Masks save lives – and so most of us have been wearing them in public for months. But recently, always working from home and mostly going out just to visit supermarkets full of masked shoppers, I’ve started really missing faces. I miss the faces of my friends and family, seeing them unmediated, not on a screen. But I also miss strangers’ faces: I miss staring at people on the tube or in pubs. ‘The face speaks,’ wrote the philosopher Emanuel Levinas. It is through other people’s faces that we recognise the existence of the world and our responsibility to it. The question of the moment is how to assume that responsibility to the world when it demands precisely that we cover our faces with masks. So there is perhaps a little irony in the fact that, around the same time we are all masking up in our daily lives, two of the world’s most famous mask-wearers – the French electronic music duo Daft Punk – announced they were calling it quits. As Stephen Colbert posted on Twitter, ‘I feel like someone should tell Daft Punk this is literally the worst time to hang up your masks.’