There will be more ice cream in 2026. More bare feet and blowing dandelions. More iced tea and Frisbees and sandals. More mosquitoes and mowing? No, please, not that, for goodness’ sake, replace it with more hammock naps and fireflies caught after sunset.

Summer is kind of, sort of, just maybe actually going to be longer this year.

Unofficially the summer begins on Memorial Day, when we break out the white clothing, and ends on Labor Day, when we pack it away again. In between: ball games, sand in your shoes, Dad insisting he knows how to light the grill and Mom chasing you down to apply another coat of sunblock.

And Memorial Day falls on the earliest possible day this year: May 25. And Labor Day is on the latest possible day: Sept. 7. It’s a SuperSummer! A Summerganza! A Summerpalooza! (You can do better than us, reader, we know you can.)

Of course, none of this is official. People in the Northeast last week felt like it was already summer as the temperature surged into the 90s (then they had to contend with an unseasonably cool Memorial Day weekend).

The season officially starts this year, astronomically speaking, with the summer solstice on June 21, and ends with the fall equinox on Sept. 22.

That is hardly how we live it.

June 21? We’re already sunburned by then. September 22? We’re mired in geometry tests and the local corn maze. (I swear the exit was somewhere around here.)

But Memorial Day has become the checkpoint to the days of summer.

The act of Congress that established this remembrance of fallen armed service members says that the federal holiday falls on the final Monday of May. This year, because the month begins on a Friday, that’s the startlingly early date of May 25. And when that happens, Labor Day, the first Monday of September, lingers all the way to Sept. 7.

The Long, Hot Summer? Definitely. 500 Days of Summer? This year it’s 106, up from a paltry 99 in 2025. The Endless Summer? We can dream.

This has happened before, most recently in 2020, a year we had other things on our minds beside sand castles.

The frequency of the stretched out summer is complicated. Calendars, like a melting rainbow snow cone, are not neat and pretty. We will have to wait 11 years, until 2037, for the next MegaSummer. The cycle continues, with the next longer summer six years later, then in five years, then six years, then 11 again. Then repeat.

But even in the midst of summer’s joy, the cool nip of fall and the responsibilities it brings are never too far away. Children and their parents will never quite be able to forget the start of the school year, another unofficial moment that feels like season’s end.

With such a stretched-out summer, will kids get to avoid “creeping like snail / unwillingly to school” a little longer this year? And by extension, will parents have to turn over more pages of the calendar before the sweet return of the school bell?

The start of the school year varies around the country. The late Labor Day will feel like true break after weeks of school in some jurisdictions. Then there is New York City, where schools open a bit later, in part because of union contracts. This year, that will be the staggeringly late date of Sept. 10, six days later than 2025.

The Justice Department has moved on two fronts to chip away at some of the last traces of its vast investigation into the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, aligning itself ever more closely with President Trump’s own efforts to whitewash the events of that day.

On Friday evening, just as the holiday weekend was beginning, federal prosecutors in Washington filed motions to formally dismiss the most serious criminal cases stemming from Jan. 6 — those that involved leaders and members of far-right groups who were tried and convicted on charges of seditious conspiracy.

Hours later, one of the Justice Department’s official social media accounts confirmed that the department was scrubbing its online archives of news releases used to publicize the cases filed against Jan. 6 rioters.

The investigation of the riot at the Capitol, which stretched from 2021 to 2025, was the single largest criminal inquiry in the Justice Department’s history, resulting in charges being filed against nearly 1,600 defendants. But ever since Mr. Trump began his second term by granting clemency to all of the defendants, the department has taken steps to unwind almost every aspect of its enormous effort to hold the rioters accountable for disrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power after the 2020 election.

Senior department officials, including Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, were, for instance, deeply involved in setting up a $1.8 billion fund this week intended to compensate allies of Mr. Trump who believe they were wronged in the courts by previous Democratic administrations. Many Jan. 6 rioters were elated by the creation of the fund, and have already vowed to file claims seeking payouts.

The motions to dismiss the sedition cases against a dozen members of the far-right groups the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers was another step toward wiping away the vestiges of what had been the most significant criminal proceedings arising from the Capitol attack. While all of the men were pardoned or had their sentences commuted by Mr. Trump, the full dismissal of their charges would represent a further symbolic victory, and would allow the veterans among them to reclaim military benefits that were terminated after their convictions.

The two federal judges who oversaw the trials — Timothy J. Kelly and Amit P. Mehta — will still have to sign off on the department’s request to dismiss the cases outright. In their motions filed in Federal District Court in Washington on Friday, prosecutors said the government had determined that dismissal was in the “interests of justice.” But the judges could push back and ask how justice would actually be served by throwing out the cases.

When Mr. Trump returned to the White House, officials quickly shut down a page on the Justice Department’s website housing a database of all of the Jan. 6 defendants with details about the charges they faced. But news releases sent out informing the public about updates in the cases had lingered on the site — at least until recently.

On Friday afternoon, a reporter for The Washington Post posted a message on social media taking note of the fact that some of the news releases were being quietly removed from the department’s archives — among them, one describing the 74-month prison sentence received by Andrew Taake, who pleaded guilty to attacking the police with bear spray and a metal whip.

A Justice Department social media account quickly posted its own message responding to the reporter and declaring that there was nothing quiet about what the department was doing.

“We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration,” the message read. “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

At age 6, Stephanie Yeh was riding a bike with training wheels near her North Carolina home when she suddenly careened down a hill. She squeezed the brakes, flew over her handlebars and landed facedown on the street, narrowly missing a passing car.

Deeply shaken, she didn’t touch a bike for more than 30 years.

On a recent Sunday, Ms. Yeh, now in her late 30s, was standing anxiously in a circle of about 15 adults between the dog run and the tennis courts in McCarren Park, on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border in Brooklyn.

It happened to be Mother’s Day, and another attendee, Rimu Byadya, a mother of two, said she woke up that morning and decided, “I’m going to give myself a gift: falling off a bike.”

She, Ms. Yeh and the rest of the group were about to take a free “Learn to Ride” class run by the nonprofit Bike New York. Helmets strapped securely to their heads, they stared apprehensively at the row of bikes in front of them.

When Ms. Byadya, 35, told the circle that both her husband and a colleague had “successfully failed” at teaching her how to ride, the whole group gave a knowing laugh.

As New York has increasingly become a biking city, adult New Yorkers are turning to Bike New York classes, as well as private instruction, to master a skill that many adults don’t even remember learning. With Citi Bikes on every corner and frequent public transportation delays, many of these students look at cyclists longingly, wishing for the freedom of two wheels. But most are embarrassed to lack such a basic skill and daunted by the prospect of acquiring it.

Not being able to ride “is one of the biggest failures that I’ve probably faced as an adult,” Iroda Kayumova, 39, said. She learned with Bike New York last year and is now training for a triathlon.

To help adults overcome that stigma, Bike New York’s classes provide a low barrier to entry: The classes are free, bicycles and helmets are provided, and the instructors and volunteers are committed to helping as many students as possible go from never having put their foot on a pedal to riding by the end of each two-hour class.

At McCarren Park, as students chose bikes that fit their height, they discovered that there were no pedals. An instructor, Tarah Monn, explained that the first step to learning was to simply sit on the bike and walk it forward. So the students cautiously put one foot in front of the other and wobbled in a loop around a line of colored cones.

As Mauricio Aceves, 59, got on his bike for the first time, he said he felt less nervous seeing other adults in his same situation. Growing up in Mexico City, he “would tell Santa Claus to bring me a bike,” he said, but he never got one. Now, he’s learning as a gift to his wife and 8-year-old son, who want to ride as a family.

Once enough people seemed comfortable walking their bikes, Ms. Monn encouraged them to approach the most difficult part of the day: pushing both feet off the ground to balance into a glide. “Strong pushes!” Ms. Monn yelled. “The faster the bike goes, the easier it is,” she added.

Ms. Byadya, who grew up in Bangladesh, where girls weren’t encouraged to ride, said it felt like a liberating exercise in “letting things go.” Once students started getting the hang of it, they bent their knees, feet dangling behind them as they glided for seconds at a time.

“I see balancing!” Ms. Monn said joyously.

Notably, a majority of adults seeking bike riding lessons in New York City are women. Chantal Hardy, the associate director of education at Bike New York, called this discrepancy the “fender gap.” She hypothesized that women were less likely to have been encouraged to participate in risky activities as children. “I also wonder if women are more open to seeking help,” she said, and to “having a group experience.”

Teaching adults how to overcome their fears in order to bike is a very specific skill — one that Lance Jacobs, a private adult bike instructor and owner of Virtuous Bicycle, has honed by teaching more than 500 adults to ride since 2013. “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who know how to ride a bike and those who won’t admit that they can’t,” he said.

Mr. Jacobs, who is seldom without his white bike helmet with attached rearview mirror, has an almost obsessive dedication to the science of teaching adults to ride.

An adult on a bike for the first time is in a constant state of panic, he said. The human instinct is to put your feet on the ground, “but that instinct that is so natural gets you in trouble on a bike,” he said. So he aims to reprogram students’ brains.

At $225 for a two-hour lesson, his classes are pricey, but he tailors them to each student based on an extensive questionnaire that asks about athletic ability, driving experience and klutziness. Yelena Naginsky, 41, who learned to ride with Mr. Jacobs in 2024, said that because she is a dancer, he used dance metaphors to teach her bike concepts. He even names his exercises after specific students: “There’s the Minerva Hand Dance,” he said, “the Hyacinth Go and Stop, the Michael Swerve and Don’t Fall.”

Back at McCarren, about an hour into the class, cheers filled the air as students who had balanced for at least five seconds had pedals attached to their bikes. The next challenge was getting both feet on the pedals and maintaining balance while moving forward.

Brendan DeZalia, 37, hadn’t been on a bike in 25 years, despite looking the part of a stereotypical bike messenger with his “Heavy Metal” T-shirt and arms and legs covered in tattoos. Once he got his pedals, he started working to gain momentum.

“I’m one of those people that wants to be perfect the first time out of the gate,” he said, but added that he was accepting that his goal was out of reach.

Mr. Aceves, though, was frustrated: “Everyone’s doing it and I’m still kind of stuck.” He had to take his pedals off and return to gliding after he kept tipping over.

According to Bike New York, in 2025, 78 percent of students pedaled by the end of class. But for those who struggle, slow progress can be demoralizing.

Yawa Kurkiewicz, a volunteer for Bike New York for more than 10 years, won’t give up on them. Having never learned to ride as a child in her native Ghana, Ms. Kurkiewicz, who is in her 60s, first learned in a Bike New York class in 2014. Cycling is now one of her main modes of transportation.

She coached Mr. Aceves to take a deep breath, slow down and start over when he felt he couldn’t get his balance. “Don’t look at anybody. Do you,” she said. “If you don’t get it today, come back to another class.”

After a few fits and starts, Mr. DeZalia finally got up and managed to ride the entire length of the street for the first time. “We got a rider!” Ms. Monn exclaimed.

Mr. DeZalia was ecstatic. “It’s kind of an emotional moment for me,” he said.

It had taken Ms. Yeh, who had to overcome the trauma of her childhood accident, seven classes before she could even pedal. She arrived to this class, her 11th, terrified that she had forgotten how to ride over the winter, but within the first hour she was confidently biking the loop.

Riding has given her “this sense of freedom I’ve never felt before,” she said. “Like pure, unadulterated joy.”

It had also been a kind of therapy. “There’s so many parallels between biking and learning about yourself as a person,” she said. She recalled that in one class, she kept barreling straight toward a tree, and the instructor told her, “‘The problem is that you’re focusing on where you don’t want to go.’”

Instead, Ms. Yeh said, the teacher advised her, “‘If you start focusing on where you do want to go and you only look at that, that’s where you’re going to end up.’”