Hello. My name is Jen Zoratti and I am a columnist/feature writer in the Arts & Life department at the Free Press.

NEXT has been arriving in inboxes since February 2021 (I know, right? Time is a flat circle, etc.). Its mandate back then was to make sense of the unprecedented times we were living in. It was Peak Pandemic, and our world looked a lot different then, which is why the tagline of this newsletter was “a weekly look forward at a post-pandemic future.” NEXT takes its name from “next normal,” a phrase I preferred to “new normal.”

Now, I think we are living in that next normal. I believed — and still believe — that the pandemic shifted our culture in dramatic ways and, in some ways, permanently.

Do I wish we learned sliiiiightly more from that life-altering experience? Of course. Am I occasionally disheartened by the many ways in which we… just went back to doing things the way we did them before? You bet!

But the thing about culture is it’s always, always, always shifting and changing. So NEXT is now a weekly look forward at arts, culture and life.

Also, I will absolutely be revisiting the pandemic since its cultural impacts are still being parsed and felt — and COVID and long COVID are very much present in our lives. Five years out from when it started, we’re finally starting to get interesting studies about that time.

NEXT still comes weekly, it’ll still arrive on Wednesdays, and for as long as I’m writing and you are subscribing, my Nexties you’ll be.

Jen Zoratti