Welcome. People talk about the new normal all the time now, but there isn’t one yet. There won’t be one for a long time to come. Our behavior is changing hourly with our moods, it seems, in response to stimuli that might be information, that might be instinct. It’s hard to say. We’re sitting at restaurant tables on the sidewalk, marching in the streets, streaming into thrift shops and bars. We’re giddy with pleasure, nervousness, joy, uncertainty. This person’s too close. That one’s too far.
What we know: It’s still safest at home, our hands scrubbed clean. We might be on the couch, reading noir: Nic Pizzolatto’s “Galveston,” currently. Or poetry: Claudia Rankine’s “Weather,” in The New York Times Book Review, for sure. We might be in the kitchen, making dinner: Melissa Clark’s crisp chicken schnitzel with lemony herb salad. We might be playing “Spelling Bee.”
[Like this newsletter? Sign up to receive it in your inbox.]
We might be pacing the living room, listening to this special episode of “The Daily” featuring Wesley Morris, our critic-at-large, talking about finding comfort at a time of need in the singer Patti LaBelle — in song and then on the phone. And we’re definitely going to curl into a chair tomorrow evening, to conference in to our Comfort, Cocktails and Conversation event with Veronica Chambers and Toni Tipton Martin at 6 p.m. Eastern. They’ll be raising a glass to Friday’s Juneteenth holiday, and talking race and food and joy. Please sign up to join them.
At Home provides all that and more: an archive of entertainments that run parallel to or entirely away from the news, a place to recharge mentally, and spiritually, even emotionally. We stand for art and design, dance and music and literature, deliciousness and self-care. Our best ideas for how to live a full and cultured life in a pandemic appear below. And we publish more of them every day. Please visit. And let us know what you think!
How to deal.
What to eat.
How to pass the time.
-
Father’s Day is Sunday, and the best gifts will be creative and priceless, in every sense of the word.
-
Rather than a typical standup act, Dave Chappelle’s new Netflix special is a raw accounting of police brutality, punctuated with images of black men who died at the hands of officers, while deftly interweaving his own personal history.
-
And in our latest playlist, Jon Caramanica recommended a new track by Lil Baby simply by writing out some of the lyrics:
“I find it crazy the police’ll shoot you and know that you dead but still tell you to freeze.”
“It’s too many mothers who’s grieving, they killing us for no reason, it been going on for too long to get even.”
“I can’t lie like I don’t rap about killing and dope but I’m telling my young ’uns to vote/I did what I did ’cause I didn’t have no choice and no hope, I was forced to just jump in and go.”
“I won’t take the stand, but I’ll take a stand.”
Like what you see?
You can always find much more to read, watch and do every day on At Home. And you can email us: athome@nytimes.com.
