As I write this on the day I give my last lecture of the quarter, there is a lot at stake in this battle for democratic rule in Ukraine.

The Oxford Dictionaries offers three meanings of the term “judgment” -- two of which are relevant to this column and to a long article I am working on right now for a Shared Assessments Board Risk Report this spring: “a formal utterance of an authoritative opinion” and “the capacity for judging or the exercise of this capacity.”

After four weeks of teaching online, I am sitting in my campus office preparing to teach in person this afternoon.

We enjoy stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. We especially like clear resolutions to mark the end of a story. So, it’s no wonder that we’re itchy nearly two years later when the omicron variant has lengthened the COVID-19 story, and threatens re-entry to libraries, museums, theatres, restaurants, churches, schools, and sporting events.

The rapid spread of the Omicron variant of the COVID virus is troubling. The university has announced that it has already been detected on campus.

I want to thank all my students for the time and effort they put in a tough quarter. They have truly learned how to be students on campus again.

It has been a good week in my enterprise risk course.

Students were so exhausted and/or anxious that I dismissed them for both classes of the week.

The quarter proceeds, sometimes painfully. Teaching is one of my responsibilities at the iSchool. This week, teaching was especially rewarding because our guest speaker was Dr. Denzil Suite, UW’s vice president for student life, who oversees everything from housing to counseling to the UW police.

My column today is a collection of observations that are based in part on the social isolation we’ve all felt for last 22 months.