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The conversation is on hold. The Edge community has hit the road... or they're staying home. Preparing for the academic year to begin, wrapping up projects and starting new ones, celebrating with family and friends or contemplating in solitude. After a hiatus, Edge is pleased to revive Summer Postcards: Edgies reporting in from wherever they are and on whatever they're doing, as the dog days wind out and the season comes to a close. As the world slowly returns to a "new normal" with enduring COVID restrictions in the midst of renewed vaccine freedoms, this year's collection is a testament to change (temporary and lasting), a consideration of loss (will travel ever be like it was?), and a celebration of questions (that still need answering). The hammock may be away until next year, but the memories remain. I spent the summer writing and revising the final section of a longish novel I started in 2019. It seems now as though I've been from 1946 to 2021 on my hands and knees. Various lockdowns have been a liberation from obligations and the luggage carousel, and I've never known such sweet and total focus for months on end. We have the luxury of living in the country--no shortage of big skies and moody walks. All our few breaks were in the UK--Scotland, the Lake District, the West country. Even in our remote part of the Lakes, I had to keep on writing--as in photo. The best novel I read this summer was Sandro Veronesi's The Hummingbird. Best non-fiction was Peter Godfrey Smith's Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. I gave time also to some wonderful novellas--perfect fictional form for you too-busy scientists. IAN MCEWAN is a novelist whose works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He is the recipient of the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam (1998), the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, and the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction for Atonement (2003). His most recent novel is Machines Like Me. In 2019, Časlav Brukner and myself were walking on a beach on Lamma Island, near Hong Kong, marvelling together at the astonishing strangeness of quantum phenomena. This summer, the conversation with Časlav has continued on another island, and quite an island: Lesbos, the northern Greek island near the Turkish coast. Lesbos is the place where lyrical poetry was born. Here lived Sappho and Alcaeus.