Watch High Maintenance on Vimeo

Snow days offer that rare opportunity to catch up on stuff you’ve heard everyone talking/tweeting about but are too busy to actually watch. High Maintenance is one such show. The bite-size vignettes revolve around the world of a New York weed dealer and can easily be rattled through in a day. The first series is free but the second can be bought for $1.99. They’re a timely investment as well: the first episode is all about a survivalist in Brooklyn.

Lanre Bakare

Watch Transparent and Pink Flamingos, then read Lorrie Moore

A snow day is a day to endlessly stream, obviously. If you haven’t caught Transparent yet, then you are very lucky and today is your day. Don’t ask questions. Just do it. Worth buying Amazon Prime just for it.

Otherwise, a snow day is a day to stay in bed, wrapped up in your duvet, and revel in your favorite classic movies. You could pretend it’s Christmas all over again and watch It’s a Wonderful Life for the umpteenth time. Or be a little bit more daring and replay Pink Flamingoes. It’s about time that one came around again.

Then there’s the book option. Short stories are good on a snow day as you flit about aimlessly (what joy!). I’ve just read Lorrie Moore’s early collection Birds of America. It is dreamily good. The story People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in the Peed Onk is truly fabulous.

Ed Pilkington

Explore the Adam Curtis Archive

BBC filmmaker Curtis has long beguiled British audiences with his documentaries, which combine smart socio-political critiques with woozy stock-image footage. His most recent film Bitter Lake considers how the west’s relationship with the Saudis has shaped the modern Middle East, while other efforts contemplate everything from the origins of mass consumerism to the rise of Rupert Murdoch. Catch the lot over on documentary library Thought Maybe.

Listen to Title Fight’s Hyperview

One of the most exciting live acts around, on record these Pennsylvania punks have dispensed with the bracing hardcore of previous albums and instead have adopted a Husker Du-meets-My-Bloody-Valentine shoegazy swirl for new one Hyperview. It’s a move that’s proved divisive among their fans, but it should prove a good entry point for everyone else. Hear the album in full over on NPR’s First Listen service.

Gwilym Mumford

Watch The Good Wife

Unless you’ve been on another planet for the last year or so it is almost inconceivable that you will not have already been recommended The Good Wife. But maybe the hyperbole has make you sceptical. “It’s the best thing on television,” they say; “it’s better than the Moon landings,” they say. Well, they’re right. TGW is a genre-defying legal procedural which is constantly laugh-out-loud funny, thrillingly paced, breathtakingly relevant, with some of the best-written dialogue this side of West Wing-era Aaron Sorkin. Don’t believe me? Watch it. Right now. You have the whole day. If you have already watched it: watch it again.

Nicky Woolf

Listen to Natalie Prass’s debut album

Natalie Prass’s debut album, which is streaming here, will melt your heart if not the snow outside. Recorded with the house band at her label Spacebomb’s studio (the same set up behind Matthew E White’s acclaimed Big Inner), it’s an album that counterpoints lyrical themes of heartache with warm, soulful brass and string arrangements.

Listen to Indiana’s No Romeo (streaming here)

Alternatively, you could just embrace the icy atmosphere with Indiana’s electronic pop. Nottingham’s Lauren Henson boasts a pop vision as smart as it is melancholic, just don’t expect to the downbeat songs about dancing alone to make you feel any better about being stuck inside.

Tim Jonze

Read The Murder of the Century

If I had one snow-day suggestion, particularly for New Yorkers, it would be The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins. It’s the well-told tale of one of the city’smost scandalous murder trials and even though it happened during the Gilded Age, you can look out your snowy window and see it all over again.

Heidi Moore

Have an Armando Iannucci marathon

There’s The Thick of It for sweary moods, The Day Today for a bit of nostalgia, Veep for when you’re sick of British accents, Alpha Papa for when you want to watch a movie and On the Hour for when you can’t look at a screen any more.

Amanda Holpuch

Read James Joyce

If you haven’t read James Joyce’s The Dead, today’s the day. While it’s from his short story collection Dubliners, it’s technically a novella. Make a cup of tea and settle in for an hour or so. Even though I’ve read it a few times, I still tear up over the end. Snow isn’t the same after that.

Sarah Galo

Watch a Louie CK standup set online

He had to cancel his show in New York, so fuming ticket-holders and indeed everyone else can settle down instead to his back catalogue of standup sets, all available on his site for $5 a pop. Giggle helplessly and nod amazedly at how he always manages to isolate just how disgusting we are as human beings – and how much better it would be if we had a moral compass as well-calibrated as his. Read our 2013 interview with him here.

Listen to Caribou’s 1,000-song playlist

In case you’re stuck for days and days, this epic playlist from Caribou and Daphni man Dan Snaith will warm the cockles throughout. Afrobeat, cosmic prog, old-school hip-hop, minimalist rap, spiritual jazz, freaky Greek electronic soundscapes, Detroit techno … impeccable taste from the man behind our fifth best album of last year.

Ben Beaumont-Thomas

Watch Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle

You could easily binge-watch the first season in a few spare hours. Amazon’s half-hour comedy about classical musicians stars Gael García Bernal as Rodrigo, an eccentric wunderkind conductor who is hired by the chairwoman of a NYC orchestra to breath some young life into the ageing institution. Bernal is so good you’ll even forgive his hair – permed and pulled into a ponytail.

Lauren Gambino

Watch Force Majeure

Snow-related panic is the driving force behind Force Majeure, Swedish film-maker Ruben Ostlund’s magnificent and squirm-enducing dissection of a family in crisis on the pistes of the French Alps. Spoilers would be unforgivable but if you’ve ever wanted to see Ingmar Bergman rewritten by vintage Woody Allen (and who hasn’t?), this Oscar-nominated film is your chance.

Dominic Rushe

Make like a Canadian

As a Montrealer living in New York City it’s my duty to show off some Canadian winter traditions. One, a snow anthem: Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver (My country is not a country, it’s winter) by Gilles Vigneault, a Quebecois singer from the 1960s. It’s a reminder that in Canada, the Juno Blizzard of 2015 is referred to simply as “Tuesday”.

Two, if your urbanite kids need some inspiration for what to do with the white stuff outside, sit them down in front of La Guerre Des Tuques (The War of the Snow Hats) and then send them out to build an igloo like good Canadians would do.

Ruth Spencer

Take a quiz on books about snow

Watch Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Enjoy your toasty home while watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the epic road-trip buddy comedy starring John Candy and Steve Martin. It’s one of the few movies centered around getting home for Thanksgiving, but don’t let holiday fatigue stop you from watching – this is a hilarious classic.

Jessica Glenza

Visit the sunshine with Australian psychedelia

The land down under is having its moment in the Orange Sunshine right now, with scores of amazing groups wigging out over phased guitars. One of the scene’s leaders, Pond, put out their third album, Man It Feels Like Space Again this week, so if you want to feel like the snow never came, look it up on Spotify.

Be baffled by hit UK music

America and Britain are two countries divided not just be a common language, but by their different interpretations of rock’n’roll. In the UK, for example, Hootie and the Blowfish, Phish and the Dave Matthews Band never amounted to more than punchlines. But Britain has its own bafflingly successful acts – as you’ll discover if you listen to chart albums by Enter Shikari (this week’s No 6), Catfish and the Bottlemen (19 weeks on the chart) and Clean Bandit (mixing house beats and classical music to enormous success). Give them a go. Then go back to Phish.

Michael Hann

Watch Home Alone again

Home Alone isn’t just a Christmas movie. It is the definitive snowed-in film in the history of cinema. The grocery store. The radiator. Eating junk and watching rubbish. Nostalgia for snow days never felt so good, even if they don’t really exist any more.

Matt Sullivan

Watch Peep Show on Netflix

If you’ve never seen it before, what better way to spend a snowbound day than in the dysfunctional company of two grown men who are also trapped together in a flat (due to their lack of upward social mobility/general life skills)? Very funny, very British.

Watch Fargo on Amazon Prime US

The snow show to watch if you want to revel in a cold crime thriller full of warmth: the Coen brothers’ classic gets a witty remake/remix/homage in a do-over that revisits the quirky town, with Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Bob Odenkirk and newcomer Allison Tolman. Ten episodes should be just about right for a whole day inside.

Watch Lawrence of Arabia on Amazon Prime

How about some counterintuitive desert bound action to warm you up? Over 220 minutes of Peter O’Toole running around the Arabian peninsula in the first world war, this is the kind of epic romp that snow days were made for.

Richard Vine

Cocoon yourself with Chocolat

When a “clever north wind” is howling around my building and the radiators are clanking, chances are I’m going to wrap myself in a blanket and watch Juliette Binoche make sweets, fix everyone’s problems, fall in love with Johnny Depp and taunt Alfred Molina during his cleanse in the movie Chocolat. (Also: the outfits! And the Rachel Portman soundtrack!) It’s currently streaming on Amazon – though I’ve owned it since the days of VHS tapes and I have zero shame about that. Did I mention the outfits?

And, as anyone who’s watched it knows, the “romance” in this romantic comedy is secondary: it’s really about the power and importance of female friendships (Vianne and Armande, Vianne and Josephine) and the ways in which mothers can hurt the children they love immensely and are trying to protect (and how they can stop). There’s nothing like a good cry about your mother and a reminder of how much good friendships can change your life to warm you up on a cold winter’s day, even if, like Vianne, you aren’t expecting Johnny Depp to come back around after the snow melts.

Megan Carpentier

Watch Run the Jewels do a video session for the Blogotheque

Rap duo Run the Jewels, behind one of our top 10 albums of 2014, played a gig in Paris for the people behind the roaming, acoustic Blogotheque Takeaway Shows. Watch Killer Mike and El-P rouse an initially sleepy French crowd, in this 30-minute set of tracks from their last two albums.

Listen to the podcast Sound Opinions – Strange Bedfellows of Rock and Opinions on Sleater-Kinney

In this hour-long episode of the WBEZ Chicago podcast, music critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis talk about unexpected musical collaborations, off the back of Kanye West and Paul McCartney’s new year release Only One. They also review Sleater-Kinney’s new album No Cities to Love, which marked the ex-riot grrls return earlier this month. For more on Sleater-Kinney check out a blogpost dedicated to their legacy in punk, by Perfect Pussy frontwoman Meredith Graves.

Tshepo Mokoena

Watch House of Cards and Bond

If for some reason you haven’t binge-watched House of Cards on Netflix, do – I finished season two last night as the blizzard closed in (or didn’t, as the case may be) and it was tremendous. Otherwise, Netflix has nine Bond movies at the moment: recommend The Living Daylights, an underrated outing featuring the underrated Timothy Dalton. Bar For Your Eyes Only, the Roger Moores on offer are relatively minor shots from the great man’s canon. As it were. Reading-wise: the Mortdecai novels, by Kyril Bonfiglioli. Very funny, progressively darker and stranger and Not In Any Way As Embarrassing As The Film.

Martin Pengelly

Stream The Interview

The Seth Rogen and James Franco film that caused an international incident is available here for $2.99 – and in plenty of other places too.

Andrew Pulver

Watch The Shining

With Jack Nicholson at his creepiest, The Shining – the 1980 film based on Stephen King’s thriller – always comes to mind when I think about being snowbound. It’s a deliciously disturbing movie, making the most of the silence and isolation of winter and any daddy issues you may have.

Jennifer Kho

Listen to black metal

Snowstorms are a reminder of nature’s brutality and indifference, so it is to black metal we turn. Arcturus’s orchestral Wintry Grey reflects the season’s enveloping dread, while Immortal’s classic Beyond the North Waves uses it as a tableau for triumphant defiance.

Spencer Ackerman