Julia Ross
I loved how Chicagoans love their summers. I spent the early part of the week visiting my sister in the Windy City and participated in a few seasonal rituals: an afternoon at North Avenue beach, a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert at Ravinia, a Cubs-Astros game at Wrigley Field. Though that last outing was interrupted in the sixth inning when a tornado swept through town—they actually sounded the tornado siren at Wrigley—it didn’t stop the warm weather revelry; most of the crowd simply repaired to nearby bars. Why let a funnel cloud ruin a perfectly good summer evening?

Eva Holland
I made a quick stop in Los Angeles this week, where I met up with an old friend and spent a fun afternoon being pure tourists at the Santa Monica Pier: eating churros and fish tacos, riding the Pacific Wheel and snapping photos of beach bums and anti-war protesters alike.

Joanna Kakissis
I’ve always been one to research the restaurant scene in the cities I visit, if only to avoid bad meals that will forever taint my view of the place. But I arrived to Boston this week unread and unprepared, relying instead on the last-minute recommendations of locals I’d never met before. I had good results! A special thanks to the guy at Peet’s Coffee on Harvard Square for recommending the Bombay Club in Cambridge. Best dal I’ve had so far!

Jim Benning
I loved Paul Theroux’s new travel book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar, which I just finished. It’s classic Theroux. Better than ever, really: sharp, funny, transporting. Our review is forthcoming.

Elyse Franko
I loved Ahmad Fadam’s latest entry in the Baghdad Bureau blog. Fadam was an Iraqi staff member at the New York Times’ Baghdad Bureau and left Baghdad in May to begin his work as a visiting fellow at the University of North Carolina. His latest entry, Leaving Baghdad: Culture Shock in America, considers more than just the life of an Iraqi in the United States. I think just about anyone who’s lived abroad can relate to the core of Fadam’s experience in the U.S.:

“Being in another country makes you get acquainted with a new culture, traditions, habits. Most of the time, it is very different than what you have experienced all your life when you still lived back home. You were used to doing things there that you cannot do here, because you know it is different. You have to force yourself not to do so now and to start acting like the people in this country. You don’t want to be looked at as a stranger. No one wants to be in this position.”

Valerie Conners
It felt positively decadent to be sipping piña coladas while sprawled across a chaise lounge on St. Thomas’s Morning Star Beach, knowing that my biggest decisions of the day would be whether to read my Carl Hiaasen book or the newspaper (in the end, I wasn’t afraid to open Stormy Weather, hurricane season be damned!), and whether I should eat conch fritters in Frenchtown or Charlotte Amalie (I devoured them in all their fried goodness at Cuzzin’s in Charlotte Amalie).

Michael Yessis
Demetri Martin’s riff on the shapes of U.S. states, specifically “why culture is attracted to squiggles.” It comes at 4:25 of the video:

Photo of Wrigley Field in Chicago by bryce_edwards, via Flickr (Creative Commons)