"The expanding reach of the technology is enough to make a person want to wear a mask indefinitely. We won’t, of course."

"With a spell of warm spring weather in New York City, masks are starting to come off and the smiles are returning to the faces—just as George Harrison once had it—and it really does feel like years since they’ve been here. To be unmasked feels good, natural, free, human. And yet, as covid-19 recedes in this country, the human face will be more vulnerable than ever. Unmasked, we’ll find that our faces have become common property. For technology, faces equal identity; we are our faces, but they are no longer ours alone."

From "Mask Mandates Are Easing, but the Way We Look at Faces Has Changed Forever/Monitoring the human face through technology has become the default mode of public encounter" (The New Yorker).