Daylight Savings Time: A (Beach) Reading List for the Lighthearted
June 30, 2026 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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I hear that there are people in the world who prefer lighthearted stories. Lovely meet-cutes where no one gets hurt and people even fall in love, where there is serendipity like there used to be before the internet, where good things happen to good people. Cozy mysteries that involve a cat—or possibly, as in one of the stories included below, a bird. I hear that these people like to remember all the ways the world can be good and surprising and curious and silly. I hear they like to laugh. I hear, at the very least, that they have lower blood pressure.
I recently stopped drinking so I could better maintain a grip on the last vestiges of my sanity. (And lower my blood pressure). Some days, not drinking is a very good decision. Other days, I look at the news and not drinking seems like the dumbest idea I’ve ever had. But any veteran sober sojourner will tell you that these moments are the times when you need to phone a friend, take a walk, do something to distract yourself.
In November 2024, when I was in a very dark moment for reasons that are likely obvious to many in the US, something told me to go to a bookstore. Whatever book I picked out, that same something said, would heal me. I selected my title, joked with the bookseller, went to my car, and cocooned myself in its silence. I reclined the driver’s seat, propped the book up against the steering wheel, closed my eyes. My breathing slowed; my god, my blood pressure might have even dropped. Nothing in here will hurt you. I cracked open the book, and read.
We could all use a little silence, a little levity. To that end, and with the peak of summer upon us, I’ve pulled together some of my favorite longreads that remind you of the joy it is to be human, even in this increasingly inhumane world. We have so much to fight for. We have (and are) so much to love.
As for the book that would heal me: That would be Alexei Navalny’s Patriot, the posthumous political memoir of a Russian opposition activist who mysteriously died in a Russian prison. Look, we’re all a work in progress, okay? Go read the essays and lighten up.
The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch (Forrest Wickman, Slate, May 2025)
We humans are an obsessive lot. We get hung up on the weirdest things: fandoms, lists, secret goals to watch every Best Picture-nominated film since the Oscars began in 1929. The weirder the time, the weirder our obsessions—and the pandemic was a weird time for all of us.
I don’t know about you but I spent that time walking a small groove in the floor of my house as I attempted to read every book, magazine, and pamphlet I owned while pacing to “get in my steps.” My husband became obsessed with crafting the perfect burger buns, going so far as to shape his own bun molds with leftover scrap metal in our basement. (The burger buns are perfect and I get to forever make a joke about his perfect buns, so don’t judge.)
Forrest Wickman, like a lot of us, got obsessed with birding during the pandemic, nearly stepping into traffic trying to identify the call of a hawk. So when he heard an incorrect bird call during the 2000s reboot of Charlie’s Angels—a bird call upon which the entire plot of the movie turned—he couldn’t let it stand. Thus, a new obsession: Who let this stand? To find the answer, we’ll travel through the utterly human enterprise that it is to make a blockbuster movie.
You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.
So, naturally, being an all-in sort of person, I embarked upon a wild-goose chase to investigate how and why this monstrosity took flight. I talked to script doctors and scoured legal statutes. I interviewed leading ornithological experts and electronically analyzed birdcalls, all to figure out who laid this giant egg. It took nearly a year. But eventually, I discovered why hundreds of people with a budget of nearly $100 million failed to accurately portray a single bird. The answer was most fowl.
Seven Days at the Bin Store (Jen Kinney, Defector, June 2025)
Not to bring up my husband’s obsessive tendencies again, but he’s a bit of a treasure hunter. Not the beep-beep metal-detectorist-on-the-beach kind, but more like the this-thrift-store-doesn’t-know-what-they-have kind or the I-got-this-otherwise-expensive-car-part-for-a-dollar-at-the-junkyard kind. (We call this last type of hunting “junkin’.”)
Let’s now imagine a junker in the extreme. Let’s imagine their perfect hunting grounds. A secondhand shop, but of modern products. A junkyard where everything isn’t broken at all, or at the most is just a little bit broken. A resale shop for last season’s perfectly good excess, or for that brand-new product that was almost what someone wanted but also not quite and it’s cheaper for the warehouse to sell the returned products in bulk to said shop than it is to try and resell the now “like new” product. A place where overstock goes to die and treasure hunters go to live. Let’s imagine . . . Amazing Binz in West Philadelphia.
To be fair, my husband would hate this place. I personally don’t know how I feel about it either. One source in Jen Kinney’s marvelous story said they were glad the stuff wasn’t being thrown away; another said they felt like the bin store was a product’s last stop before ending up at the bottom of the ocean. Whether it’s gems or junk, Kinney’s essay is a treasure in itself. Let’s go junkin’—er, bin-divin’.
This Friday morning at Amazing Binz, there are now over 30 people waiting to be let inside.
Finally, the doors open and the crowd floods into the narrow shop, homing in on the premier items. Scooters and grills and Target-branded home goods fly out of the bins. People are hauling around air fryers so no one else can take them. It is, frankly, a bit of a mad house. One reseller, who didn’t find anything he wanted, says, “One of these days, someone’s going to get shot.” A woman declares, “I will never do this again.”
Generally, people seem happy with their finds. The guy who wanted the scooters gets the scooters; the woman who wanted the shower caddy gets the shower caddy. It all happens fast. By the end of the day, the first two bins are completely empty.
How My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey Into Hell (Caity Weaver, The New York Times Magazine, January 2025)
My friend Julie is an avowed workaholic, a government bureaucrat at the worst possible time to be a government bureaucrat. She carries two phones with her at all times, one for her job and one for the rest of us. Because she is a busy professional bee, she rarely cooks (though she is quite a good cook) and so maintains a steady diet of coffee, cigarettes, and red wine to supplement her overall Wisconsin diet of cheese, cheese curds, Cheez Balls, brats, and beer. She has an entire closet in her basement filled with bags of chips, just in case. She is short, scrappy, and mighty, has big eldest-sister energy, a rude ‘tude, and can fit her whole fist in her mouth (she’ll show you, just ask). She is, clearly, a legend.
But even legends must age, and this legend just turned 50. So she went to the doctor recently to get some blood work done, preparing herself for a talking-to about living right. (In addition to her incredible diet, Julie is not an exerciser.) She didn’t need to be worried. The bloodwork looked good. In fact, the bloodwork looked great. So great, it was the best the doctor had ever seen. “Whatever you’re doing to keep up this heart-healthy lifestyle, keep it up!” the doctor said, pleased to have finally found a good patient. Like I said, a legend.
I couldn’t stop thinking of Julie as I read this essay from Caity Weaver, another legend in her own right with a wicked sugar addiction. She travels across the globe to a luxury retreat in Austria to confront her need for the good stuff, only to find out that her body is perfectly healthy—happy, even—when filled with sweet sugar. With this essay, it’s less about the takeaway and more about the ride, as is usual with a Caity Weaver classic. It also comes with some great photo illustrations of the tastiest sweets that will rot your teeth just by looking at them. Life is short (or not); treat yourself.
Perhaps the diagnosis was wrong. If so, what did he suppose could actually be the matter with me?
All the other tests, Ian pointed out, indicated I was perfectly healthy. “I guess my question back would be: Why is it a bad thing to like sweets if otherwise things are going well?”
At no point — during my stay, or my life — had I ever asked myself this question. Any time a test result suggested health, I assumed I had slipped by on a technicality — that that test was not designed to detect the specific obscure condition that would obviously reveal me to have been pirouetting on the brink of death for years. The possibility that I could be flailing to solve a problem that did not exist had never occurred to me.
I Played ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out (Timothy Faust, Vice, March 2015)
There’s a famous episode of The Simpsons entitled “Cape Feare” in which Sideshow Bob leaves jail only to attempt to fulfill his one-track goal of finally killing Bart Simpson (who was responsible for said imprisonment). It’s a great episode, perhaps one of the show’s greatest—not only for its spoof on the 1962 classic film Cape Fear and Kelsey Grammer’s impeccable rendition of the entirety of H.M.S. Pinafore, but because of the rake gag. You know the rake gag. The one where Bob, finally on his way to exact his revenge, takes a step forward, only to get hit in the face with a garden rake. Classic slapstick, poor Bob’s cross to bear. He turns, takes another step, and gets hit with another rake. Cue, again, Kelsey Grammer’s mewing moan of disdain that I can still hear despite not having seen the episode in years. Funny enough, but he turns, and—yes—another rake. Okay, this is getting old, right? But no: Bob steps on at least nine rakes. Turns out the episode was short, and the writers needed to fill things out for the requisite runtime. A gag done out of necessity that for no reason whatsoever grows in humor with each passing rake. The first? Hilarious! The second, meh. The third provokes annoyance. The fourth, fifth, sixth? At some point annoyance turns to anger turns to acceptance, a submission to the inane whims of the world that makes you question the point of life itself until you begin to see the beauty in that resolution and you realize the only thing to do in this stupid world is to laugh. This happens somewhere around the ninth rake.
Which is exactly why I loved this piece by Timothy Faust, who plays Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back In Town” on repeat in a metal bar, questioning life, celebrating life, really living—okay, maybe he’s the only one really living in this essay. Anyway, it’s perfection. Bummer that the embedded tweets don’t work any more, but let that be part of the time capsule that is this whole essay. Strap in, baby, because the boys are back.
Over the course of these past few months, I have come upon two bits of forbidden knowledge: One, this bar does not have a working “kill switch” (which allows the bartender to change a song in case someone plays, I dunno, the entire A-side of 2112). Two, this jukebox permits the same song to be played back-to-back if each instance was paid for with a separate bill.
It was 3 AM on a recent Tuesday when, standing in the dark outside my train station, these truths reconciled themselves within me. My compulsion became explicit and inescapable: I needed to stay up and play “The Boys Are Back in Town” as many times as I could. The thorns from the road ahead cleared themselves, and I walked toward the future amid roses to share the gospel with the other patrons of this unlikeable bar. The boys were back.
The Siege of Fulton Avenue (David Amsden, New York, June 2004)
We don’t give kids enough credit. In fact, we adults spend an inordinate amount of time crafting rules and regulations for the behavior of children. More specifically, teenagers. There’s a mall in Nashville that doesn’t allow anyone under the age of 18 to be in the mall on Fridays and Saturdays after 3:00 p.m. without being accompanied by an adult at least 21 years old. They make these kids wear yellow wristbands to ensure compliance. Kids who try to buck the system will be asked to leave the premises. (And go where? Not the mall’s problem!) It’s not clear if this new policy has made the mall a more enjoyable place. It sucked before and it still sucks now, albeit with a ghostly, sanitized absence of squealing and laughter.
Like, not to be a weirdo, but have you ever just watched a gaggle of teens be teens? Observed them in their natural habitat without trying to interfere and tell them how to have fun? It’s hilarious. They’re neurotic, excitable, very concerned about their hair, and awkward, like a year-old standard poodle who doesn’t realize how big they are. Just admit it: Teens are funny. Teens know how to live.
Take, for example, the teen caper. Nothing harmful. Just a little running from the authorities, sticking it to the man, parkouring pantsless out your girlfriend’s window and still landing on your feet, stealing the Queen’s diamonds but actually it’s your parents’ vodka. When you think back to your own youthful shenanigans, doesn’t a little part of you want to revisit those glory days where every moment with your friends felt like you were getting away with something? Because you were. You were getting away with everything.
That’s why I love this piece. Written in 2004 (when yours truly was flying down a Texas highway at a hundred miles an hour with her brand new driver’s license so she could pick up some friends and go to the party at “the shed” where we just barely managed not to start any fires), this piece offers a blow-by-blow timeline of the end of a high school party. The parents are out of town. There were only supposed to be 15 people. Instead, there are girls in tight jeans. There are some guys on the couch who don’t even go here. And now, there are cops. What happens next breathes life into the tagline of the 1993 classic The Sandlot: “Heroes get remembered. But legends never die.”
2:12 A.M.
When Malik made it upstairs, he was startled by the powerful knocking at the front door. He assumed it was just the police, but, no, it turned out to be … a parent. Holy shit! Cops were one thing, but parents controlled cars. Credit cards. Summer nights. At the door was the father of Joey Groglio, who was now running up from the basement.“Joey, get the hell out here!”
Joey walked up to the door. Malik watched, wondering if this was it, the end?
“Go away, Dad!” Joey yelled. “I’ll find a ride home!”
Joey’s mother appeared in the window.
“These kids are crazy!” she shouted. “They have too much freedom! We need to take away their cell phones, and their instant messages, and …”
Damn. Cops or no cops, this was not the best impression to make at a party.
Lisa Bubert writes from Nashville, TN. Her fiction, essays, and journalism have been published in numerous publications, including Texas Highways, Noema, Northwest Review, Texas Monthly, and many others. Her work has been recognized by the Best of American Essays, and nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/06/30/beach-reads-reading-list/
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