Watching the wildly popular television series Love Story took me back to a strange week in my past. One day in April 1994, I was working in a studio apartment that I used as an office. I split the cost with Cynthia Horner, a psychiatrist who’d recently moved out to live with her boyfriend, the songwriter and cyberspace philosopher John Perry Barlow , who was a friend of mine. Late in the afternoon my wife called me with the shocking news that Cynthia, just shy of her 30th birthday, was dead. I called Barlow, who told me that Cymthia had passed away suddenly on a plane. Both of them had suffered from a bad flu the previous week, and the virus had been silently attacking her heart. I dropped everything and headed to Barlow’s place. For the next six hours, Barlow and I cried, drank, and head-banged in the wake of the inexplicable, along with another friend. That friend was no stranger to tragedy. He was John F. Kennedy Jr. Barlow, who died in 2018 at age 70, was known for many things.…