Summer is, tradition has it, a time for lazy lingering over little more than the lilt of the breeze on the water on a long, languid, sunny day. Sure, we might bring a book or two along to the beach or a mountain hideaway, but even literary fare is lighter through days of sunshine, humidity, and generous afternoon naps. Summer is for relaxing, recharging, and resetting... Read more

This isn’t, as summers go, an easy one. With ongoing waves of gun violence roiling the nation and two presidential nominating conventions more likely—to mix metaphors—to turn up the heat than to calm the waters, an escapist junket into banal beach reading might seem a reasonable tonic. But that hardly seems to be the direction of some of our Bearings contributors,... Read more

What we’re reading at any given time in our lives says a lot about what’s going on in our lives, who we are, and maybe a bit about who we’re becoming. After all, the stories we absorb from the pages of books, the ideas we imbibe, and the images that float into our consciousness become part of our own stories—part of who we are. The science fiction writer Ursula... Read more