From left, Stellan Skarsgård (Shcherbina) and Jared Harris (Legasov) watch Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 burn in Episode 1 of HBO’s miniseries CHERNOBYL.

We all have those moments in our lives when the world at large encroached upon us; moments like 9/11, the JFK assassination, or the Challenger explosion. Those moments that, when we are asked to talk about them around the office water cooler, we begin describing with the words, “I remember exactly what I was doing … ” or “I remember exactly what I was wearing … ”. For those of us not directly connected to any of these tragedies, some of those moments are just that: moments we’ll never forget.

Others become watershed.

I was 15 years old when the Chernobyl disaster occurred, and it was exactly seven days after Read the rest of this entry →