Right now, many young summer campers are frolicking beneath the open sky, the wind on their faces perfumed by the rough fragrances of pine and their parents' jet exhaust; on the horizon, the mountains shrug, "whatevs." Their families will pay one-fifth of the median national household income so they can go "rough it." And The New York Times has been on it.

The modern tales are ghastly—and not just that now-infamous tale of chartered planes and rural runways. Because of the economy, some owners have to deal with lower enrollment this year; in July, the Times told the story of one camp that hit only 98 percent capacity [...]

It starts at a very young age. The summer after third grade, my parents sent me to Jewish sleepaway camp. I was deeply homesick at first and cried a lot in my bunk bed, but by the end of the month I didn't want to leave. So I went back, summer after summer—boarding the plane with a few other Jewish kids from my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, and flying to Appleton, Wisconsin, with a stop-over at O'Hare, where a volunteer from Hadassah would meet us at the gate and try to keep us from the moo shu pork at Wok-N-Roll.

Those summers blur together, but each day begins [...]

Monday marks the unofficial beginning of summer. For Here Comes Summer, we asked folks to explain its magic. And is there anything more magical than appearing on TV?

"God gives each of us only what we can handle" was advice a lesbian bike messenger and Brussels Griffon owner gave me when I expressed guilt about our relative suffering. She had just shared with me a harrowing story about growing up poor in the South with a father who sexually abused her, following my own disclosure that I had a terrible time at sleep-away camp when I was ten.