Social Distance

Where were you in March of 2020? When did you realize Covid was a thing that was going to disrupt life as you knew it? I was hiking in Joshua Tree, spending my days delirious at the natural beauty of the desert, unsure if I should return to New York. Each time I refreshed The Times’s coverage, it seemed more and more evident that going home would mean staying indoors for the foreseeable future.

I came back. I began working at The Times a few months later (from my living room) and soon started writing a newsletter called At Home, wherein I tried to help people lead full, cultured lives from their living rooms. It was a project intended to help people find distraction, comfort, meaning, joy, sense, commiseration and community in the midst of what felt at times like intolerable uncertainty. Here’s what to watch, read, cook, listen to, think about. You could attend this virtual disco, or this virtual poetry reading or someone’s virtual birthday party, where you’ll squint at screen after screen of squares of people you know and people you don’t, smiling and focused, so close up and so far away. Remember virtual happy hours? Remember Zoom shirts? Remember when it was weird to see your colleagues’ bedroom décor on video calls? Who would have thought Brian from analytics would choose those table lamps?

I spent so much time thinking about coping in those days. We all did. In the midst of a lot of confusion and sadness, there was creativity. Pandemic pods. Sourdough mania. Alfresco dining enabled by every conceivable form of outdoor heating element. A friend of mine started a dance troupe in her town that practiced its choreography on Zoom then performed their dances on neighbors’ lawns. Another built a bed in the back of her SUV and drove across the country, sleeping in her car. I reconnected with college pals I hadn’t spoken to in decades; once we realized how easy it was to FaceTime, it seemed ridiculous that we hadn’t been doing it all along.

Five years isn’t long enough to get perspective, not really. It’s a roundish number so it feels meaningful: a good time for retrospectives, to ask what we learned, how we’ve changed, how we haven’t. The things we swore we’d do differently once “the world opened up again” — are we doing them? I vowed more socializing, more dinner parties, more dancing, more trips, more visiting people just because. No more taking in-person contact with other humans for granted! I’d like to renew these vows, but the world opened up and so did the options. There was so much room for longing in lockdown, so much time to romanticize freedom of movement and to fantasize about the possible lives we’d lead in the future. But unless you put some kind of plan in place for executing these intentions, it was easy enough to just slide back into how it once was: Other humans are lovely at times and annoying a lot of the time and it takes effort to plan a dinner party.

But remember when every hug involved calculation? I wrote about it in the At Home newsletter, how I hoped “this new appreciation for each fleeting moment of contact, the meaning in every casual touch” wouldn’t ever go away. Despite my best intentions, it has. However sincere our lockdown-era intentions to forever relish all the things we missed, we reverted. There’s probably not a lot from that period we want to resurrect, but maybe those plans, those intentions to value each other a little more intentionally, we could consider revisiting.

THE LATEST NEWS

Government Funding

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• The Senate passed a spending bill to keep the government running, after Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, and several other Democrats allowed the measure to advance.

• Schumer, who made an about-face on the bill in recent days, said he was protecting Democrats from the long-term damage of shutdown.

• But many in his party disagreed. “I believe that’s a tremendous mistake,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said.

More on Politics

• In a speech to the Department of Justice, President Trump lashed out at the lawyers and prosecutors who had investigated him or opposed his policies. (Here’s a fact-check.)

• A draft list for the Trump administration’s planned travel ban includes 43 countries — broader than the ban he enacted in his first term. See the list.

• Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, is investigating whether intelligence officials leaked information to the news media.

• In his Senate confirmation hearing, Mehmet Oz, the former TV doctor tapped to oversee Medicare and Medicaid, largely deflected Democrats’ concerns and seemed to escape unscathed.

• Oklahoma’s Board of Education approved social studies standards that would ask high school students to identify “discrepancies” in the 2020 election.

• President Trump signed an executive order seeking to dismantle seven more federal agencies, including the one that oversees Voice of America.

Other Big Stories

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• Paul Mescal stars in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Our critic says Mescal, known for sensitive portrayals of hurting hunks, does justice to the brutish Stanley.

• The veteran stage and screen actress Jean Smart will star in “Call Me Izzy,” a one-woman Broadway show.

• A new production of “Othello,” starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, made $2.8 million last week — a record for a nonmusical on Broadway.

More Culture

• Niantic, the company behind the hit mobile game Pokémon Go, is selling its video game business to a company owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund for $3.5 billion.

• A philanthropist couple donated $50 million to the Lincoln Center to promote contemporary dance. The center hopes the gift will revive New York’s dance industry after the pandemic.

• Netflix signed a deal with the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who drew widespread scorn last year when he mocked Puerto Rico at a Trump rally.

• How much do you know about the great author feuds of modern literature? Take this quiz.