What Were We Thinking?

In the early spring of 2020, freelance writer David Zweig was, like most suburban dads, willing to follow the advice of experts. “People were dying from a scary new disease, and my family and my neighbors were readily compliant with the governor’s orders to stay home and stay apart from each other,” he writes in his new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. As a member of the “laptop class,” and living in a charming Hudson Valley village, Zweig knew that he and his family were among the luckiest cohort of Americans when it came to weathering the Covid-19 pandemic.