ON THE COVER
It’s a tradition in computer science, dating back to the days of the earliest microprocessors, for rookie coders to pass a simple test. They must write a program, no more than a few lines long, that outputs the phrase “Hello, world!” As we look ahead to the coming months—to the end, we hope, of isolation and the start of new growth—we can’t think of a better message than that. So we asked Lisa Congdon, an artist based in Portland, Oregon, to put it on our April cover. The program isn’t ready to run quite yet; there’s still the vaccine rollout to worry about, and the emerging variants, and plenty else. But one day soon, the world is coming back, and you’ll want to say hello.…