NEGA DA NET: Quartzy: the delight edition

Happy Friday!

I'm Lila MacLellan, a reporter for Quartz at Work. I'm here this week to dwell on something we all need right now: delight.

I've stolen this theme from a brilliant episode of This American Life that first aired in January, which I discovered on a pre-quarantine drive from seeing my parents in Toronto. As my husband and I binged on podcasts heading home to New York, our rental car became an escape hatch from coronavirus anxiety. Listening to host and co-producer Bim Adewunmi as we drove rural highways past leafless forests, I felt my blood pressure and shoulders drop.

I was transported to a different road trip, one Adewunmi made as an American culture-obsessed teenager, visiting the US for the first time from her home in East London. In the episode, she recalled the pleasure of cruising in a friend's El Camino. The windows were down, the music was loud, and they wore cutoff jeans:"I was like, oh my god! This is America! I'm in a truck! We're on the road! The wind is in our hair! This is perfect! … Like it was a performance, but I knew all the words."

In defiance of her British sensibilities, Adewunmi decided that summer that seeking delight—"to find it and replicate it forever"—would become her life's organizing principle.

It feels a bit subversive to make the same commitment to levity now, given the epic catastrophe unfolding. And yet, that's what we know about delight, humor, or kindness: resistance is futile. "One of the complicated things about delight is that it can exist, like a kernel, at the center of misfortune," remarks This American Life co-producer Dana Chivvis.

Hearing this I thought of seeing my father, who has Alzheimer's, the day before. In one afternoon, though I hadn't gone anywhere, he recognized my "arrival" a few times, his face lighting up with surprise and joy. "There's my daughter now," he said, as if he had been expecting me. I was delighted.

Doctors' orders. We also know health authorities around the world are recommending we manage our stress levels to protect our mental health and immune systems. Delight isn't indulgent; it has become a part of self-care.

For some, the ideal counter-programming to nightly news is a stylish Japanese detective show on Netflix. For others, it's cooking shows, reruns of basketball games, or resurfaced episodes of Glee and Cheers. Still, there's a difference between comfort or distraction—also necessary in tough times—and delight.

The word is derived from Middle English deliten, which came from the Latin delectare, and relates to "delicere, to allure," says the Merriam-Webster dictionary. To be delighted, I'd argue, is to be charmed by the pleasurable and unlikely, intolerably cute, or awe-inspiring—or any combination thereof. Delight can have a spiritual element. Your awareness is heightened by it. Ideally, you're left feeling more openhearted.

Delight is Italians singing together from their balconies, during a nationwide lockdown, earlier this month.

In these trying days of quarantine, you might jot down "seek delight" on your to-do list. I've gathered some potential sources, with the help of my colleagues at Quartz.

A shared family recipe. Quartz reporter Daniel Wolfe lives in Oakland, California, miles from his mother in Baltimore. She has been feeling "pretty fear-stricken," he says, so they video chat regularly. "This weekend we set out to make banh bao, a notoriously difficult Vietnamese take on a bao bun," he messaged me recently.

"We chatted during the two and a half hours making it together," Daniel wrote. "I discovered that my mom first learned how to make bao when she was 16, from her mother, when they had just immigrated to the US from Vietnam. Sequestered and homesick, she shared how to make it, and we did the same some forty-plus years later."

Dogged delight. If there's one reliable source of goofiness and whimsy, it's dogs. Health reporter Katherine Foley dropped this video into Quartz's dog-focused Slack channel, unleashing delight. On Twitter, British journalist Hannah Jane Parkinson rightly called it "possibly the best short film ever made."

An ode to grace. "He rarely strikes the ball hard; rather, he calmly caresses the ball into the net, surrounded by a storm of opponents. It's a sight of extraordinary beauty," says Hasit Shah, deputy news editor in London, of Mo Salah, the soccer player featured in this delightful video compilation for Liverpool FC. "Mohamed Salah is not a typical soccer superstar," Shah adds. "He has a low-maintenance haircut and no tattoos. He is small and slight, and is a devout Muslim who bows towards Mecca after scoring a goal. But he scores many, many goals."

A throwback dance party. "Yes, I could listen to The Daily or new music while I walk my dog," says lifestyle correspondent Jenni Avins. "Instead, I keep queuing up Girl Talk's 2008 insta-party album Feed the Animals—a raunchy mash-up masterpiece that layers hits from the likes of David Bowie, Ludacris, Missy Elliot, and the Flashdance soundtrack. From the first beats on the snare, this relentless string of bangers turns our sleepy stroll into a sweaty dance-run."

Message the neighbors. From France, geopolitics reporter Annabelle Timsit describes taking to the street every day at 8 pm to applaud healthcare workers with crowds of fellow Parisians. "It's a form of solidarity I've never experienced with other French people," she says. Neighbors have also been leaving messages of optimism in chalk on the sidewalks. One says "l'insousiance reviendra!" or "Carefree times will return!"

Remarkable trees. Last week, design reporter Anne Quito walked to the foot of the Camperdown Elm, in Brooklyn. "Seeing the scarred, muscular branches of Prospect Park's 148-year old 'crowning curio' gave me a gush of reassurance," she recalls. "Once on the brink of death after a fierce rodent infestation, a poet who recognized its beauty saved it from peril. This old weeping elm has seen and survived so much, maybe we will too."

Remote control. Game sales are surging this month in the US, and within the Quartz newsroom. Why? "The simple act of manipulating a controller with my hands, which directly corresponds to actions/movements in the game—gives me a strangely powerful (though fleeting) feeling of peace at a moment when everything else around us feels totally out of our control," says Adam Epstein, entertainment reporter.

Socially distanced bird watching. Special projects editor Alexandra Ossola has been taking advantage of an "abnormally clear schedule" to go birdwatching with her boyfriend and a birder friend (at safe distance). In Jamaica Bay, Queens, she says they spotted 17 species, including hundreds of migratory snow geese, a northern harrier, two hairy woodpeckers, as well as warblers, sparrows, and cardinals.

"You enter a different headspace when you're birding—calm but also alert, more attentive to your surroundings," Alex promises. "Delight comes from glimpsing a new species or watching a bird do something wonderful or strange."

I hope you too find something wonderful, strange, and above all, delightful this weekend!

The original delight diary. The aforementioned This American Life episode was itself inspired by The Book of Delights (Algonquin Books, 2019), by poet Ross Gay. The writer began keeping a delight diary a few years ago. "I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand," he explains in the introduction. His 102 short meditations on topics like "Kombucha in a Mid-Century glass," "Inefficiency," and "The Sanctity of Trains" are enchanting and layered. He discovered themes in retrospect: "My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind." I promise it lives up to its title.

(Portrait: Natasha Komoda)