Welcome to today’s edition of Navigator, CityLab’s biweekly Saturday newsletter.

For those of us who were lucky enough to have spent much of the past year and a half working from home, the return to the office has brought with it the return to “toting around a tupperware full of meal-prepped farro as if you’re ever going to eat it” and “waking up an hour earlier but still somehow being 14 minutes late” and the classic “accidentally touching someone’s feet under the benched desk and feeling weird.” Fossilized apples and limp Post-Its saying “call epidemiologist back: does bird poop carry covid?” from March 2020 greet us at our desks, as if nothing has changed. 

But a few things already feel different. Questions about mask etiquette and dress codes abound. Weather-related small talk has been replaced by “first time back?” and “so, what capacity do you think this is at?” 

And if you happened to work in an open office pre-pandemic, the physical space welcoming you back may be transformed.

One of the stories I wrote back in May 2020 was about how open offices were changing up their designs to address the aerosol transmission associated with sitting elbow-to-elbow in a giant room with no walls. Architects and designers told me and my other CityLab colleagues that building managers would be
revamping HVAC systems, reducing density, adding plexiglass dividers (though their germ-blocking effects are disputed), and using stickers to create new traffic patterns. 

Widespread vaccination may make some of these adjustments less urgent, but others could also do a lot to address the other problems with open office life, like lack of privacy and too much background noise to concentrate. Even without bringing back walls wholesale — a process that will take time and money and maybe even a new lease — open-office critics hoped Covid could mark the catalyst for closing in some parts of the floor plan. Others theorize that the office will no longer be a single building but an ecosystem of downtown spaces for work.

If you, dear reader, have noticed a change in your office life since returning, send me an email. Are there more sound-proof pods? A designated “Zoom room”? Are you using your space differently? Taking more meetings outside? Let me know what looks different, and how it’s changed the experience of in-office work. 

I won’t end this newsletter litigating whether or not 100%-remote-everything is here to stay. Personally, I’ve been enjoying the opportunity to go back to my desk intermittently, and tend to agree with Slate writer Christina Cauterucci: “if I have to write posts to clothe my body and fill my fridge (and I do), I’d much rather do it in a space dedicated to post writing than in the one dedicated to everything else in my life.” 

That doesn’t mean the transition is ideal for everybody, especially for the majority of people who recent polls say do feel more productive at home, or have child-care responsibilities, or who have had to contend with toxic workplace dynamics. (I am still wondering whether the person who had and hid a secret baby during the pandemic will be able to break it to her boss if they cross paths again IRL.) 

Still, it would be nice if someone came in to keep the commuters company. 

—Sarah Holder

• Cultish, a new book by Amanda Montell, explores the “language of fanaticism,” from hard-C cults (like Jonestown and Scientology) to less insidious communities with no less fervent followers (like Soul Cycle and Amway). ( Harper Collins)

• What happens when the crypto miners come to town. ( Curbed)

• Flooding is coming for Bay Area highways. ( San Francisco Chronicle)

• Forensics revealed the culprits behind a felled traffic pole in Japan: bad dogs ( Newsweek) 

• Giant goldfish alert! ( City of Burnsville Twitter)

• @saztravel peeks at goldfish at a Hong Kong street market

• @camilleammoun asks “Métropolitain ou vélopolitain?” from France

• @masterofcities gets immersed in a Van Gogh exhibit in Hawaii

• @staklo_urbex calls the Kyiv Institute of Information the “Mother Ship”

Tag us with the hashtag #citylabontheground so we can shout out your photos on CityLab’s Instagram page or pull them together for the next edition of Navigator.