(NYTIMES) - The bad-luck streak started when I got Covid-19 and then it escalated: health troubles, deaths in the extended family, frantic worry about loved ones, too many of whom were struggling in the pandemic. All of it backgrounded by dire news about the natural world and my own beloved country. There have been times during the last 16 months when I wondered whether grief and fear were all I would ever feel again.

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions," Hamlet's perfidious stepfather observes, failing to note that his own crimes are to blame for the rotten state of Denmark.