Mike Ananny discusses “how the pandemic has shown how an everyday word like ‘public’ actually contains myriad assumptions about why and how to live together.” Ananny argues that as “public life”—both as concept and practice—has been destabilized under Covid-19 conditions, we witness how the conventional notions of a “public sphere” has always limited our understanding of “public” and diverted attention from the inequalities that underpin it. At the same time, public life during the pandemic has revealed multiple examples of social connection and mobilization that broaden the scope of “public” in ways that imagine “what public life could be like.”