the covid-19 pandemic has confounded the world’s expectations at every turn. It began in surprise, continued with chaos, and devolved into conspiracy theories. From a policy standpoint, it gave the lie to our prepandemic imaginations of order and control. Public health experts, after all, had warned of an outbreak for decades. But despite its prominence among the grand global challenges that successive U.S. presidents were advised to take seriously, it still caught this nation and many others flatfooted. Nineteen months into the pandemic and counting, the balance sheet of losses and gains in the United States leans negative across public health, the economy, and democratic politics. How can we begin to make sense of a widely predicted crisis that, by late October 2021, had carried off nearly 5 million lives worldwide, stalled economies, and placed unprecedented strains on social ties and personal liberty?