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Craft projects and gospel choirs.
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Welcome. After a year of limited socializing, seeing more people in person can be as exhausting as it is exciting. Activities once commonplace — hugging a friend, dining indoors, going to the movies — now feel novel, complicated, freighted with calculations that our mostly at-home brains take time to process.
Take it slowly. A car you haven’t started in a while needs time to warm up. Start your weekend with a gallery of crafts — including ceramics, quilts, paintings of Zoom meetings and a hand-tufted MetroCard rug — completed by Times readers. Check out Elisabeth Egan’s guide to the best books by Elin Hilderbrand, “the bard of Nantucket and the doyenne of flip-flops, outdoor showers and pink sunsets.” Read about the dancer LaTasha Barnes, about whom the critic Brian Seibert writes, “Steps and attitudes separated by eras flow through her improvising body not as some premeditated fusion but as a single language she appears to have always known and yet is creating on the spot.” Then watch her dance for yourself.
See how gospel choirs in Harlem found ways to bring live music back during the pandemic, and hear members of the Bethel Gospel Assembly perform “It Is Well” in the church’s empty sanctuary. Go inside “the relatably argumentative, highly downloadable marriage” of Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach (and answer the crucial question, “Are you a Glennon or an Abby?”). Stream the first episodes of the new variety series “Ziwe” (on which she asks Fran Lebowitz, “What bothers you more: slow walkers or racism?”), then see how the wardrobe for the show came together.
And if you get a chunk of time on your own, be sure to read Susan Dominus on how a group of teenagers in Missouri survived their sophomore year during the pandemic and Ligaya Mishan on how H Mart and other grocery chains specializing in cuisine from Asia have “revolutionized the way many Asian-Americans shop and eat.”
N. McGrath in Ontario is finding joy in a Netflix comedy series.
The saucy Australian series “Offspring” has been a wonderful tonic during Covid. We look forward, every evening, to a couple of episodes about the lovely, dysfunctional Proudman clan, as Nina and her family, their friends and workmates deal with life. The Nina/Patrick love story is certainly a highlight during seasons two to four, but the rest of the seven seasons are also entertaining, funny and touching. We are now watching it for the third time!
If you’re beginning to socialize more, how’s it going? Exhilarating? Exhausting? What have you learned about yourself and your circle as you gather in person for the first time in a year? Write to us: athome@nytimes.com. Include your full name and location and we might feature your response in a future newsletter. We’re At Home. We’ll read every letter sent. More ideas for things to do at home and away appear below. And I’ll see you next week.
You can always find much more to read, watch and do every day on At Home.