Fun in the time of fear
THERE WAS A LOT WE DIDN’T know a year ago when we picked “Play” as the topic for this issue. We didn’t know that a pandemic would put much of the United States and the world on lockdown. We didn’t know the Olympics, one of the reasons we selected the theme, would be postponed. Heck, we didn’t know I’d be writing this letter, my first as PopSci’s editor-in-chief, let alone that I’d be typing in isolation in my apartment as the staff remotely stitched together a digital-only edition. With everything turned upside down—and so quickly!—I started to worry that 96 pages of riddles and sports and fart jokes would seem tone-deaf in a time when life by necessity is serious and grim. And when the stakes are so very high. The…