Summer

Thursday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Get off the La-Z-Boy this summer

From our US edition

After two and a half years of Covid waves and last year’s elusive hot-vax summer that never was, Americans are depressed, bored and clamoring for something to do. I’m one of them. Yet when it comes to choosing what to do, many of us are paralyzed by an embarrassment of riches. Allow me to be the thorn in your side that says: get off your La-Z-Boy and go do something. Anything. Scrolling through Netflix for your next binge-watch doesn’t count. Give your couch cushions some time to regain their figure. I’m probably the worst person to be penning this advice — I’m five days delinquent on my column deadline, and have been at least as late every month for as long as I’ve been writing in these pages.

summer

Wednesday

Francesca Peacock

Searching for the American summer novel

From our US edition

I am convinced that the sweet-smelling tycoons that run candle-making companies must have read too much Proust when they were younger. With scents like “Inspire,” “Bohemia,” and “Sunny Daydream,” they cannot be aiming for something as cheap and transitory as mere tawdry olfactory pleasure. They must have become all but obsessed by À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and be aiming for something akin to his narrator’s nostalgic odyssey upon tasting a madeleine: “and at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.” Rather pretentious, oui — but what other excuse can there be for a candle that proclaims it can smell like a cool library at midnight, or the depths of some dreamy reverie?

Saturday

Teresa Mull

Mowing the lawn is underrated

From our US edition

I struggle to enjoy summer. So each year, when the last frost drifts away to Australia, or wherever it goes, I grit my teeth and remind myself of the most “hot girl summer” moment I’ve ever had, and look forward to reliving the pleasure of lawn mowing that brought it about: I was house-sitting for my parents at our old farmstead in rural Pennsylvania. One of the responsibilities of this job is to put the trash out for the trashmen every week, because more than a decade ago, a little black bear got into the refuse and scattered it from our house to Kingdom Come. The trash shed has been guarded by a thin piece of electrified barbed wire that has deterred both bruin and garbage collector with equal efficacy ever since.

lawn

Tuesday

Mary Kate Skehan

Hot vax summer

From our US edition

Remember spring 2021? COVID cases dropped as the days lengthened, every balmy, breezy morning bringing happy news of America’s three-vaccine rollout. By the end of the season, vaccination wasn’t just for hospital workers and overweight asthmatics. As temperatures rose into the 70s in the Northeast, where I live, we heralded the arrival of ‘hot vax summer’: the triumphant return of fun to the 20- and 30-somethings whose social lives had been shut down tighter than last year’s Democratic National Convention. After a long, dark winter, hope sprang. Now it looks like hot vax summer didn’t quite pan out for many in our sex-recessed country.

summer

Thursday

Matt Purple

Let’s make it a Hot Bartender Summer

From our US edition

Is renaming the seasons a sign of late-stage capitalism? Or empire? Or decadence? Whatever the case, our cultural commissars have spoken and they’ve decided that seasonal epithets are back in. No longer is it acceptable to wistfully recall the summer of ’69; we must now commemorate it as Raspy Canadian Dreamboat Summer or some such thing. The Chinese have long categorized their years according to animals — dogs and rabbits and tigers and so on. Not us. What we’ve done is to head to the Narcissus pool, hold up a calendar, and demand that the months and equinoxes look a little more like us. This began two years ago when someone called Megan Thee Stallion released a rap single called ‘Hot Girl Summer’.

hot bartender summer