Welcome. What does it mean now, to be “at home”? Not so long ago we nonessential people were quarantined, hiding out from an invisible foe, either circled tight with family or flying solo, peeking out the windows at the scary world without. We awoke at home, spent the day at home, went to bed at home. One newsroom wag declared time changed forever: coffee time, wine time, sleep time. Everything else was work, even if you weren’t working. We were all just stacking time, at home.

Now we’re eating outside of restaurants, some of us, or gearing up to go to drive-ins for films. We’re shopping in sneaker stores instead of making rare mad dashes into the market for flour and milk. We’re voting, considering elevators, planning road trips, getting onto boats to fish. The coronavirus pandemic continues to swirl, and we’re out there amid it, many of us masked, some of us not, and we’re considering our ways forward into the charged, changed future, with whatever it brings.

Still, it bears repeating: We’re safest at home. And it is important that our lives there be as full as possible, cultured and rich. At Home is devoted to that conviction.

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So we’ll tell you all about delicious things to make and eat (strawberry drop biscuits, please!), and we’ll point you toward performances worth your time (here’s Aretha Franklin, “Never Gonna Break My Faith,” featuring The Boys Choir of Harlem).

We’ll encourage you to look closely at photographs — really closely, as art historians do — and we’ll help you get started exercising again, outside and in. We’ll let you hang out with the writer David Sedaris. We’ll teach you how to meditate. Want a book? “What’s Left of Me Is Yours.”

At Home provides all that distraction and more. It’s a collection of entertainments that won’t ever deny the news of the day or the moods of the nation, but will always embrace serendipity and stand for joy. Our best ideas for living right now appear below. We publish more of them every day. Please visit us At Home.

And let us know what you think!

How to deal.

• If you are lucky enough to have some outdoor space, you can improve your mood considerably by building an outdoor room. That might be the key to helping your kids avoid developing “Nature Deficit Disorder” — which is real — and could help parents avoid burnout this summer.

• It wasn’t so long ago that saying “masks” required some context for people to know what you were talking about. Now we’re working on getting kids to be OK with wearing them, and we’re figuring out how to exercise with one on. One things masks have taken away? Our facial expressions.

• And while a lot of emphasis in recent times has been on how we can stay positive in the middle of a crisis, a question we may want to ask ourselves: Should we be more pessimistic?

What to eat.

• Finding the perfect summer treat is a worthy goal, and you’d have a hard time finding one that has a better ratio of effort to tastiness than our Key lime pie bars.

• It’s never too early to plan a Fourth of July celebration, so we put together a list of recipes that will help you make the day memorable — even if it’s going to look a lot different than it did in previous years.

• Did you assume Melissa Clark would run out of ideas? She’s showing no signs of fatigue, with recent hits including a versatile cheesy olive loaf, an adaptable recipe for spicy pork kebabs, and a tomato-chickpea salad that tastes like summer.

How to pass the time.

• You can’t say people aren’t getting creative with the arts while the world is partially shut down. Recent innovations include opera by phone, and a series of plays you can listen to rather than watch.

• If you’ve been stuck inside for a long time, you might feel a strange sense of familiarity when watching any of these films, each of which took place in a single location. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for something to watch, a good way to celebrate the life of Joel Schumacher, who died this week, is to watch “Batman Forever,” the movie in which he revived a franchise.

• And if you have some time tonight, tune in for a live event where Tara Parker-Pope and Amber Coleman-Morty discuss how you can raise a socially conscious, anti-racist child.

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.