Growing up as I did in the Cold War, I still experience a special kind of shudder whenever I come across an anecdote like that of Katya Soldak, whose Soviet nursery school teacher once showed her class a photograph clipped from a Western newspaper, "depicting skinny [Russian] children in striped robes walking in a straight line."

The capitalists who printed that picture wanted people to think Soviet children were "treated like prisoners," the teacher declared angrily, "when in reality the kids were on their way to a swimming pool in their bathrobes."

Which was a nice story (thought little Katya) — except that "I had never even seen a pool…. [T]hey existed in my mind as does an exotic animal or an unvisited city."

A time capsule from a remote dystopia? Think again.

Staring at me right now from the latest quarterly newsletter of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, is an identical piece of bad-is-good fakery: a photograph of an involuntarily isolated graduate student named Kalea Obermeyer, accompanied by a caption blandly informing the reader that the woman seated alone on a trunk in the confines of a cramped dormitory room, clumsily swathed in a surgical mask, "shelters in place" in "her most secure housing during the pandemic."