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“Reading has been unfairly maligned as an indoor activity for far too long,” Bekah Waalkes wrote this past spring. “As a child, when nice weather came around, I was told to put down my book and go play outside.

Can this really be the song of the summer? For seven weeks now, the most popular tune in the country has been Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”—a solemn ballad that has all of the warm-weather appropriateness of a fur coat. Ideally, the song of the summer is a buoyant one, giving you a beat to bob a flamingo floatie to. “Ordinary,” instead, is made for stomping, moping, and forgetting.

Aufort Jerome / Getty
An aerial view of Guédelon Castle in Treigny, France, in 2023Jacky Naegelen / Hans Lucas / Reuters
Stonecutters work at the construction site of the Château de Guédelon on June 25, 2005.Xavier Rossi / Gamma-Rapho / Getty
A person in medieval-style clothing observes the building site of Guédelon Castle in June 2002.Thierry Perrin / Gamma-Rapho / Getty
A blacksmith in period attire works at the Guédelon Castle site on April 12, 2018.

Americans have a long history of enduring heat waves by going outside. In a 1998 essay for The New Yorker, the author Arthur Miller described urbanites’ Depression-era coping mechanisms: People caught the breeze on open-air trolleys, climbed onto the back of ice trucks, and flocked to the beach. In the evenings, they slept in parks or dragged their mattresses onto fire escapes.

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Earlier this summer, I spent one blissful week on vacation doing some of the best vacation things: lying in the sun with a book until my skin was slightly crisp, making full meals out of cheese and rosé. Of course, when I returned, I felt very, very sad.

I was taking soup to the orphans, as usual, when a young man I’d never before met seized me by the arm. “Donald,” he said. “My name is Barack Obama, although that’s not important right now. In fact, you’ve already forgotten it. Before I matriculate at Harvard Law School, I must introduce you to someone who’s going to change your life.”
I looked at my watch. It was 1987.
“Who?” I asked.
“A man with whom you have nothing in common,” the mysterious figure went on. “Not one single thing.

This was supposed to be the summer superhero movies became fun again. At first, that appeared to be true: Superman, released earlier this month, relaunched DC’s previously dour cinematic universe as a brighter and bouncier affair; the film zips from one encounter to the next with sincere aplomb.

Adolf Hitler’s first weeks as chancellor were filled with so many excesses and outrages—crushing states’ rights, curtailing civil liberties, intimidating opponents, rewriting election laws, raising tariffs—that it was easy to overlook one of his prime targets: the German central bank.
The Reichsbank president was a man named Hans Luther, a fiscal conservative who subscribed to the “golden rule” of banking, which stipulated that a country’s indebtedness should never exceed its obligations.

“Wi-Fi is available on this flight,” the flight attendant announced on a recent trip I took from New York City to St. Louis. She recited her routine by rote, and Wi-Fi is among the details that now need to be conveyed, along with explaining how to use a seatbelt and enjoining passengers not to smoke e-cigarettes on board.
But when the time came to use the Wi-Fi, the service didn’t work. Eventually, enough people noticed this that the crew “rebooted” it, after which it still didn’t work.