The lovelorn have computer dating: Cupid is digitized. But computer dating is not just for romantic love anymore.

An intriguing new company, founded by two computer professionals, is helping start-up companies find love with big enterprises. The results, so far, are wedding bells for a great variety of companies.

The matchmaker is Hunterz.io (yes, spelled with a “z”) and the proposition is straightforward: Start-ups register and are connected with the all-important “hunterz” — people who have worked for large enterprises and know the lay of the land inside.

They are people who have been laid off or have retired or are consultants; they make introductions and direct the start-up to the right people and right part of the large enterprise. Sometimes a hunterz is employed by a large entity, but mostly they are or were associated or employed there.

The co-founders of Hunterz.io are Noam Weisman, a veteran of giant Cisco Systems, and Yuval Shalev, who used to work for Deutsche Telekom, one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies.

Weisman told me that things were going well for the matchmaker before the coronavirus crisis, but there has been stratospheric growth since it began. “We have more than 10,000 hunterz on the platform, and we are active in 69 industries in 55 countries,” he told me. Although as a New York-based company, the emphasis is on North America, Weisman said.

An example of Hunterz.io at work is the successful linkup between Intellivisit, a Madison, Wis.,-based virtual health diagnostics company, and Rush Hospital in Chicago.

A hunterz made the introduction and Intellivisit found a role at the hospital. Weisman says that kind of linking is happening all the time to the benefit of the large enterprises and the start-ups. No more banging on closed doors, shooting off emails to unknown players who, as likely as not, will trash them.

This way willing start-ups and willing partners — investors or purchasers — meet each other.

“It was great to connect with some of the more innovative start-ups I have met,” said Kevin Serfass, manager of Global Telecom Partners. “My contacts appreciated me introducing these start-ups to them as they were in the process of looking for such solutions for a while now.”

Another hunterz, Othmar Knoll, an executive healthcare consultant, said, “Being a full-time consultant, it was a welcome change of pace to have vendors contact me for my services. Instead of me having to look for new vendors. It was simple and quick.”

To my mind Hunterz.io is the wave of the future — a wave I have been anticipating. New start-ups are likely to flood the market as we get to the “new normal.” That presumes that we will not suddenly revert to the status quo ante; that U.S. and global business will be dramatically restructured with new players, technologies and vision.

Since the beginning of business linking within the business sphere has been a problem. With Weisman’s company a new kind of efficiency has entered the marketplace.

Most of us have heard the plaintive, “Do you know anyone at this company? I think they would love my start-up, but I don’t know how to get their attention?” Or the equally sad, “I used to know someone whose wife worked there. Maybe she could help.”

As dating went from happenstantial to computer-matching so, too, businesses have always needed to know of each other. The big need the innovation of the small, and the small need the patronage of the big.

How many start-ups with wonderful product ideas have failed and left the field for want of an introduction?

Introductions are the oxygen of business and the more efficiently they can be made, the brighter the future looks — particularly at a time when, in so many ways, the future is cloudy.

After upheaval, like the current one, there is always innovation. But innovation needs to be known for it to find partners, patrons, purchasers.

When I was publishing magazines in New York in the 1960s, the struggle was to get a new magazine displayed on the 110,000 newsstands in the United States. We more-or-less bribed our way onto them.

Business has always had the equivalent of the newsstand problem: How do you tell them you are there?

Now they can find each other.

There is something fabulously exciting about watching science riding to the rescue.

The gloom about the coronavirus pandemic began to lift dramatically in the past several days as good news about vaccines came out.

Out front Oxford University, with a well-established history in vaccines, announced that it had started trials on people and that it might have a vaccine by September.

It has a manufacturing partnership with AstraZeneca, a giant European pharmaceutical company, and it is hoped that a million doses can be produced by September, even as there is not absolute certainty that it will work. Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at Oxford’s Jenner Institute, says she is “80 percent” certain that it will.

Incidentally, some tests on rhesus macaque monkeys were done at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana.

Labs in all major countries are in close pursuit of Oxford. What does seem certain is that the time when a viable vaccine can be brought to market is shrinking. The next challenge will be to manufacture proven vaccines in the hundreds of millions of doses needed.

To me the big thing is not who finds a vaccine, but rather how science answers the call to arms when the challenge is there — and financial support is provided. Much critical research in many of the coronavirus vaccine efforts has been provided not by governments, but by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

There is reason to wonder why Gates has been out in front of many governments, including the United States. This points to government failure to adequately support research and to prepare non-military defenses. Not every threat a modern nation faces comes from national armed forces.

Across the spectrum of research, private money is raised to do the work that should be in the government’s purview. Money for science is a struggle: There are competing philosophies, political and scientific, about research. To begin with, all research is messy.

The scientific method, as Michael Short of MIT reminded me recently, is based on try, fail, try again; test, prove, then proceed.

Conservatives have tended to be skeptical about a lot of science, pooh-poohing the study of obscure microbes and what they see as dubious investigation. They have consistently demanded quantifiable results from the government’s scientific establishment, looking for practical applications and unhappy about research for its own sake.

They have forgotten the real driver of all science: to know.

Liberals have favored, as you would expect, the social sciences over the hard ones. They are more prepared to treat social studies as science than high-energy physics.

What is lacking is something that we used to have in Congress: the Office of Technology Assessment, which was the scientific equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office. As with the often-quoted CBO, the OTA was a tool for members of Congress; a means for them to get complex scientific issues right and help them to understand the budgeting for those.

The OTA was created in 1972 and looked to be a firm part of the support system of Congress. But the Newt Gingrich-led House axed it in 1995. There have been several attempts to bring the OTA back in the House; last year a bill was introduced that would have re-established it at a modest $6 million, but no action was taken.

The OTA provided a valuable service in saving members of Congress from themselves; advising them when they come back from their constituencies believing hearsay as scientific fact — the same thing that has bedeviled President Trump in his briefings on the COVID-19 crisis.

I was well acquainted with the OTA and I always thought its greatest value was not in its formal advice, but rather in its informal help to members — who often confuse what they are told by sources as disparate as their children and lobbyists — from saying something about science that did not hold up.

As it is, we are all standing where we can see the scientific cavalry saddle up and ride out. This is heart-pumping, reassuring and confirms that science should not be neglected for budget or other reasons. To have a viable scientific infrastructure is to be defended from non-military attack, ranging from cybersecurity to a virus.

Scientists agree on this: There will be more.

The assumption is that we’ll return to work when COVID-19 is contained, or we have adequate vaccines to deal with it.

That assumption is wrong. For many millions, maybe tens of millions, there will be no work to which to return.

At root is a belief that the United States — and much of the world — will spring back as it did after the 2008 recession: battered but intact.

Fact is, we won’t. Many of today’s jobs won’t exist anymore. Many small businesses will simply, as the old phrase says, go to the wall. And large ones will be forced to downsize, abandoning marginal endeavors.

When we think of small businesses, we think of franchised shops or restaurants and manufacturers that sell through giants like Amazon and Walmart. But the shrinkage certainly goes further and deeper.

Retailing across the board is in trouble, from the big-box chains to the mom-and-pop clothing stores. The big retailers were reeling well before the coronavirus crisis. Neiman Marcus, an iconic luxury retailer, has filed for bankruptcy. All are hurt, some so much so — especially malls — that they may be looking to a bleak future.

The supply chain will drive some companies out of business. Small manufacturers may find that their raw material suppliers are no longer there or that the supply chain has collapsed — for example, the clothing manufacturer who can’t get cloth from Italy, dye from Japan or fastenings from China.

Over the years, supply chains have become notoriously tight as efficiency has become a business byword.

Some will adapt, some won’t be able to do so. A record 26.5 million Americans have sought unemployment benefits over the last five weeks. Official unemployment numbers have always been on the low side as there’s no way of counting those who’ve given up, those who work in the gray economy, and those who for other reasons, like fear of officialdom or lack of computer skills, haven’t applied for unemployment benefits.

To deal with this situation the government will have to be nimble and imaginative. The idea that the economy will bounce back in a classic V-shape is likely to prove illusory.

The natural response will be for more government handouts. But that won’t solve the systemic problem and will introduce a problem of its own: The dole will build up dependence.

I see two solutions, both of which will require political imagination and fortitude.

First, boost the gig economy (contract and casual work) and provide gig workers with the basic structure that formal workers enjoy: Social Security, collective health insurance, unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation.

The gig worker, whether cutting lawns, creating websites, or driving for a ride-sharing company, should be brought into the established employment fold; they’re employed but differently.

Second, a new Works Progress Administration should be created using government and private funding and concentrating on the infrastructure.

The WPA, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, ended up employing 8.5 million Americans, out of a total population of 127.3 million, in projects ranging from mural painting to bridge building.

Its impact for good was enormous. It fed the hungry with dignity, not the soup kitchen and bread line, and gave America a gift that has kept on giving to this day.

Jarrod Hazelton, a Rhode Island-based economist who’s researched the WPA, says the agency gave us 280,000 miles of repaired roads, almost 30,000 new and repaired bridges, 600 new airports, thousands of new schools, innumerable arts programs, and 24 million planted trees.

It also enabled workers to acquire skills and escape the dead-end jobs they’d lost. It was one of the most successful public-private programs in all of history.

As the sea levels rise and the climate deteriorates, we’ll need a WPA, tied in with the Army Corps of Engineers, to help the nation flourish in the decades of challenge ahead. The original was created by FDR with a simple executive order.

On the face of it, there isn’t much to celebrate on April 22, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. The oceans are choked with invisible carbon and plastic, which is very visible when it washes up on beaches and fatal when ingested by animals, from whales to seagulls.

On land, as a run-up to Earth Day, Mississippi recorded its widest tornado — two miles across — since measurements were first taken, and the European Copernicus Institute said an enormous hole in the ozone over the Arctic has opened after a decade of stability.

But perversely, there’s some exceptionally good news. Because of the cessation of so much activity, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the air has cleared dramatically; cities around the world, including Mumbai and Los Angeles, are smog-free. Also, the murk in the waters of Venice’s canals and the waves from motorboats are gone, revealing fish and plants in the clear Adriatic water.

Jan Vrins, global energy leader at Guidehouse, the world-circling consultancy, was so excited by the clearing that he posted and tweeted a picture taken from a town in the Punjab where Himalayan peaks are visible for the first time in 30 years.

The message here is very hopeful: With some moderation in human activity, we can save the environment and ourselves.

The sense of gloom and hopelessness that has attended a litany of environmental woes needn’t be inevitable. Mitigating conduct in industry and, particularly in the energy sector, can have huge effect quickly; transportation will take longer. Vrins says the electric utility industry — a source of so much carbon — is now almost entirely engaged in the fight against global warming. Just five years ago, he says, they weren’t all fully committed to it.

Another Guidehouse consultant, Matthew Banks, is working with large industrial and consumer companies on reducing the effect of packaging as well as the energy content of consumer goods. Among his clients are Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Johnson & Johnson. The latter, he says, has been working to reduce product footprint since 1995.

“This is an important moment in time,” Banks says. “Folks have talked about this as being The Great Pause, and I think on this Earth Day we need to think about how that bounce back or rebound from the Great Pause can be done in a way that responds to the climate crisis.”

I was on hand covering the first Earth Day, created by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson and its national organizer, Denis Hayes. It came as a follow-on to the environmental conscientiousness that arose from the publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring” in 1962. That dealt with the devastating effect of the insecticide DDT.

Richard Nixon gave the environmental movement the hugely important National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. With that legislation, and the support of people like Nelson, the environmental movement was off and running — and sadly, sometimes running off the rails.

One of the environmentalists’ targets was nuclear power. If nuclear was bad, then something else had to be good. At that time, wind turbines — like those we see everywhere nowadays — hadn’t been perfected. Early solar power was to be produced with mirrors concentrating sunlight on towers. That concept has had to be largely abandoned as solar-electric cells have improved and the cost has skidded down.

But in the 1970s, there was reliable coal, lots of it. As the founder and editor in chief of The Energy Daily, I sat through many a meeting where environmentalists proposed that coal burned in fluidized-bed boilers should provide future electricity.

Natural gas and oil were regarded as, according to the inchoate Department of Energy, depleted resources. Coal was the future, especially after the energy crisis broke with the Arab oil embargo in the fall of 1973.

Now there is a new sophistication. It was growing before the coronavirus pandemic laid the world low, but it has gained in strength. As Guidehouse’s Vrins says, “We still have climate change as a ‘gray rhino’, a big threat to our society and the world at large. I hope that utilities and all their stakeholders will increase their urgency of addressing that big threat which is still ahead of us.”

Happy birthday Earth Day — and many more to come.

 

 

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Photo: President Richard Nixon and First Lady Pat Nixon plant a tree on the White House South Lawn to recognize the first Earth Day.

I’m just old enough to remember Victory in Europe Day (May 8, 1945), formally recognizing the end of World War II in Europe. My family was in Cape Town: My father served in the Royal South African Navy, then under the command of the Royal Navy.

The jubilation was intense; nothing I’ve seen has touched it in its unrestricted joy. Strangers really did hug and kiss each other. I was hugged and kissed as though I’d personally borne the battle as a toddler.

Apart from joy and relief, the end of war in the Free World had another consequence: It liberated people from class and economic structures that had inhibited creativity.

Under the pre-war rigidities, those lower in the social system didn’t have the temerity or the opportunity to add to the innovation that created the peace prosperity that marked the 1950s.

The working class — now regarded as being part of the middle class — had been thought as destined to a lesser social standing; certainly not expected to invent, create and go into business. After the war, more things were possible.

Innovation was for everyone and it showed in everything, from the building of Levittown on New York’s Long Island and its descendants, to the civilian uses of nuclear power, the arrival of FM radio and color television, revolving credit and, oh, the miniskirt.

In the last 30 years the universal nature of innovation has come to mean advances, incredible advances, in computing and industries transformed by computing — take public transportation and scooters and ride-sharing.

The creation of wealth through innovation has been largely in the province of computing. But in the last several decades it was the innovation of bringing Greek yogurt to the United States that led to a billion-dollar fortune.

When the scourge of COVID-19 has passed, the nation will be a different place, changed dramatically from the way it was. It won’t have — to use the business school analogy — a classic V-curve recovery where things bounce back to where they’d been before.

Many weak industries will be severely contracted, including movie theaters, retailers, restaurants, and small colleges and universities. This will throw a great deal of talent out of work. Those are the people, I believe, who will create a new innovative wave in society and bring about a new prosperity, after some very hard times.

The internet provides new entrepreneurs an opportunity to draw attention to products and services that would have faced a marketing roadblock in another generation.

Big industry, too, will innovate, not the least to shore up its defenses against another national crisis.

The electric utilities, which have been on the front line of the essential services during the COVID-19 horror, will be seeking to further harden their systems against disruptions from cyberattack, physical attack or other failure, which could produce a huge crisis.

Already, Michelle Fay of the forward-looking consulting firm Guidehouse is looking to this innovative future to strengthen the electric industry. She says, “Innovation will emerge as an even bigger opportunity as we look to improve the resiliency of the critical infrastructure and further enhance our ability to provide business continuity in times like this.”

Michael Short, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, points out an accompanying development. He says on a recent edition of my television program, “White House Chronicle,” the current crisis looks as though it’ll bring back respect for expertise.

It seems to me that this disrespect has been prevalent since the 1960s, when so many of our social troubles — environment, civil rights, women’s rights and the Vietnam War — were laid at the feet of experts and the institutions that employed them.

The crisis has shown that hearsay medicine and what I call “voodoo science” won’t help in a crunch. Solid science and good medicine are the only way.

Now I’m seeing the shoots of new businesses sprouting, from people making jewelry at home to sell on Etsy to grocery delivery services. Expect a surge of books and plays. Crisis produces new product, creates new business, causes new thinking.

My friend Morgan O’Brien, who is well-credentialed in innovation as the co-founder of Nextel and now at the helm of Anterix, a critical communications network provider, says innovation doesn’t come easy.

“The inertia that pulls all human efforts earthward, and the pain of looking past the ‘very difficult’ to spy the ‘barely possible’; these are the obstacles to bringing innovation into the world, bloody and bruised, only to be immediately beset by doubts and fears,” he says.

Innovation is coming on a grand scale, some of it as complex as  O’Brien’s vision for cell phones or as simple as, my favorite, wheels on luggage. Get ready.

There are lessons to be learned in the COVID-19 crisis from the energy crisis, which broke in the winter of 1973 and extended into the early 1980s. Projections were dire. At a session of the Aspen Institute’s energy section one year, we looked at how the country could deal with an economic downturn to a negative growth rate of 23 percent. Aspen may want to look at that again.

In Washington, first under President Richard Nixon, then under presidents Gerald Ford and finally under Jimmy Carter, there was what might be called mobilization. It had two aspects: one was intellectual and the other was scientific. The brainy one was centered in the Federal Energy Office which attracted some extraordinarily gifted economists, geologists and managers. The rest of the government, from the Interior Department to the State Department, was also in the game.

Particularly there was mobilization of the system of national laboratories where, to my mind, the scientific muscle of the country could be found then and now. They had been primarily nuclear labs, led by the three big players in the atomic arsenal: Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia.

Everything was tried and not everything worked. Who remembers in situ coal gasification, ocean thermal gradients, magnetohydrodynamics, hot rocks, low-head hydro or wave power?

In the mix were solar, wind and efforts to loosen oil in tight formations. These were the winners, but it was not clear at all then.

Gifted leadership emerged first at the Federal Energy Office, then at the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Energy Research and Development Administration. Under Carter, all the energy agencies were rolled into the Department of Energy with its first secretary, a star in the Washington firmament, James Schlesinger.

That kind of mobilization is needed now, talent plus science.

The national labs, 17 strong, have some biological capability —  several having had some role in the Human Genome Project, and others looking at the treatment of cancer with radiation.

The COVID-19 virus will not be defeated just by medical science but by the whole panoply of science, including what might at first sound like kooky ideas. I recall the derision that greeted solar and wind concepts back in 1974. Now they are mother’s milk in the energy mix.

One of the highest challenges facing hospitals and medical facilities is to save the lives of their staff with superior sanitation of protective gear like respirators, the now well-known N95 masks and the ambient air itself.

I was excited to learn about a McLean, Va.-based company, airPHX, which has an off-the-shelf, air-scrubbing system using a cold plasma as the scrubbing agent. The units are about the size of a computer and each unit – they operate continuously from a three-prong plug — will clean the air of a 15,000-square-foot room, according to the company’s CEO William Pommerening.

The airPHX units, which were developed to combat mold, odors and pathogens in gyms and elsewhere, are in production on a modest scale, but this is set to ramp up with a new contract manufacturer in Tennessee.

Pommerening told me that he believes his machines will effectively destroy the COVID-19 virus both in the air and on surfaces. He said, “We have lab testing showing efficacy on over 30 health care-associated pathogens including bacteria, viruses and mold showing a 4 log [a technical measure in sanitation which equates to 99.99 percent effectiveness] reduction, or greater, in surface organisms in 30 minutes.” This, he said, included testing on a sister virus to COVID-19. For the air, the effectiveness was between 92 percent and 96 percent, he said. New masks are rated at 95 percent, hence their N95 designation.

If this proves out, it will be a boon across the spectrum of indoor trouble spots and will one day have a wide application in workplaces and recreation areas.

In my view, it needs government scientific review to confirm the data. But it is as promising as anything I have heard of, including hydrogen peroxide and ultraviolet light.

The need to be sure is paramount.

Nothing will be the same again.

Those are words that challenge the heart and the imagination. The heart because, as in a death or the loss of a job, some things will be very missed. The imagination because it needs inspired speculation to know how the present crisis will reshape the way we live; how we are governed, how we educate, how we do business, and how we play.

Some losses are somewhat predictable. Most of us may never sit in a movie theater again because there may be no movie theaters. They were already having a hard time with the competition from streaming services, now many may just not reopen.

Question: What will be done with those buildings? They are mostly part of shopping centers where many of the tenants for restaurants and specialty shops will also go out of business.

Here’s my answer: In that glorious time when we have licked COVID-19, many new entrepreneurs will get their start in those empty shells. A myriad of yet-unknown businesses will crop up, coming out of these times of ultra-difficulty. Failing shopping centers offer habitat to startups.

We are in a state of war, and in war — despite its horror — there is invention. As we try to defeat this pandemic, there will be inventions aplenty.

War has always spurred creativity, in art and in science, and in its aftermath, a time of optimism and opportunity. Catastrophe shakes up society and reorients it. There is a high price but a great reward.

Needs must, there will be a re-evaluation of values and the goods and services that are essential. High on that list will be electricity. Over and over again we will be asking ourselves if the electric grid is safe and if so, how safe?

As Morgan O’Brien, co-founder of Nextel and now CEO of Anterix, which offers utilities secure communications systems, told me, “The coronavirus pandemic is putting more stress on the infrastructure which keeps our society functioning. Critical infrastructure like the electric grid will be more stressed as it is the essential lifeline for Americans sheltering in place.”

A loss of all or part of the grid is an existential fear that has had experts worried since the first computer hackers had a go at it. Utility presidents have told me that it is grid security that keeps them awake at night. It should. CPS Energy, the utility in San Antonio, gets more than 2 million hits a day, I believe.

Late last year the president’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council warned strongly of the dangers of cyberattack. It said the electric utility industry is good at tackling small, short-term outages but it is essentially unprepared for catastrophic outages lasting a long time.

Earlier this year James Woolsey, a former CIA director and an honorary co-chair of the Secure the Grid Coalition, wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission demanding it order more physical security for transformers, pylons, etc.

Woolsey cited a lack of improved physical security since that became an issue with the sophisticated disabling of Pacific Gas & Electric’s substation in Metcalf, Calif., in 2013.

John Savage, professor emeritus of computer science at Brown University, who is writing a book on cybersecurity, raises a less-mentioned dimension of threat to the grid: the role of GPS. With the advent of global positioning satellites, he explained, the utility industry switched from using atomic clocks to using GPS timing as the basis for its nationwide synchronization.

Savage told me, “Dependence on GPS for timing is a security risk. If GPS timing signals are distorted or lost, serious damage may be done to the grid.

“GPS signals can be lost due to a local jamming, blackouts, produced by a solar flare, or spoofing. A GPS anomaly alone or a cyberattack combined with one can cascade and bring down a large portion of the grid for an extended period of time.”

Gen. James Jones, a retired Marine commandant and NATO commander, told me, “For the past several years, I have been preoccupied by the proximity of threats, particularly in the cyber realm.”

Much will change, but the need for reliable electricity will remain paramount.

There is plenty of time in Botswana. I mention this because suddenly many people around the world are finding time hanging heavily as the coronavirus rages.

But there are cultures where time is part of the ethos, where filling it is an art. For example, look to shepherds in the Middle East, building complex cairns out of loose stones to fill in time. Look to parts of the world where people sit together in companionship but not conversing. You see it in the Middle East and Africa.

For most of the 1970s my father lived in Botswana. He loved the country; and from what I could see on annual visits, the country loved him. He was one of a small population of expats in the capital Gaborone. He had gone there from neighboring Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to work at his trade as a mechanic.

When he grew too old to handle the demands of the work, he switched to teaching simple mechanics at the local high school. These consisted of things like why a hammer needs to be balanced, the difference between British and American threads on bolts and how to ground an electrical installation.

One day he, a mild man, told a student that he needed to do something a bit quicker. The student, one of his favorites, replied, “Rra [Sir], you have no time. There is no time in Rhodesia where you come from, there is no time in England, and there is no time at all in America. But in Botswana, there is plenty of time.”

Indeed, there was — and I am sure there still is plenty of time in Botswana.

Activities had to be crafted to take time.

One morning Dad told me he had to make a telephone call to his friend Peter Robbertse. “Good,” I said, expecting him to go to the phone across the room. Instead, he suggested yet another cup of tea, a staple of life among Brits in Africa.

Breakfast followed with more mentions of the need to make the phone call. So it went, “I must call Peter” and no call made.

Finally, just before 8 p.m., he picked up the phone and talked to his friend. After hanging up, he said, “There. That is something accomplished.”

Social visits were about the same.

We would go to “tea” — with cake and bread and butter. The town baker was skillful, and the cake was good. But, oh, the conversation.

At that time, there was no newspaper, no radio and no television in Botswana, so news was by word of mouth. As there was sunshine every day, there was not even the weather as a topic of conversation.

Our conversation went like this, “Jim got a new tire for his truck.”

“Yes, I heard it came on the train from South Africa. Only took about a month. Not bad.”

Long silence. Maybe some desultory remark like, “He needed it: The old one was always losing air.”

It would go on like that for an hour and a half or longer — people having nothing to say and yet enjoying each other in silence.

At the end of one such tea, my father got up, we said our thanks and farewells and went back to his cinderblock flat. He said something like, “I really enjoy these get togethers. Good to hear what is going on.”

I held my tongue, not mentioning that I had had better conversations alone in the bath.

No one ever said they were bored. Neither, noticeably, were they interested in the outside world.

Perhaps that might have upset them. I was not asked to hold forth on my racy life in Washington. Knowledge of the bigger world would not have sat well: It might have drawn attention to what their lives lacked and to the silence.

Fast forward to 1998. I am back in Botswana, sitting in the beer garden of the spanking new Holiday Inn in Gaborone. Things have sped up for Gabarone since its designation as the capital in 1966, when it was more of a village.

I am there this time covering President Bill Clinton’s Africa tour. I and four other reporters order lunch: hamburgers for all. But the waiter, instead of taking our order to the cook manning the grill, went to talk to other waiters.

Time went by. An irritated guy from a network said, “What is she doing? She has not put our order in.”

I explained, “She thinks we will want to be here for a very long time. This is a nice place to pass time in her view. She is being considerate. In Botswana there is plenty of time.”

I went to tell her that we were Americans and had no time. She understood.

For more than a decade, I’ve been writing about the isolated, the lonely, the abandoned: Those who feel that the world has no place for them.

Now all of us will know something of their isolation and, in the case of people who live on their own, loneliness.

Those I’ve been writing about are the luckless hundreds of thousands in the United States — millions around world — who suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, now known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. They are sentenced to live separately by their illness and its debilitating fatigue. They are a kind of living dead. Now I have a glimmer, no more to be sure, of how it must be every day for these sufferers.

What will it be like for the rest of us in two weeks when we’ve exhausted the pleasures of home life and yearn to see our friends, go to a restaurant, a play or a concert? Just to live normally?

I’ve always tried to console myself with what I call “adventure therapy.” Like most pop psychology it isn’t very profound, but it does help. Will it help now? I have no idea.

Anyway, the therapy is that you try to find the adventure in any situation you’re in, which can include some hairy ones, like facing surgery. (Who will you meet? What’s all the equipment? How will they perform the surgery? Do the doctors like doctoring? What kind of life do the nurses live?)

In my own home — mercifully which I share with my ever-cheerful wife — I wonder where the adventure lies in this crisis.

First, I know I won’t write the Great American Novel or any work of fiction. I won’t write my life story, as I’m constantly advised to do. My ego is robust, but I’m not sure it’s robust enough for that.

Oscar Wilde worried about “third-rate litterateurs” picking over the lives of dead writers. Of course, it seems to me some lives are lived with an eye to posterity.

I’m always amazed at people who in the middle of great trauma or great events have time to sit down and write what they think and feel. I’m glad they do, but I don’t think we’re entitled. The world loves Shakespeare’s works and knows nothing much about him.

We know too much about people of minor achievement whom we call celebrities. We watch them and their petty lives with the attention of a fakir watching his snake. Yeah, I’m no better. I want to know what’s to become of Meghan and Harry, where will Lindsay Lohan settle and, only somewhat less trivially, what are the late-night comedians doing with their spare time now that we learn that they need huge staffs to be funny?

I do think we need a record of our times, often informed by memoirs.

Unfortunately, and inexcusably, when the Trump era is behind us, we’ll know too little about what went on in the inner councils of the White House. President Trump has shown near contempt for the Presidential Records Act, inspired by the fall of President Richard Nixon. Trump writes little and destroys much that it written, we’re told.

One has always dreamed of a time when there was enough leisure to read, maybe plow through Tolstoy, give Proust another go, or try to understand Chinese literature. But I think that won’t happen. I’ll read the same kind of books I always read: biographies and crime stories. Most likely I’ll read a bit more, curse television a bit more, and squander my time watching and reading the news about COVID-19.

As I struggle to avoid the temptations of the refrigerator and that reproving word processor (It whispers, “Write a book.”), I’ll wonder about those who existed before this pandemic in a long, dark tunnel of isolation without hope of light at the end: Those who can hardly hope to break out one day into what Winston Churchill called the “sunlit uplands.”