| The first time Kenneth R. Rosen traveled to Iraq for a reporting assignment, he took with him a bulletproof vest. But really, that's not what helped him feel safe during his trip. It was Cliff bars and calls home and a talismanic tube of Chapstick and his thoughts of his wife. "It's coming home I enjoy most," he writes this week on Backchannel. "That first embrace after hours or days apart. In those moments, unprotected by any gear, I was bulletproof." Now, though, he is locked in with his family as the globe weathers the coronavirus pandemic, and everything feels a little too close. "I'm with people I love and trust, but the distance, which helped our relationships stay strong in the past, is gone … I feel under siege, and there's little I can do to protect myself. No bulletproof vest, no surgical mask, can give me the distance I suddenly crave." In this meditation on protection and distance, Rosen, the author of a forthcoming book about Kevlar, toggles between faraway places and intimate spaces, between the forces that hold us together and those that would drive us apart. Sarah Fallon | Deputy Editor, WIRED |
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