Digested week: a children’s party in New York felt like a golden-ticketed event

It was only a small gathering, the sort I used to dread, but it was a glimpse of a post-Covid world

Is a Great Easing under way? Superficially, it seems not. In New York, everyone is still masked. Teachers send kids home with Covid test kits at the slightest symptom and advise them to stay away until they have two negative results in the bag. In Chicago, the schools shut down for a week then reopened, while Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, freaked everyone out last Friday by making ominous noises about potential school shutdowns in the city.