I'm writing a "summer fun" zine in response to an AI-generated newspaper supplement earlier this year. Support one of the causes below or one of your own; then submit receipts for those donations OR Queer Games Bundle purchases, and suggest ideas for the zine. Or throw me curveballs if you want! I'll make them work. This page will update frequently alongside my stream. Scroll to the bottom for whatever is newest. So far: Books • Swimming • Grilling
Everyone's version of a summer read is different, but for me, these are books that tell stories about hot weather adventures, boat trips, twisty and fun thrillers, bad times on vacation, and more. Summer is a state of mind as much as it is a time of year.
This lushly illustrated book highlights some items from David Copperfield's personal collection, going back well over 100 years and documenting the history of stage magic. Copperfield has two coauthors on the book, suggesting his role was likely to talk about these items and let the writers polish his comments. He's one of the most charming guys to ever do stage magic, and one of the most financially successful. It's fun to read the history and context of a magic trick in the same breath as a firsthand account of how difficult the trick is to do.
Honestly, many Michael Crichton books feel like great summer reads -- he cornered the market for many, many years with hits like Jurassic Park and The Lost World. But Sphere is a little bit thinkier and more claustrophobic, with long discussions of big life questions. The main characters are all different types of scientists, making these chats a kind of Who's Who of 80s ideas -- many of which we still debate today.
This surreal novel is hard to categorize, but is darkly funny in the same vein as the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man or even Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. The main character has bought a coastal home for a bargain price, but she's displaced after the house is wiped away by a hurricane. Where do you go when everything you own has been washed into the sea? It barely throws her off her stride.
Before her pioneering feats as a pilot or her untimely disappearance, Amelia Earhart worked as a social worker and in a variety of other traditional "women's jobs" at the time. She also rode along on some important journeys instead of piloting them herself. In 1928, she spent 20 hours and 40 minutes (as the title suggests) crammed into the back of a small plane that crossed the Atlantic Ocean. She became the first woman to ever make that trip. Her book, part autobiography and part event chronicle, is much funnier and more wonderful than it has any right to be.
After the main character's wife is killed in a shocking accident, a family friend offers him an island cabin as a writing retreat. But something isn't right on this odd little island, where only about 30 people still live and rely on tourist money to survive. If they need tourists, why do they also hate outsiders so much? It's a classic setup for some creepy hijinks.
I wasn't familiar with the term "midnight feast," but it seems to be a Britishism about children having a selection of snacks in the middle of the night. In this novel, a young woman spends time at a coastal U.K. campground trying to impress some local aristocrats who are "above her station." Decades later, everyone returns for the nearby manor's grand reopening as a retreat for the uberwealthy.
Many book series can be considered summer reads, but Charlaine Harris' first True Blood novel really dwells on the sultry heat of her Louisiana setting. I also hadn't thought before about how vampires are basically always having a hot meal, you know? In Harris' alternate history, vampires are "out of the closet" (oughties eyeroll) and they can survive on synthetic Tru Blood. Main character Sookie Stackhouse serves bottles of it, ice cold out of the cooler, at her waitress job.
For fans of the underrated 1990s Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon movie The River Wild, this is a thriller about two men whose fishing trip turns into a rescue and protect operation. They've packed to survive a very remote backpacking and fishing trip, taking only what they can carry. But they find an injured, delirious woman deep in the woods and decide to help her. That means dividing everything by three instead of two, and finding a way to care for and carry her to safety.
When I looked this book up for its publication year, the marketing copy struck fear in my heart. Yes, Penn Jillette is famously a Libertarian or whatever, and a famous atheist; but no, this novel about gambling is not a Libertarian or atheistic novel about gambling. It's just a really fun and sometimes scary adventure set in Las Vegas, where a desperate guy only has a short time to try to get a lot of money. Jillette's point of view comes through in the funny, sometimes glib mathematical approach the main character takes. If nothing you do on purpose is working, why not try leaving it up to chance?
I really like the subgenre of thriller books that are like, What if my friend's (sister's etc.) new boyfriend or husband or whoever turns our double date into a murder date? What if our simple hiking trip becomes a complex and deadly hiking trip? Ulf Kvensler gives the story a fresh coat of Swedish specificity, including local foods and the fact that hiking is seen as almost a national requirement.
Smartphones have really disrupted the thriller genre, because it's getting more and more difficult to put people in settings where they can't simply look up the answers or call for help. I understand why authors keep doing this, but Olivia Muenter's novel instead leans into the premise. How would a child raised live on social media choose to live the rest of her life? How would she respond when her sister goes missing?
Multilevel marketing (MLM) is a blight that disproportionately affects the United States, and Jane Marie's podcast The Dream has explored why that is for several seasons. In this fun book adaptation, she goes into the history and particulars of some influential MLM founders. Marie's writing is funny, conversational, and relatable, making the gross subject matter a lot more palatable.
I was a competitive swimmer for my whole childhood, so holding my breath for fun or sport was a big part of that. James Nestor's nonfiction book follows freedivers, who hold their breath for minutes at a time and use large fins to help them swim to record-setting depths in the ocean. I can only say that, like with Tom Cruise's harrowing breath-holding scenes in the Mission Impossible franchise, being pretty good at holding my breath only makes these true stories even more impressive and terrifying.
Storms are an essential part of summer for people around the world, and Nishita Parekh's locked-house thriller follows the last family in their neighborhood who haven't evacuated. There are cultural factors at play that make a classic type of story even more interesting. Who do you listen to during an emergency, and who do you consider an authority? Both questions have a million assumptions built in that Parekh picks at a bit in order to explore them.
There's been a literary trend for novels about the downfalls of wealthy or dynastic families, maybe inspired by Succession and other media exploring these dynamics up close. Danielle Prescod's version is a little different, because the patriarch is also the world's first Black billionaire, adding social heft and tension to both his history and the role he performs to the public. But it's still a juicy story, and often a lot of fun.
This is another "rich family's downfall" type of story, but in this case, we follow the orphaned adult children of a "cursed" wealthy couple. Sara Sligar's novel is dotted with short interludes depicting the cursed and untimely deaths of previous generations of this family tree. In the present, a brother and sister maintain the family's secluded island property while preparing the brother to run for office. Nothing goes according to plan.
In this surprisingly timeless romp, join a university student and his carefree-to-a-fault uncle as they spelunk to Earth's core. Jules Verne turns a dangerous trip into a comedy of manners, where these two European men refuse to talk to each other even when almost starved to death twenty miles underground.
The father of modern science fiction (or one of them!) also wrote some regular novels about realistic people who aren't in time machines or wars of the worlds. Mr. Polly is just a classic old goof, like Forrest Gump or the guy in Being There. This book follows him through his entire life and all of his misadventures.
Is "science fantasy" a thing? In this adventure novel, Taylor Zajonc imagines a world-record-setting deep cave where a group of explorers get very, mortally lost. I like the way he plays with memory and local lore, creating a believable scenario where everyone could have forgotten this cave was even there.
You know the old chestnut about the human body being 70% water, but humans also love to play in and around bodies of water. If aliens observed human beings for a while, they might write in a report that we take both "hygiene plunges" and "fun plunges" into anything from the ocean to a bathtub. In hot weather, pools and sprinklers help cool us down, so summer fun and water based activities go hand in hand.
The human body has a precise temperature zone where we are safe and healthy. We are warm blooded, so our bodies also have robust "machinery" built in that helps to regulate our temperature as much as possible. But in hot or cold enough weather, our machinery is outpaced and we can enter a dangerous temperature zone.
One of the key ways our bodies stay regulated is through our breathing. Yes, breathing brings fresh air into our lungs, which refreshes us and replaces our oxygen. But the lungs also circulate blood, turning a larger stream of blood into many tiny branches with more surface area. That hot blood comes from the rest of our bodies, where body processes like metabolism are warming it up at every turn -- remember that a calorie is a unit of heat!
So in the lungs, fresh air can come in and literally cool the tiny strands of circulating blood, much more efficiently than when the blood is in a larger "river" of a blood vessel. Think about how long it takes to make the surface of your soup or other hot food cool off, but how much longer the inside stays hot.
This type of cooling isn't very different from some surprising things like car air conditioning, where very cold liquid goes through a series of pipes and air is blown across them to cool the air down.
Cool water on the outside of our bodies acts much the same way, too. In a sprinkler or even when we're sweating in hot weather, the water on our skin evaporates in the heat, and that creates cooling. In a swimming pool, we're surrounded by cool water, which continues to "pull" heat out of our bodies. The same thing works in reverse when you take a hot bath or go in a jacuzzi and your body feels warmer.
People have been swimming for, likely, all of human history. But even swimming pools date back a shockingly long time. In ancient Greece and then Rome, people gathered in large public baths in order to bathe, not swim. Japan has a strong culture of public bathing like this in onsens, and Iceland has natural baths built around its geothermal hot springs. These are just a few examples that represent something most people were doing in some way. Before running water in homes or even neighborhoods, these large communal spaces were a huge benefit to the people who lived in the surrounding areas.
Baths and pools were also believed to be curative and medical, like Bath in England -- named by the Romans -- and Baden-Baden in Germany. These spa towns attracted the medieval equivalent of startup businesses, and resorts sprang up where people could go and live for months or even years at a time to try to recover their health. Swimming did not become a "sport" in the modern sense until much later. But splashing in a pool, even if it's for your health, has likely always been pleasurable.
In the 1800s, the world changed rapidly as technologies like electricity were invented and then distributed starting in cities and in wealthier nations. Science accelerated after that, since electrical current makes it easier to do many chemistry processes, for example; and industry accelerated with the invention of e.g. indoor light and street lights. Chlorine as a product was developed during this time.
Before chlorine, people kept pools and public baths as clean as they could, apparently by filtering the water or by frequently just replacing it with fresh water. Before the advent of germ theory, people wouldn't even have understood what a clean pool had to try to avoid in order to be safe for the public. But the development of commercially available chlorine powder went hand in hand with another key change in U.S. society at least:
"By the early 1900's waterworks engineers had mastered the use of chlorine and filtration. Educators and health professionals appreciated the value of swimming for physical fitness. All of the elements of the modern swimming pool were in place. As near as the author can determine, the first attempt to sterilize a pool in the United States using chlorine was at Brown University in 1910. The 70,000-gallon Colgate Hoyt Pool was chlorinated by graduate student John Wymond Miller Bunker."
As public swimming pools sprang up around the country, they also became a battleground for racism toward Black Americans and other marginalized groups. Segregation extended to swimming pools, even after segregation was outlawed; and white groups built private "swimming clubs" to avoid having to allow nonwhite people to swim in their pools. This also led to the construction of many backyard swimming pools.
Swimming has become a global sport and one of the most popular sports from the Summer Olympics. USA Swimming, the governing body of competitive swimming in the United States, lists over 200,000 members in its 2024 demographics report.
Children can begin learning to swim at a really young age, and swimming lessons for any age usually start with learning to sense the water and float. The human body is pretty buoyant -- we may be 70% water, but we also have some fat and air, both of which are lighter than water. That means floating is usually a case of learning to position your body a certain way and then relax. It can be surprisingly hard to do!
"Doggy paddle" may be the most widely known style of swimming if you aren't watching the Olympics, but any form of swimming can be fine if it's what works for you. Treading water is when you swim (keep yourself afloat) without moving horizontally in the pool. Sidestroke and crawl are other common ways to swim. People may do the front crawl without putting their heads underwater in order to keep their hair dry (looking at you, ladies in 1960s movies).
In competitive swimming, front crawl is called freestyle, and it's the fastest swimming stroke. Technically, people can do any stroke they want in a "freestyle" race, as the name suggests. The other main strokes are backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. Freestyle and backstroke are asymmetrical, meaning your arms cycle forward and backward at opposite times and your feet kick in an alternating way. Butterfly and breaststroke are symmetrical and use very different muscle groups as a result.
Almost all sports are made up in some sense; even running has been turned into specific lengths that everyone competes in, for example. Swimming strokes are kind of arbitrary in that way -- there is no definitive way to swim, nor are we born to swim like a fish or a frog is. But we've learned from animals, like the "dolphin kick" used in butterfly and the "frog kick" used in breaststroke. You can even see ducks use a version of the freestyle "flutter kick."
Beaches around the world tend to draw people who want to swim in the ocean or local lakes. I didn't learn until well into adulthood, though, that not all beaches have sand. The British have beaches with tiny pebbles instead. Sand, especially the finer and softer sand we prefer at a tropical beach, is just not that common on waterfronts around the world. But why is that?
If you've ever seen a microscope image of traditional beach sand, you know it's made of a zillion tiny pieces of all kinds of things. That's because sand is almost more of a category than it is a specific substance. Some is made of silica, which is the type of sand associated with glassmaking. But many materials can be eroded until they form tiny particles that can mingle and gather with sand. These particles are lightweight and easily carried in or moved by bodies of water. Ocean and lake creatures die and leave skeletons that break down into sandlike granules. Heck, sand itself can create more sandy materials in the form of erosion as it's blown by the wind or moved by the water.
In the tropics, where low-lying islands are popular places to vacation, sand beaches occur a lot more frequently by nature. That's because islands create a barrier, in a way, where the ocean washes up again and again and carries sediment. To an island, the sandy beach is like the undissolved grains of sugar in the bottom of a glass of iced tea. This happens on some parts of larger landmasses, but it's just less common.
Not all islands have naturally sandy beaches, though. Not even all warm islands do. The Florida Keys are one example where the composition of an island chain just did not include much sand. They're made of the ancient remains of coral and, in some places, covered in tangled plants called mangroves. Most of the sand beaches along these photogenic islands are manmade. On the other hand, the Great Lakes of the central United States have some natural sand beaches and even large areas of sand dunes.
Because beaches are usually so large and open compared to swimming pools, they offer a great place for families with children to choose their own comfort zone. You can walk along the edge of the water, sit in a few inches of water and build a sand castle, or wade out until the water is up to your own waist, wherever that may be. Swimming pool designers have tried to mimic this effect in the wave pools seen at many waterparks.
Frequent swimmers know that swimsuit fabric technology just can't keep up over time with the chlorine of swimming pools OR the sun, salt, and sand of the beach. Scientists have invented technical fabrics over many decades, meaning we at least have the best possible swimsuits at any given time; our ancestors swam in natural fibers like cotton and wool, and in fabrics that had no stretch at all.
Chlorine's most popular use outside of water purification is as a bleaching agent, meaning it strips certain stuff out of fabric and other materials. Being submerged in water and then stretched and contracted isn't good for any fabric, really -- experts say not to wring your clothes dry with too much force so you don't tear the individual fibers, which are weaker when they're wet. Adding chlorine further weakens the fabric structure over time, even the space-age Lycra and other technical fabrics used in competitive swimsuits.
The sun also causes fabrics to deteriorate. UV rays pass through fabrics and pull individual particles away, which leads to instability and weakness in the material. This is a version of what happens to your skin over long term exposure to the sun, where the reaction of sunlight in your skin tissue can lead to mutations that become cancer. Our bodies are finely balanced for the right conditions, and our fabrics are even easier to tip out of balance.
One of the unsung heroes of summer swimming life is the chamois cloth, also known by the trade name Shammy and other names. This treated natural leather is highly absorbent and easy to wring out back to near total dryness. You see Olympic divers, especially, carry these small towels to and from their dives and use them frequently. Swimmers and divers must stay warm between races, which is difficult when you're constantly dipped into water and pulled back out -- literally nature's cooling mechanism!
In his book Cooked, Michael Pollan explains how cooking food -- applying heat and water or fat in order to make ingredients more digestible -- freed up human resources by moving some of the work outside our own bodies. Contrast with the panda, which must spend virtually all its waking hours eating tough bamboo in order to get enough calories to even survive.
Today, we often appreciate foods that are fried or grilled more than foods that are boiled, for example. But when you boil a food, all the particles of that food stay in the same water you're using to cook. Afterward, you can drink that liquid and get those nutrients back. Cooking on a spit, instead, lets fat drip out of meat and into your fire. In the past, cooks learned to position trays of vegetables, potatoes, or grains under their roasting meat in order to use the dripping fat and not lose it into the fire.
Cooking over an open fire is not inherently the same as grilling. The term grill suggests use of a grill, or a surface of metal sticks where a piece of meat can be positioned over a fire and carefully controlled. People invented fire pits and then portable containers where grill surfaces are positioned over a belly where a fire can be built. Now, you can also get gas grills that are essentially predictable outdoor stoves with grill surfaces on top.
The archetypal American suburban grill may be the rounded kettle shape of a classic Weber. It rises to about waist height and stands on three legs. But if that grill is the simple bicycle, you can also spend a ton of money and get the Harley Davidson cruiser equivalent. These elaborate gas grills have multiple cooking surfaces, space-age materials, multiple propane tanks, and all the other bells and whistles a suburban dad could want.
All these grills have one-directional heat, as opposed to the surrounding heat of an oven or air fryer; they're designed for food to sit directly on them instead of in a pan or anything; and we want the food we cook on them to have a smokey, fire-kissed flavor. But the food is still cooked with direct heat from the fire, rather than only smoked. That's a different art -- the barbecue.
Food preferences, like the "best" cooking methods, are extremely specific and cultural. In some cuisines, visibly browned food is considered undesirable. Consider the French omelette, which must be carefully monitored so its color stays uniform and yellow and its texture stays very soft; or Hainanese chicken rice from Singapore, where soft, tender chicken is the most important ingredient. These dishes should not be browned or crunchy in their classical form.
That said, when browned meat IS desirable, what's at play is the Maillard reaction. This is a chemical response when proteins are exposed to the heat of a cooking fire or oven. The Maillard reaction is different than, but often in conjunction with, caramelization of sugars. Both lead to deepened flavors and a browner appearance, and in foods like baked goods, the two may be inseparable. (Maybe by someone with a microscope.) Sometimes, we add sugar to a glaze or sauce that we put on grilled meat, bringing the two reactions together and creating global favorites like teriyaki.
But the two reactions also have fundamental similarities, and they are often confused with one another. The Maillard reaction does require a type of sugar, though we don't associate sugar with meat in its natural form. These sugars form because tiny starch particles in the meat break down under heating. The reaction is very abstract and microscopic -- we don't even think of meat as having any "starch" at all. It's strictly chemistry in this case.
Caramelized onions, or when we talk about caramelization on the surface of meat, is still ultimately referring to the Maillard reaction. Onions do contain sugars in the chemical sense, but caramelization is only for sugars in the vernacular sense as well.
My partner and I bought a small grill this summer, so we've been learning in realtime how to build a consistent charcoal fire. You can buy metal canisters with open tops and bottoms that serve as fire-starting chimneys. These help to shelter your baby fire from wind and keep the heat contained to help the fire advance. But you can also do it the old fashioned way, by which I mean, using shredded newspaper or other kindling and being patient with a lighter.
One of the main obstacles in building a charcoal or wood fire is that different materials catch fire and then sustain fire at really different speeds. Even different types of paper catch and burn at different rates. This is why accelerants like lighter fluid are so popular. They really even up the playing field as far as what you can expect to catch fire and when.
When we build a fire for the grill, we start with a bed of paper kindling that my partner sometimes adds a small amount of cooking oil to. That's another way to even the playing field and make the paper burn longer before it fizzles out. On top of that, we place a few charcoal briquets. Charcoal is made by heating wood in a low- or no-oxygen environment, meaning all the living or moist parts of the wood are destroyed as completely as possible. Because of that, charcoal is much easier and faster to ignite than even dry wood.
Experts say paper is one of the smokier options, though, and that can be a dealbreaker depending on where you live as well as your family's health. You can buy or even make natural fire starters, often from shredded wood that burns more like paper than a solid log. Increasing the amount of air circulating around the strands of wood fibers lets them catch faster and burn hotter, while they stay lit for longer than paper. They're a great middle ground.
Since open fire is the original cooking method, humans have been fine-tuning their grilling, spit roasting, and other open fire techniques for many thousands of years. If there's a particular world cuisine you like, they probably have a form of grilling that you can try, from Thai satay and Brazilian steakhouse skewers to ancient grilled kofta or kefta from the Arabian peninsula. Try searching for a combination you're curious to learn about, like this Italian grilled chicken with a Sicilian herb sauce -- yum!
Vegetables and even some fruits are delicious when grilled. Last week, we halved and grilled a tomato and a peach, then diced them into a fresh salsa with some herbs and minced chiles. There are salsa recipes where you first char the vegetables and then put them in a blender, resulting in a more traditional salsa verde type of texture. You can wrap garlic or potatoes in foil and then nestle them directly in the coals for a roastier final product. You can even pop popcorn on your grill.
For a next level challenge, you can even mix up and bake breads and cakes on your grill. The most classic form of this might be cornbread in a cast iron pan or muffin tin, typically with the lid closed so heat can circulate better. But there are flatbreads designed to work on the open grate of the grill itself, too, or cakes whose batter you pour into hollowed-out apples for cooking. The world is your oyster, especially if you're trying to plan a camping trip and don't want to eat only grilled meat for the next week.
In the U.S., grilling is linked with postwar prosperity and suburban excess. We almost never cook over open fires otherwise, excluding the parts of the country where gas stoves are still de rigeuer. But according to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2024 there were still more than 2 billion people worldwide using unsafe stoves that cause millions of deaths each year. The main culprit is smokey fuel sources. Gas stoves burn very cleanly, so even our "indoor fires" in the U.S. are not inherently dangerous. But natural gas is costly and requires infrastructure. Electric burners require regular access to electricity. Instead, people in need use whatever they can find that will burn. People need to eat, and they make due.
The WHO lists these preventable deaths as one of the major issues in global health, especially because women and children are overrepresented in the statistics because they're more likely to be in the home and involved in cooking. Like clean water and safe healthcare, increasing access to better cooking fuel is a decades-old project that will take decades more.
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