James' World 2

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(Emily Wright/The Washington Post)

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In college, after being subjected to plastic-tinned deli sushi and leftover club meeting pizza, I began craving home cooking. Specifically: simple, cozy jia chang cai, or homestyle Chinese dishes that many families, including mine, put on the weeknight dinner table. I pined after tomato-egg stir-fry the most, perhaps the simplest and coziest of all.

Ideally, the tomatoes are bursting with August ripeness and the eggs are beaten with Shaoxing or rice wine. The sweetness in the mixture, sharpened by a spoonful of sugar, almost turns it into a treat. Nearly every Chinese family has its own version; some make it sweeter, some lean more savory. Until I missed it, I didn’t realize how emblematic of home it was.

Tomato-egg stir-fry is a light, easy dish made with ingredients you likely have in your fridge. It’s quick to whip together for dinner after a long day of class, work, or travel, though I love eating it for breakfast and lunch too. Pairing it with white rice and cucumbers marinated in soy sauce makes it a complete vegetarian meal that hits just about every cravable texture and flavor—and it comes together in minutes.

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Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Spencer Richards

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Who among us isn’t depressingly familiar with the constant tug of war between putting off tasks that require focus, and, like a moth to a flame, being drawn to distraction?

Sometimes we blame ourselves, cursing our tendency to procrastinate. But we should give ourselves a break. We’re living in an unprecedented age where billions of dollars have been made by machines designed to tempt us away from doing what we had planned to do.

These thoughts are hardly new. But something happened recently, which—ironically—has captured no small amount of attention and provided me with a glimmer of hope that the Internet that has rewired our minds could also be used to untangle them.

Last month, YouTube suddenly suspended Lofi Girl, a music live stream that had been broadcasting, uninterrupted, for some 20,843 hours—more than two years—gathering 660 million views in the process. The takedown was due to a false copyright claim and was later reversed. But such is Lofi Girl’s popularity that its fans were, briefly, bereft.

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Right now, this dish is my favorite way to eat chicken fresh off the grill because it turns all the delicious parts of the popular chicken Caesar salad into a sandwich you can pick up and bite into.

Boneless, skinless chicken thighs — or breasts, if you prefer — get a short, quick marinade in oil, mustard and garlic powder before grilling. You can cook the protein on a grill pan or in the oven, if you prefer.

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Marta Crilly has come to despise her outdoor patio heater. She bought it in the late summer of 2020, hoping it would allow her to host some outdoor gatherings before the Boston winter really hit. “It wasn’t honestly that warm, but it was better than nothing,” she says. At least it was an excuse to get people over. In the summer of 2021, she decided to get rid of it — she figured there’d still be a market for it, since Covid-19 was still with us, as would soon be the Boston cold.

Turns out nobody wanted it. She’s been trying to sell the device and even give it away for nearly a year, and she’s had absolutely zero bites. In the Buy Nothing group she’s in, all anyone would have to do is come pick it up. “Nobody’s even interested,” says Crilly, an archivist for the city of Boston. “People don’t even like the post.”

Crilly is hardly alone. Plenty of people are sitting around their houses and apartments, weighing their pandemic purchases — sometimes the house or apartment itself — and wondering, “Huh, what was I thinking?” Consider it a Covid-specific flavor of buyer’s remorse.

When in distress, a lot of consumers are inclined to throw money at their problems. During the early days of the pandemic especially, there was all this pressure to better ourselves, or at least channel our energy somewhere, which in our society often translates to buying stuff.

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Amid the Covid-19 pandemic social distancing and mask-wearing restrictions and requirements, beach-goers take a boat ride with their dogs on a sunny summer day off Santa Catalina Island, California, on August 11, 2020.Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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