b'Once again, in this frayed Republic, there is scant middle ground. The virus is Godzilla destroying all before it. The virus is a myth, get over it. . .Nobody foresaw what a pathogen about one-thou-sandth the width of an eyelash could trigger in a society where truth itself has been obliterated. 17Truth, trustworthy information, myth, fake news, political rancor, tribal vitriol. The President of the United States and Jack Kerouac, it seems, came to the same conclusion from very different angles: People arent interested in facts. One interprets this as a license to pretend there is no such thing as truth and the other as a calling to evoke truth through literary fiction.The World Health Organization reported a few months ago that it was not only fighting COVID-19 but also an infodemic, which it defined as an overabundance of informationsome accurate and some notthat makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. The understatement of the century. In the Age of Ones and Zeroes, the time of Twitterdee-and-Twitterdumbism, the epoch of data smog, we are challenged to continually reconnoiter between the fake and the real.In order to seem more real, the worlds largest private bank uses the photo of an anonymous Asian rice farmer. 17 The Masked Versus the Unmasked, Roger Cohen (The New York Times, May 15, 2020)66'