Why Summer Isn't That Much Fun David: Now that Memorial Day has come and gone, I feel that summer has truly started. I love this time of year and not only because I look amazing in poplin and any outfit involving spaghetti straps. Gail: We had smidgens of snow around town last weekend so I'm not counting on anything until I see the cicadas. So exciting to be in a cicada year. My brother sent me an interesting recipe for cicada fritters. David: I say it because during the summer the news cycle changes shape. During the spring, winter and fall, the news pegs come in a portentous procession, like retired law school professors entering a symposium. But during the summer there are no normal-size news events, like the release of a budget, or the Justice Department's decision to undermine the First Amendment. Gail: I hate to say it, but under the current Attorney General, the Justice Department's undermining the First Amendment knows no season. David: The summer news stories come in odd sizes. First there are the silly season pseudo-scandals of no importance whatsoever. We'll spend two weeks arguing over whether the president plays too much golf. Gail: Did you see that President Obama lost football-toss game at a boardwalk arcade to Chris Christie? I predict one heck of a lot of "Touchdown Fever" practice this year at Camp David. David: My view is that no president should ever be criticized for taking time off. They would all govern better and have a better perspective on life if they took one week off a month to actually think about things. Besides, each president needs something that arouses childlike glee and reminds him that he is still marginally human. For Dwight Eisenhower and several others, it was the game of golf. Ike would apparently arrive at Burning Tree Country Club in a giddy, giggling mood, like a boy on Christmas morning who has been carefully pious all year. If golf does it for Obama, I suggest he play daily. Gail: He's good at taking time out to be with his daughters. Although they've hit the age when quality time with Dad is not generally the top social priority. Most people don't begrudge an elected official down time. But as Obama demonstrated over Memorial Day weekend, you can't be seen just having fun when people are suffering from a disaster. You visit the tornado site, the hurricane victims - given the weather we've been having lately, it's amazing he ever got to come home. I remember long ago, when I was working in Connecticut, a governor failed to cut short his skiing vacation when the state was hit by a blizzard and his political career was ruined forever. But about the news - are you saying we're going to be in a long summer slough? I always hate when that happens. David: There are the occasional epic events, like the collapse of the Soviet Union. For a few years in the early "90s, each summer was interrupted by some gigantic history-shifting news happening. The networks would have to scramble private jets to the Vineyard to locate their correspondents who were tippling across the croquet lawns getting in touch with the American people. They'd be rushed across the world so it looked like they were reporting from the front lines, the camera angles carefully avoiding their flip-flops. Even the radio jocks would arrive for their reporting, their voices, as Fran Lebowitz would put it, audibly tan. Gail: Once when I working for the Daily News, I was summoned back to work from vacation because Donald Trump announced he was getting a divorce. David: Best of all there are the days on end with no news event at all. During these long, arid stretches it becomes clear that news is the bane of the news business. Stories about everyday life leap to the top of the most e-mailed and most viewed lists, and you remember that these stories are the most important of all. For example, we're in the middle of a little news drought now and our colleague Stanley Fish wrote a nice piece about selling almost all of his books and feeling perfectly fine about it. Gail: Yes, Stanley's piece must have restarted a lot of household debates that have been going on sporadically for years. In our house we keep books for various reasons. The ones on the danger list are the books we bought decades ago and hung onto not because we loved them, but because you could never tell when somebody would need to look up something about, say, medieval clothing or the history of the New York City Police Department. Now the family library is no longer the first place you go when you want an odd bit of information. Although I still like the way they look, all squished in the bookcases. David: I found this piece completely fascinating and completely unimaginable. I've lugged the same books around since college. They are like little memory prompts, taking me out of the crush of my Twitter feed, reminding me of more important and permanent things, giving me different and alien perspectives on the world. I actually skim through my old college texts, embarrassed by what I underlined back then and what I was oblivious to. Gail: Funny you should mention that. I picked up my college copy of "The Great Gatsby" in an attempt to recover from the movie and was interested to find out what I'd underlined. The answer was basically: everything. David: It just feels wrong to cut yourself off from that museum of ideas. And yet Fish, a great literary critic, has done it with equipoise. There must be some fundamental shift in mentality as you age, some desire for streamlining and getting to the essentials. That's the sort of interesting piece of news we get during the summertime. Gail: And we'll finally know who won the basketball championship. That season lasts longer than cicadas. David: Plus every summer we wind up at some beach, and I recall that I don't really like going to the beach. It's nice to get in touch with the eternal verities. Gail: My argument against beaches is that you don't leave the city in order to be crowded. But I do like driving up to the country, except that the dog always throws up in the car. Does that count as a family tradition? And more important, if nothing happens for the next three months, would I somehow be able to get a column out of it?