~In this time,~ would you say you’ve been doing more or less than usual? Sure, you’ve stopped commuting, but you’re also probably processing a lot more, advocating a lot more, and carrying more weight. For anyone needing a counterbalance, you may have your eye on yet another thing to engage in more: meditation. As if the cosmos had its ear out for you, the Dalai Lama released an album this week of mantras and teachings set to music. Each track on Inner World is devoted to a theme like “Compassion,” “Wisdom,” “Healing,” or “Protection,” and each has its own lyric-inscripted video. While the album, which is free to stream, is kind of a gift in itself, there are a bunch more gems buried down the rabbit hole of His Holiness’ YouTube channel. Listen and breathe.
Over the last several months, work-from-homers have cohered around a basic idea: who needs pants. But that puts us in kind of a funny position when it comes to shirts, doesn’t it? Sure, you have video meetings for which you need to look *presentable,* but you’re not going to walk around all day with business on top and party on the bottom. Enter: the Zoom shirt, a thing you’ve almost certainly been using but maybe haven’t yet named, the lone garment that you keep handy to throw on whenever you have to appear onscreen. While this phenomenon coined by the writer Joel Stein is delightful in itself, what’s even better is the truth it lays bare*: work clothes are over. Business casuals are lying fallow in closets, destined for an eventual thrift store where they will likely continue to go unloved. That’s bad news for the Brooks Brothers and Ann Taylors of the world (both going bankrupt), and a huge life upgrade for the rest of us.
*heh
If Brooks Bros, Ann Taylor, AND Macy’s are about to stop paying rent, who’s gonna float the malls? No one, that’s who, which is why they, too, are dying. So, what to make of their skeletons? Why, apartments, of course. Developers are looking at malls as templates for “communities” mixing retail with residential and common space— “a great example of evolution in the shopping center industry,” according to a spokesperson for the mall conglomerate, Brookfield Properties. On one level, fine: shifts like this could hypothetically be great for developing affordable housing, of which there is an extreme shortage in and around most American cities. But the reality is that these spaces are super expensive to convert, which means that developers will want to position them as high-end developments, of which there are already far too many. On the bright side, the promise of living in a restored Hollister could be a handy way to sequester all the people who were terrible in high school and never moved on. Always look for the silver linings.
