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Well, we’re in it for the long haul. As self-isolation and quarantine continue on — as the hours lose their edges, as the days start to blend together — we may find ourselves looking for new ways to pass the time, since some of us, suddenly, have so much of it. |
Nearly every week for the past five years or so, The Times Magazine has published a Letter of Recommendation: a column that, in its own way, suggests new things for readers to try. These articles have run the gamut — writers have extolled the virtues of Lent and Nikes, biting your nails and having a cocktail at lunch — but we’ve pulled together some of our favorite ones that can be experienced entirely indoors. |
Here are some TV shows to watch, games to play, activities to undertake and, we hope, opportunities to take your mind off things, if only for a few minutes. |
— Jazmine Hughes, Story Editor |
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For Music Lovers |
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“This is the pleasure of Radio Garden — the window it opens onto other places is both exceptionally vivid and exceptionally limited, like looking through a keyhole, so that you’re compelled to start filling in the rest of the picture yourself. Its interface obliterates all distinction between radio stations, and because radio stations themselves tend to target narrow slices of a population that I don’t necessarily know all that much about to begin with, Radio Garden raises as many questions as it answers.” Keep reading… |
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For Globetrotters |
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“What moves me about these videos is the combined pointlessness and preciousness of shooting ordinary street views and putting them up for five or 50,000 people to see. I don’t think it’s incidental that transportation videos provide a unique opportunity to glean the sacred in the mundane.” Keep reading… |
For Exhausted Parents |
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“Its explicit aim is to bring about in your child — through the sedative effects of repetition, through extreme dullness, through strategically staged yawns — a state of narrative-induced anesthesia.” Keep reading… |
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For News Junkies |
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“An hour before I go to bed, I turn off all my devices for the night. I hit the lights. I light a candle or two or three — enough to read a book by, or to just sit and stare at the flame, which, by drawing oxygen, reminds me I need to breathe, too.” Keep reading… |
For Know-It-Alls |
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“Life doesn’t present us with many opportunities to put to use the facts that we know for no other reason than that we know them. And so last year, when two of my smartest, most interesting, most encyclopedic friends revealed that they were members of an online trivia league, I wanted in.” Keep reading… |
For the Whole Family |
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“The problem with spending time with your children is that most of the stuff you can do with children is terrible.” Keep reading… |
For Mixologists |
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“I like to imagine what the instruments making these sounds would look like were they to take physical form — maybe some fleshy contraption from a David Cronenberg movie, capable of mutating, with the twist of a knob, into a completely different shape right before our ears. Or maybe the sound of a star shooting past your windshield as you drive up the freeway into outer space.” Keep reading… |
For Aspiring Soloists |
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“I felt like the speaker in the William Carlos Williams poem ‘‘Danse Russe,’’ who dances naked in front of the mirror once his wife, baby and nanny have gone to sleep and sings to no one: ‘‘I am lonely, lonely./I was born to be lonely,/I am best so!’” Keep reading… |
For the Gym Rat |
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“‘You’ll get there,’’ the other guy said. ‘‘Just keep working at it.’’ |
I returned to the park the next day. I did a few pull-ups, and a ropy, gray-haired Latino guy gently informed me that I was doing them wrong.” Keep reading… |
For the Couch Potato |
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“Many sitcoms are predicated on the notion that TV should lighten a viewer’s burdens by pretending they don’t exist. “Roc” was built on a different idea, which is that you can also lighten a burden by letting the viewer know he’s not alone in carrying the weight.” Keep reading… |
For the Dancing Machine |
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“I wish you could have seen me playing it a few Sundays ago. I was a model of funk and cool in a canary yellow satin tracksuit. I was dancing the way talented, seriously butch guys do, popping and locking with a hint of Jagger.” Keep reading… |
For the Linguist |
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“The app eventually became a type of productive therapy, replacing other time-wasters in my life. Can’t sleep? Let’s learn more Dutch. In the mood to text an ex? Maybe I should start the Danish course instead. Fighting the urge to tweet that ill-thought-out opinion on current events? You’ll feel so much better reviewing Dutch prepositions.” Keep reading… |
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