Modern Ruhles: “Everything is amplified”

I love Modern Ruhles, Stephanie Ruhle’s podcast about “getting comfortable talking about the uncomfortable.” I almost always find some nugget of perspective that helps put the national mood into context—like this quote from MSNBC columnist Liz Plank, her guest on sex and dating in the time of Covid:

“If you’re single, you’re extra single. If you’re married, you’re extra married. If you have kids, you extra have kids. Everything is amplified.”

Whatever you’ve got going on within the walls you call home, it probably feels bigger than it did before the pandemic. The pandemic’s muting of public life was plainly obvious, but its amplification of private life was (for me, at least) much harder to recognize. I think we’re just beginning to wrap our heads around this and the other second-order consequences of COVID-19.