Annaliese Griffin

I travel in some fairly nerdy circles. Over the years, I’ve logged serious time playing Settlers of Catan. One of my best friends from high school is a part of a group that has been playing Magic: The Gathering together for more than 20 years. But until recently, I had never heard of America’s biggest, oldest, kindest gathering of nerds: Gen Con, an annual gaming conference held in Indianapolis each summer.

The Great British Bake Off returned to American televisions on Friday, June 16, ushering in another season of show-stopping Charlotte Royales and gingerbread houses, ever-so-slightly risqué quips, and heart-melting civility.

The wellness movement is having a moment. The more luxurious aspects of it were on full display last weekend at the inaugural summit of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop, from crystal therapy to $66 jade eggs meant to be worn in the vagina. Meanwhile, juice cleanses, “clean eating,” and hand-carved lamps made of pink Himalayan salt have all gone decidedly mainstream. I myself will cop to having participated in a sound bath—basically meditating for 90 minutes in a dark room while listening to gongs and singing bowls. (I felt amazingly weird afterward, in the best possible way.)

Last fall, I moved to a small town in Vermont after living in New York City for 15 years. I promptly adapted to the New England winter diet: hearty soups and stews, excellent sourdough from the local bakery, and Christmas cookies baked in a blessedly full-size oven. Pretty soon, my flannel-lined jeans were snug. So I signed up for a fitness and weight-loss app called Noom, and vowed to change my eating habits.

Recently, I picked up a few pounds of mussels at the grocery store on a whim. On Sunday night, my husband and I hovered over a large pot, peering down at the shiny shells in a broth of white wine, garlic, parsley, and butter. I made a salad with a simple vinaigrette and sliced a loaf of good bread. It took us only 20 minutes to get dinner on the table, and the shellfish had clocked in at just $3 a pound. Sopping up the garlicky, buttery sauce with crusts of our bread, my husband proposed, “From now on, let’s have mussels every Sunday.” Challenge accepted.

Some people dream of sailing around the world for a year, or quitting their job to live in the mountains and write a great novel. My personal fantasy is to start my own commune. I’ll get a group of friends together to buy a decommissioned elementary school. We’ll cook together in the big industrial kitchen, turn the schoolyard into a community garden, convert the classrooms into bed-and-bath suites. The chance to pool our resources, create a community, and upend the nuclear-family model of living sounds intensely appealing to me. And the idea of eating dinner with a dynamic tangle of friends and loved ones every night doesn’t hurt, either.