Editor's Note

Do you remember, in the first weeks of the spring shutdown, all those silver linings we scrounged up from our strange new lives at home?

I acknowledge this as a false belief, but tough times call for, uh, sometimes indulging a forgivable weakness for a little personal religiosity cooked up in your head. Mine is: Las Vegans are extraordinarily hospitable.

We can’t stop the future, but we can shape it.

I’m a walker. Not one of those elbow-pumping cardio-cult gazelles, enviably chugging along residential sidewalks and park pathways in superhero tracksuits. I wish I had that level of athletic will. No, I’m a nervous, ruminative walker.

I sure hope 2020 embodies at least a fraction of the spirit of cogent, assured optimism suggested by the number.

It’s only maybe kind of a little bit of a small coincidence that our annual Restaurant Awards feature falls in December, part of the season that celebrates rosy-nosed goodwill, generosity, and, if you’re doing it right, heedless excess.

For all its transience and fluidity, Las Vegas seems like a giant airport sometimes. Countless people — tourists, residents, nomads falling somewhere in between — perch for a while and then flutter off.

October marks that last quarter of the year that leans toward the decidedly domestic: fall, a time of settling down amid the happily familiar — think family traditions, think seasonal celebrations.

Productivity was all the molten rage for a minute on the internet: getting things done, lifehacks, deep work, inbox zero, social media blackout apps, monotasking.

I’ve had an on-again, off-again affair with yoga for (wow) decades now. Occasionally I’d get obsessed with some other form of exercise — running, swimming, weightlifting, aerobic existential screaming — but I always returned to yoga.