For Those I Love is the producer David Balfe’s eponymous album about losing his best friend and former bandmate in 2018. Now, like all content about grief, these songs speak to everybody. Of the 76 electronically-tinged tracks Balfe wrote for this album, nine ultimately made the cut, and we’ll nominate “You Stayed / To Live” as the best of the bunch. Tune on in (and if you have eyes to spare, the video is mesmerizing).

We know that basically every restaurant has gone online during the pandemic. And that might make for a bigger industry shift than you’d imagine. A platform called BentoBox has gone gangbusters this year helping restaurants add digital capabilities like to-go ordering, delivery scheduling, and gift card sales to their websites, and those basics appear to be something of a digital trojan horse: the company’s real value prop is to help restaurants form “direct relationships” with consumers the way e-commerce companies do, which translates to “gathering data on patrons.” Don’t worry about your personal info— everyone has it already. What’s striking is that restaurants, which have always been works of art based on the whims of their creators, could now start make decisions, from menu to business model to design, based on who they now know they’re serving. Is that good, bad, or neutral? Probably all of the above.

You remember when virtually every food service worker lost their job a year ago. Now, as the whoring 20s wind up and restaurants start opening again, no one is coming back to work. The break made it clear what a bad bet restaurant work is, between the low wages and high risk, and restaurants of every kind across he country are struggling to staff up. To sweeten the deal, owners are starting to offer incentives like higher salaries, extended benefits, and bonuses, which we love to see. Let’s call that the road to the new normal (maybe with the help of the Restaurant Workers Community Fund?).

For everyone rushing out to restaurants anyway, did you know there’s a mask just for you? Please meet the nose-only dining mask, effectively a Patch-Adams witch costume created by “researchers” to “stop the spread of Covid-19.” The single-orifice cover is supposed to help you breathe through your nose while you chew, which might help you spread fewer Covid particles if you hold your breath while you take bites and don’t engage in any table conversation. While its benefits are uncertain, what we do know is that it makes you look way cooler than whatever you’re wearing right now. Try it and see!

Moving back into the realm of the reasonable— that is, the full lower-half  cover— how long are we gonna be wearing these things outside? Maybe not much longer! Obviously the risk of outdoor spread is super low, particularly for vaccinated folk, and as for the whole “it makes everybody feel safer” argument….. does it? In the words of a Harvard epidemiologist, “We don’t recommend condom use when people are enjoying themselves alone to get them to wear condoms with their sexual partners.” So why do we think outside masking is good training for good behavior inside?