https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-during-a-pandemic-the-big-event-is-no-events/

Hi, everybody, and congrats for making it through another week. We’ll do this seven days at a time.

This past Wednesday, “after much deliberation,” the organizers of the Aspen Ideas Festival, scheduled for late June and early July, canceled the event. Like every other events team faced with zeroing out months of hard work—which is often the focus of an entire year and the whole of their jobs—they probably found themselves tumbling down the Kubler-Ross progression. This means lingering in the denial stage (maybe it will be over in a few months!), desperately bargaining (should we go virtual?), and finally making the depressing call to abort. Acceptance is the final stage, and in this case, it comes with the understanding that all that deliberation was pro forma. Conferences just don’t happen during pandemics. Everything is cancelled. Meanwhile, those who would have attended have moved on to bigger worries.