Recommendations from New Yorker writers and artists for this time of social distancing.
Knitting isn’t just a way to pass the time that’s not spent reading news about the apocalypse—it’s an activity that requires intense mental focus, a hunger for learning, and a willingness to follow instructions meticulously. It engages your brain in a way that is at once low stakes, meditative, and highly productive. In her 1988 cultural history of knitting, “No Idle Hands,” the writer Anne L. Macdonald points out that knitting has, in the past, been cited as a cure for all sorts of compulsions and afflictions, including “nervousness, agoraphobia, rheumatism, insomnia, smoking, mental strain, and guilt.” Before COVID-19, I would have written off these claims as dubious. Now, though, as the doom of a pandemic threatens to undermine our collective mental health as much as our physical well-being, I understand knitting’s palliative power.
—Carrie Battan
I had some high-minded viewing recommendations to share, but in truth the only thing I’ve watched all the way through, since the crisis escalated, is “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul,” a road movie that relentlessly skewers meme makers and celebrity video gamers, red-state cuisine and helicopter parenting, with loads of literal bathroom humor at every turn. It took me a moment to realize that the mom of Greg, the Wimpy Kid, is played by Alicia Silverstone; it’s surely her best comic performance since “Clueless.” Also great is Greg’s dopey metalhead brother, Rodrick (Charlie Wright, looking like a cross between a young Keanu Reeves and Adam Driver). It could be that our reality has changed so much that my critical faculties have gone haywire; after all, the film has a scant eighteen-per-cent Tomatometer rating. But I think everybody is wrong and I am right. This is a real gem—one of the most deeply enjoyable pure comedies I’ve seen in years. (Confession: I make it sound like I just chanced upon this in the on-demand selections, but I saw it twice in the theatre. Remember theatres?)—Ed Park
My go-to listening for the moment is the BBC’s “In Our Time,” a weekly podcast from Radio 4, Britain’s equivalent of NPR, hosted by Melvyn Bragg. It’s got none of the slick production values and storytelling tropes we’ve come to expect from the medium—there’s no specially composed music, no cliffhangers, no hosts with vocal fry. Instead, there’s Bragg, a veteran broadcaster, author, and member of the House of Lords, who conducts a small roundtable of big-brained academics and critics to discuss a historical, scientific, ethical, or philosophical topic. Rather than keeping up with the terrifying news cycle, I’ve been browsing the program’s twenty-year archive, exploring bits of British history I’ve forgotten or never really knew. Why is there an aristocracy? What was the Field of the Cloth of Gold? I would like to think that listening to professorial types with plummy accents, speaking in whole sentences, is a form of self-education, but let’s be honest: it’s self-sedation. —Rebecca Mead
Previous recommendations: Thomas Mann, “The Wedding Party,” and Tracy Chapman.
