Virtually Perfect

WHEN I WAS a kid growing up in Danville, it was my job to adjust the TV antenna to pull in the signal from Indianapolis. My father, stretched out on the couch on Saturday morning, would say, “See if you can’t get that in a litt le better.” I would sort through my large collection of metal appendages—coat hangers, tinfoil, and copper wire—att aching some or all of them to the antennas to dial in Channel 4 and watch Dick the Bruiser batt le Jimmy Valiant. These many decades later, it remains the sole example of my mastery of technology.

I was thinking of this recently while participating in a Zoom meeting,