I spent many hours in 2020 scrolling through Instagram, as the rest of the world was doomscrolling the internet. Although my job demands that I spend a fair amount of time on social media daily, it wasn’t news updates that kept me hooked to the platform, or even the voyeuristic titillation of peeking into other people’s moods and miseries.

While the rest of the world may want to cancel 2020 for obvious reasons, for Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic, the covid-19 pandemic is only one of several mishaps that have made this year especially miserable for him. From his brazen misconduct with an umpire at the Australian Open in February to the recent fiasco over inadvertently hitting a line judge at the US Open, Djokovic has been in the limelight this year for all the wrong reasons—although tennis watchers aren’t too surprised.

Summer afternoons have informed our emotional histories in ways we may not even imagine or remember