Quarantine Culture Recommendations: Knitting, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” and Melvyn Bragg

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 BattanI 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 ParkMy 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 non
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