What's there to do while stuck indoors?

Illustration by Tamara Shopsin

 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 Battan