Can’t lick the witch wind that carries rumors
over shining aurora-lit prairies:
horror of what comes to light at the dawn
of the mind.

In the 1980s, the world’s largest producer of shoes was the Communist Soviet Union. In his 1994 book, Dismantling Utopia, Scott Shane reported that the U.S.S.R. “was turning out 800 million pairs of shoes a year—twice as many as Italy, three times as many as the United States, four times as many as China. Production amounted to more than three pairs of shoes per year for every Soviet man, woman, and child.

About a year and a half ago, I was scheduled to play a concert in Vermont when word came that the gig would be canceled because of an approaching nor’easter. I checked out of the hotel early, lobbed my suitcase into the rental car, and hightailed it to New York as menacing clouds darkened the rearview mirror.

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Lingering questions over the Epstein case are consuming the White House and paralyzing Congress. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss how a once-fringe conspiracy theory became a spiraling controversy.

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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.