I've read and listened to a lot of stories in the past week about "the moment" when people realized that the global pandemic was going to change their lives as they knew it. While we'd been living with the impact of the crisis for months, for me, everything changed within minutes after the group photo at right was taken a year ago.

I had just finished up another workshop at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City, where I was working as a visiting professor through the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program.

Instead of teaching journalism classes as I had been invit...