The song of the summer is the chime of breaking news alerts on your phone

As history was unfolding in all its chaotic, frightening glory, Eve Keesecker was selling fresh peaches out of a truck in New Jersey. Michael Straw was birding in Delco. Piper Brunhuber was emerging from the waters of Wildwood, planning to quickly check her phone before plunging back in.

But leisure is not the watchword of summer 2024.

Over the course of the last month, a sitting president fumbled a 90-minute debate so badly that his party and donors publicly abandoned him, a former president was bloodied in an assassination attempt at his campaign rally, the aforementioned sitting president declared he would not seek another term just three months before a general election that some see as a fundamental referendum on democracy, and his vice president sought to consolidate support for a historic candidacy.

The extraordinary twists of the last few weeks have resulted in a bizarre summer, in which suntanning is interrupted by news alerts, and freezer martinis perfectly complement existential dread.

Perhaps nothing better captures this mercurial July than side-by-side photos of CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer that ricocheted across the Internet on Sunday: the first showed him at brunch, holding aloft an orange spritzer (called the Wolf Spritzer) and smiling; the second, taken a few hours later, showed him stonefaced on television, discussing President Joe Biden’s dramatic resignation.

If summer is usually a lazy river, this one is more like whitewater rapids, headed straight for a waterfall, and also the inner tube is actually just interlocking sticks of dynamite.

The startling news about Trump and then about Biden came eight days apart. It just won’t stop, and it arrives in real time.

Harry Winkler, 33, was sitting on a blanket at the Mann Center on a Saturday evening, drinking beers with friends before the Dr. Dog concert. Then, someone mentioned something about an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

“I was like, c’mon. Really?” Winkler said. He was shocked; reception at the concert was bad. All his fellow concertgoers were on their phones.

Indeed, the group chats are ablaze — not with photos of kayaking or the zucchinis Grandma grew. The hottest gossip this summer is about what the delegates are thinking.

A friend recently alerted Walter Bess’ group chat to the availability of dollar crabfries and $5 pitchers at Chickie’s & Pete’s. Bess, 43 and a truck driver, asked if anyone was up for heading to a casino. Just regular stuff.

The next text was a breaking news video showing Trump getting rushed off stage after being shot.

“Did they shoot him?” Bess asked.

“It looked like it was a graze,” someone said.

“Just a graze,” another friend chimed in.

Sebastiana Lopez, a 22-year-old master’s candidate at Temple University, saw the news about Trump on TV. Her brother was napping nearby; she shook him awake. Later, sliding into a car with friends, she opened with a phrase more typically associated with a juicy story than a presidential election: “Did you hear...?”

Lopez and 20-year-old Eve Keesecker were discussing the latest news as they sipped iced coffees outside of Saxby’s on a recent afternoon.

Keesecker was working her summer job, selling peaches from a truck in a New Jersey parking lot, when Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the race. She was checking a customer out using her phone when the text came through.

“Both myself and the person I was checking out froze,” she said. “I was like, ‘Is there anything else I can get for you?’ They were like, ‘Is that real?’”

Across the political spectrum, the onslaught of news has jolted people from their summer bliss. Michael Straw, 29, was birding in Delco’s Glen Providence Park when he got a Fox News alert that Biden was leaving the race. Straw, who works in Republican politics, was stunned. The binoculars practically fell from his hands.

Piper Brunhuber, 21, was also derailed — from re-entering the ocean after seeing that Biden was withdrawing. She and her boyfriend discussed the news, and scrolled Twitter, for the next hour and a half while sitting on beach chairs in Wildwood. She texted her roommate and her parents to let them know the latest development.

“The beach always makes you hungry,” her mom texted back. “And, what do you think about Kamala?”

It might be nice, some have suggested, to live in precedented times. But after a while, even the extraordinary begins to seem ordinary.

“This will be the first year that I get to vote, and my older brothers and my parents are like, ‘We promise it’s never usually like this,’” Brunhuber said. Well, she added, “other than the last couple of years.”