s been accused of having said; what she did say was true; and every politico using this opportunity to take a swing at her likely knows those two things—they just think you don’t.

Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.

Editor’s Note: Every Tuesday, Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer take questions from readers about their kids’ education. Have one? Email them at homeroom@theatlantic.com.

Dear Abby and Brian,

Everything feels untenable. I am so frustrated for my son, whom I’ll refer to as “Caleb,” who is in first grade. I’m frustrated for his teachers too, and for me and my wife. Caleb is on the verge of tears by the time online school ends at 2:30, and, to be honest, so am I. His schedule is different every day, and he can’t read well enough to follow all the directions, so even though I am working and ignoring him most of the time, he interrupts me just often enough to make me seem unprofessional. After his day is done, we let him watch TV until my wife or I can stop working, which is around 5 o’clock most days. This means that one of us has about an hour with Caleb before bath, dinner, and bedtime.