Paul Constant

Blog

  • More Than Half of You Are Probably Robots

    More Than Half of You Are Probably Robots

    Hi!

    Here’s a factoid that hit me like a cricket bat: Forbes recently reported that “for the first time in the internet’s history, machines now generate more web traffic than people.” In fact, internet traffic analysis shows that bots now average “57.5% of all HTTP requests to HTML content, humans at 42.5%.” 

    Those numbers are guaranteed to get worse. Over the last few weeks, Google switched from its traditional blue-link results page to an AI chat-formatted response that makes it hard to actually find a webpage—or even a sentence that was written by a human and not AI.

    The five or so giant corporations that run the internet are trying to railroad us into Web 3.0, an internet that takes place almost entirely in a chat field, with robot-generated text and images serving us whatever the algorithms think we want. 

    Say what you will about the algorithm-heavy social media of Web 2.0, but at least the possibility of discovery was there. People could occasionally bump into life-changing posts or websites. But 3.0 is not an algorithm pointing out at the world. It’s an offer to step inside the algorithm, to be entombed inside an AI capsule that promises to bring you only what it thinks you need and desire.

    I’m not convinced that Google and Meta will win this round, honestly. I think anti-AI sentiment is calcifying within the general public at a rate that none of the Silicon Valley set anticipated.

    Maybe there’s something wrong with me, because when I read that human traffic on the internet is declining, it just makes me want to post more writing on the internet. I’m thinking about retooling this website at paulconstant.com and turning it more into an old-school weblog, a journal of all the books and movies and art that I encounter, published in real time. At the moment, it’s just serving as an archive of newsletters, which is fine but feels like kind of a waste.

    Anyway, I’m only vaguely just starting to think about this. But I can tell you that nothing will change with my newsletter. I will routinely link to my writing from there and you can choose to read it or not, like always. But if you’re following me here at paulconstant.com via its newsletter function or the RSS feed, at some point soon it might become something more like an old-fashioned LiveJournal, with multiple posts published at different times.

    In the meantime, if you recently found something on the internet that you treasure because it’s a labor of love made by one or two humans, I hope you’ll share it with me. I’m looking for blogs and podcasts and art written by humans for humans. For a while, at least, that kind of stuff is going to get harder to find online. 

    I’ve Been Writing

    For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Grit City Books, an “unapologetically queer-owned and queer-positive” general-interest bookstore in Tacoma that I learned about because Seattle booksellers can’t stop raving about it. If you shop for books regularly in Seattle, there’s a good chance that Grit City is your favorite booksellers’ current favorite bookstore. It’s easy to see why: The shop is beautiful and very thoughtfully designed.

    I also wrote about June’s excellent array of new paperbacks, including the latest R.F. Kuang novel. 

    I’ve Been Reading

    I’ve been reading cartoonist Julia Wertz’s books for the better part of two decades. She’s a little younger than me, but her autobiographical comics have sort of grown up with me. I was coming out of my 20s party years when Wertz was reveling in hers, and we’ve both matured at roughly the same pace, eventually moving away from cosmopolitan socialization and into a more sedate home life.  Bury Me Already is Wertz’s latest cartoon autobiography, and it documents her rocky path into parenthood and her struggles with learning how to be a mom. I got to interview Wertz three years ago for the Comics Journal, and in many ways that interview was a preview for this book—it’s about how a detached, ironic young artist learns to live with the aching sincerity of parenthood. Like all of Wertz’s books, I laughed out loud at several points, which is not common for me as a reader. I like that her books don’t feature epiphanies for the sake of epiphanies, or any false narrative structures slapped onto the events of her life. For Wertz, life happens and you adjust to it, even if you really have no idea what the hell you’re doing. So far as artistic statements go, I can for sure vibe with that.

    Somehow, I had gone 50 years without reading a J.M. Coetzee novel. Thanks to a Little Free Library on Beacon Hill, I found myself in possession of a copy of Waiting for the Barbarians at the exact same time that Steven Metcalf of the (sadly soon-to-be-ending) Slate Culture Gabfest started raving about his late-in-life discovery of Coetzee, so I decided to give it a try. Friends, this book is so of-the-moment that I’m having a hard time believing it was written in 1980. It’s set in a tiny frontier town that is slowly going mad over the just-past-the-next horizon threat of foreign barbarians who are presumably going to lay waste to everything they encounter. If an American tried to publish this novel for the first time in 2026, I would have called it too on-the-nose because it so closely resonates with the headlines. 

    I read Nicholas Enrich’s memoir of his time working at USAID while Elon Musk’s DOGE ripped the agency to shreds, Into the Wood Chipper, at the same time that Scott Pelley was protesting the hackification of management at his job at 60 Minutes. Like with Pelley’s post-firing interview, this book left me a little mortified that smart people who were very good at their jobs just completely failed to recognize what was happening when the fascists came for them. Pelley seems genuinely astonished that new CBS owner David Ellison might have gone back on his word to maintain 60 Minutes’s independence, and Enrich couldn’t begin to fathom that Elon Musk would want to murder hundreds of thousands of (mostly non-white) children on the other side of the globe. The expectation of civility left both of these men woefully unprepared for the fight that was coming to them. When will we stop being surprised by the powerful oligarchs doing exactly what they threatened to do? 

    Somewhere on social media, someone praised sci-fi author Clifford D. Simak’s City, a novel-in-stories set in the far future, about the end of humanity and the rise of dogs as the world’s dominant, intelligent species. It’s an entertaining book that is very clearly stitched together from a handful of short stories that were obviously never intended to work together as a piece. I deeply disagree with Simak’s initial premise for the dystopia. The basic idea is that cheap, fast, and affordable transportation led to the wholesale rejection of cities as humankind retreated to solitary rural life and society fell apart. But just because an old sci-fi writer’s prediction didn’t come exactly true doesn’t mean the book is worthless. On the contrary, I enjoyed the thought experiment, even if it wasn’t the most satisfying novel.

    And finally, I read a couple of short books that I picked up on a recent trip to Peter Miller Books. 

    First, even if I hate the author and think their advice is absolute shit, I find myself magnetically attracted to how-to-write books. I am unfamiliar with the author Verlyn Klinkenborg so I can’t tell you how I feel about his work. But Klinkenborg’s writing book, Several Short Sentences About Writing, might be my favorite how-to-write book of all time, replacing Stephen King’s On Writing after two decades as the reigning champ. What’s most appealing about this book is that the advice is almost entirely at odds with every other writing book. 

    Klinkenborg urges the writer to write in very short sentences. No, You should write even shorter sentences than that. No, you should make them even shorter. Like this, then? Maybe, yes. And while most writing books urge quantity over quality, Klinkenborg also urges the writer to focus on making every sentence perfect before moving on to the next one. 

    Most writing books make me want to read more, with an eye for the choices that the author made while writing. I’ll say this for Several Short Sentence About Writing: It really made me want to write fiction. That’s rare.

    And Bruno Munari’s Drawing a Tree is exactly that: A short, profusely illustrated book showing how to draw trees. The styles range from hyperrealistic to cartoony, with tutorials for different types of trees throughout. The book is just as inspiring in its own way as Klinkenborg’s writing guide. There’s a real pleasure in being able to do something really well—even if that something is just knowing how to draw a tree in a pinch.

    And Here’s a Bald Eagle I Saw at Seward Park the Other Day

    A bald eagle resting in a tree against a blue sky. It's very American, in a non-shitty way.

    That’s it for now. I’ll see you again at the end of the month!
    Paul 

  • The Other “C”-Word

    Hi!

    For The Stranger earlier this month, Chase Hutchinson interviewed the new owner of the Pacific Science Center’s Boeing IMAX—the only true IMAX screen in the state of Washington. The interview contains two absolutely baffling quotes in one brutal paragraph:

    “We weren’t looking to operate a theater,” said Sevart in an extensive interview with The Stranger. Instead of being a theater for movies, Sevart described the space as now being a place where they’ll show various “content” that will be determined more in the future. 

    Funnily enough, I was working at The Stranger when someone first referred to my writing as “content” in 2014. Shortly after the bosses bought analytics software to track the performance of our pieces, three of the paper’s leadership team started to use the word “content” around the office. 

    At first, they used the word ironically, literally throwing air quotes around it and speaking in an exaggerated voice to let us know they were joking. “I look forward to reading your ‘content’ this week,” they’d say to me in an emotionless robot cadence, followed by a forced chuckle and a pair of waggling eyebrows.

    Like most of the ugliest tendencies, the joke soon became serious and the three men started to use the word content sincerely and without the air quotes. The jokey voice disappeared. They started to plan content strategy. They discussed how the tone of our content needed to change, and how we needed to pivot to different kinds of content in order to attract larger audiences to our arts coverage. Shortly after they started to implement their content makeover, I left the paper. 

    (Here is where I place an IMPORTANT CAVEAT that all three of the men I mentioned in this story have not worked at The Stranger for a very long time. You should definitely support The Stranger in its current form because it’s an outlet for good journalists like Chase who deeply care about the city and its arts scene. Those three pieces of garbage who used to work there can go piss up a rope, wherever they are.) 

    Anyway, I deeply regret not pushing back on “content” when it first started appearing. In fact, I think we all should have treated people calling writing, video, and art “content” as though they just released the loudest, smelliest fart imaginable. We should not have tolerated the loosening of language, the death of specificity, the financialization of art. We should have fought back, and we should have fought hard.

    Because looking back, that early-2010s funneling of journalism and video and audio essays and movies and TV shows into the beige, formless packaging of “content” really paved the way for the dawn of AI slop that we’ve seen in the last three years. When everything is just content to smash into the frameworks of streaming video and the endless gutters of a news website and a streaming music queue, why not just hire the robots to do that work? 

    Why pay the exorbitant cost to show a movie on your IMAX screen when the balance sheet doesn’t recognize the difference between an expensive Christopher Nolan epic and a free AI slop stream of glossy nature scenes? After all, it’s all just content, baby.

    I’ve Been Writing

    For the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I interviewed Columbia professors Kate Andrias and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez about their report, Democratic Abundance: An Abundance That Works for Workers. It’s about how the political concept popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance suspiciously leaves out working Americans from many of the benefits. When Abundance centers on letting CEOs build big projects, where do workers fit in?

    I’ve Been Reading

    I brought a visiting friend to the wondrous Peter Miller Books in Pioneer Square this month—I wrote about the shop a few years ago—and I bought a stack of books that I’ll be writing about in this section for a few newsletters to come. If you haven’t read Peter Miller’s How to Wash the Dishes, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s exactly what the title promises—a little book explaining how Peter Miller washes dishes, illuminated by his delightful prose. Even though it does very explicitly detail every single step of washing a load of dishes, I’d argue that the book is more about finding joy in work and taking pleasure in getting the details just right. It’s a treasure.

    Vigdis Hjorth’s Repetition is a novel about a young Norwegian girl’s sexual awakening, which happens to arrive just as Norway’s long, dark winter approaches. Appropriately, it’s a dark book with short meditative passages about the loneliness of youth and the pain of abuse. It’s beautiful and brief and very difficult to get through. 

    The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park by Michiko Aoyama is a collection of stories about people who learn that a pink hippo statue in a city park seemingly heals anyone who touches it. Like many of the books in the current trend of gentle Japanese sci-fi stories, this one gets a little repetitive and wears out its welcome early. 

    You’ve probably heard of Kate Folk’s novel Sky Daddy. It’s about a woman who is sexually attracted to planes. She fantasizes about one day dying in a plane crash, which she describes as being “chosen” by the plane as its bride. I enjoy provocative literary fiction and this was a very entertaining novel from an unforgettable perspective. Though I was annoyed that the protagonist works as a content moderator for a social media network. There have been too many novels in the last five years centering around content moderators—I’ve read at least three—and the concept is stale and overdone, not to mention outdated. 

    Money Walks

    A couple of weeks ago, I did the Wealth Walk, a theatrical walking tour by Seattle-area theater group The Feast. The premise combines three of my most closely held interests—city walks, income inequality, and Seattle history. I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that the Walk cleverly invites you to count your steps to dimensionalize income inequality and the passage of time, transforming a two-hour walk around the Mount Baker neighborhood and Rainier Valley into a meditation on wealth and power and who gets what and why.

    I walk through the Mount Baker neighborhood often on my Saturday walks, and the Wealth Walk excavated pieces of local history that I’m glad to know—interesting things, uplifting things, shameful things. I’ll never be able to look at the area in quite the same way again.

    To allay any fears you may have: while there is audience participation, it’s not uncomfortable or awkward—and I say that as someone who nearly fainted with embarrassment when a Teatro ZinZanni actor tried to flirt with me during a show.

    The Wealth Walk is continuing through June 7th, and I’d say it’s definitely worth the ticket price if your interests overlap with any two of the three that I listed above. And I think it’s worth noting that the ticket pricing system is clever and on-point: They request that you pay about what you earn in one hour’s work. 

    It's a screenshot from the Wealth Walk ticketing page and it says "I make about $20 an hour," "I make about $40 an hour," and so on up to $80.


    That’s all for this issue. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in June for the last issue before the longest day of the year. Take care of yourself.

    Paul

  • A Fifty Year Sentence

    By the time my next newsletter arrives in your inbox, I will be 50 years old. I know some people who hate aging and getting old, and that’s always felt so hopeless to me. You might as well try to win a fistfight with the ocean.

    In fact, I’ve always felt good about aging. When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be a grownup. When I was in my 20s, I wanted to be a stable adult. I loved being in my 30s and I loved my 40s even more. Obviously, at some point aging becomes a game of diminishing returns, but for now I’m enjoying myself. 

    I don’t like to make a thing about my birthday, but 50 feels like something that should be observed. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Breakfast of Champions as he was turning 50 as a way to ball up all the childish thoughts in his brain, throw them away, and start fresh. Based on his later work, that plan didn’t succeed—he was just as obsessed with sex and death and absurdity at age 51, 52, and so on. 

    But I think Vonnegut’s idea was a worthwhile one. All those memories you carry around with you for decades start to get heavy. I don’t have the time or the talent to write a Breakfast of Champions. I’d like to build a little balcony in my mind so that I can ball up all the elementary school embarrassments and ancient advertising jingles and throw them off it, into thin air. The past gets heavy after a while and I’ve got a craving for weightlessness.

    I’ve Been Writing

    For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Paper Pushers, a new zine pop-up store in the heart of downtown Seattle. It’s run by three young artists, and they have a lot of big plans for the space during the six months or so that it’s open. 

    I also wrote about 13 of the best paperback releases in the month of May. 

    I’ve Been Reading


    I enjoyed Seattle writer Olivia Waite’s second Dorothy Gentleman sci-fi mystery novella, Nobody’s Baby, more than I enjoyed the first installment in the series. While Murder By Memory had to establish the generational starship and its cast of characters, Nobody’s Baby could just dive right into the story. It’s a cracking good yarn about a baby who’s born on a starship where the entire population is on birth control to prevent overcrowding. And while there is a mystery at the heart of the story, it’s also interesting to explore the impacts of a child born in a purposefully child-free society. 

    Emily Jane’s Mr. Yay is an enjoyable novel about a hip-hop group that names themselves after a children’s entertainer who doesn’t seem to exist. It starts as an amusing novel about burnouts and transforms into a gentle sci-fi epic. 

    Automatic Noodle is Annalee Newitz’s entry into the cozy sci-fi category, a short novel about robots who open a noodle shop in a post-second-Civil-War future California. I liked the book but found myself wondering if it would have hit me even more if it were just a realistic novella about a group of friends opening a noodle shop. The sci-fi trappings were interesting, but I think I might have felt more emotionally connected to more finely wrought realistic characters. 

    Transcription is just such a hyper-realistic novel, and it really worked on me. Ben Lerner’s novella is about a journalist whose phone breaks hours before an important interview. It’s a meditation on technology and how it shapes us, and it’s a delightful quick audiobook experience—the book only runs four hours and it feels like a one-man monologue read by a charismatic actor. 

    Did you know Oprah is still picking book club titles? Bruce Holsinger’s novel Culpability has that O right on the front cover, and it’s the kind of contemporary novel that’s always appealed to the Oprah brand—a social novel that explores the impacts of a trend ripped from the headlines. In this case, the book is about artificial intelligence from AI friends to self-driving cars, and while the book opens with a bang, asking some of the most important questions of our time, it ultimately runs out of gas about halfway through and then just sputters to a stop. 

    How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?

    If I were forced to offer political advice to Donald Trump to help overcome his historically low approval ratings, my advice would be simple: shut the fuck up and disappear for a while. In a hyper-partisan environment like this one, any president’s polling numbers are likely to bounce back to something like 40 or 44 percent if they can just get the spotlight off them for long enough.

    But our president is a deeply broken person who compulsively dives for the spotlight. He literally can’t help himself. And so his approval ratings keep plummeting—as low as 30 percent on his economic performance, which is basically his floor. A full third of the American people wouldn’t hold a negative opinion of Donald Trump if he personally foreclosed on their homes.

    I don’t know where we go from here. The economy is likely only going to get worse. Ordinarily that would result in a massive swing in the midterm election, but the Supreme Court’s shameful decision to allow racist gerrymandering means that the midterms are probably not going to result in as significant a swing as they should. 

    It’s been over ten years since the media began its sick fascination with Donald Trump and I am so tired. I’m sick of hearing about him, I’m sick of living with the unending parade of shit that he’s foisting on us, and I’m sick of watching virtually every powerful institution bend to his will without putting up a fight. 

    The bad news is that we’re all stuck in a weird psychosexual relationship with a narcissist, and there’s no end in sight. The good news is that thanks to Trump’s abysmal polling,I know I’m not alone. There’s a little bit of comfort in that—knowing that across the country, hundreds of millions of Americans shake their heads and make a little tsk noise out of the corner of their mouths and mutter “that fuckin’ guy.” 

    More Americans now fear for the future of the economy than at any time in the history of polling. President Trump has responded by publicly fretting over the type of marble used on ballroom floors and the proper blue shade of a reflecting pool. He’s even more that fuckin’ guy than ever. 

    I have never in my life seen any public figure’s name come closer to transubstantiating into a curse word. I believe that with a little bit of effort and a whole lot of his trademark cluelessness, Donald Trump can permanently befoul his legacy and elevate himself into a generational laughing stock and object of scorn. If anyone can do it, Donald can.

    Thanks for reading! See you in a couple of weeks.

  • Walking in a Big Circle

    In which I walk around Lake Washington and urge you to buy a bookstore or three.

    Hi! 

    Last Saturday, I did my annual walk around Lake Washington. It was a little early in the year, and I almost undertook it impulsively. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to complete the full loop without a few weeks of psyching myself up for it first.

    It turned out to be one of my easiest trips around Lake Washington ever, assisted in large part by the fact that long-standing construction projects in Juanita at the top of the lake and Mercer Slough at the eastern edge of the lake have both finally ended. Without having to take long detours, I wound up walking a relatively short 49 miles—102,297 steps. 

    The sun over the Montlake Cut, with placid waters and no people in the shot.
    Dawn over the Montlake Cut.

    I left the house at 4:19 a.m. and returned at 8:59 p.m. I mostly ate protein bars bought from grocery stores along the way and drank Gatorade—though I’m happy to report that fresh watermelon juice is just as reinvigorating and electrolyte-laden as any sugary sports beverage. I made no major stops, aside from bathroom breaks. My heart rate for the day is kind of astonishing to see—not too high, not erratic at all. Just steady, all day.

    A screenshot of Apple Health's heartbeat metrics for the day of April 25th, showing my heartbeat basically ranged from just below 100 to roughly 120 beats per minute for the whole day.
    I am unfortunately very addicted to my Apple Watch’s metrics. 

    One unfortunate variation this time around: The trail running shoes I have sworn by for the better part of a decade, Brooks Cascadia waterproof runners, are a little bit different this year. Brooks has unfortunately fallen for the trendy Hoka shtick of overinflating the cushioning of their shoes, and the Cascadias were too goddamned cushy. I wound up developing a bad blister in the center of my left foot that I’m still feeling five days later. It’s the most painful and long-lasting injury I’ve ever had from one of these walks. 

    Brooks has been very good to me so I’m not eager to give up on them yet. But if next year’s Cascadia models are as over-cushioned as this year’s, I might have to find a new trail-running brand. When will this marshmallow-footed athletic shoe trend finally die?

    Part of the reason that I took my yearly walk around Lake Washington so early in the year is that I’m thinking about adding a second circumnavigation of the lake at the end of summer or the beginning of fall, before it starts to get dark early. I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not, to be honest. 

    This one long walk has become so important to my mental health—a pillar of my emotional life and something that I dearly look forward to every year as winter draws to a close—that I wonder if adding a second walk might be good for me. Or maybe it’ll be the equivalent of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs by making it less special somehow.

    Because coming home after walking steadily in a giant circle around an enormous body of water is still, after all these years, an emotionally powerful experience. I still feel a little high, filled with a glow that stays with me for days afterward. I might not be able to jog, or throw a ball, or hold a yoga pose. But I can walk a really, really long goddamn time.

    I’ve Been Writing

    On the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I talked with Jamie Keene, a former Biden administration economist, about her new report that makes a very compelling case for a very important point: Whenever the next progressive wave takes the White House and Congress, it’s important that they not waste time trying to repair the social safety net that the Trump White House has left in tatters. Instead, they should build new programs that invest deeply in people who need food, unemployment, and income assistance without all the means testing and terrible constraints that have been written into the system over the last 40 years or so. It was a great conversation. 

    I’ve Been Reading

    I had been saving Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel, Long Island Compromise, for a vacation, and I’m so glad I did. What an absolute pleasure this big, sprawling novel about generational trauma and its impacts on one rich family full of frustrating twerps turned out to be. It’s deeply funny and while it is about trauma, it also satirizes modern novelists’ overuse of trauma as a narrative crutch. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but this one is a phenomenal reading experience. I recommend taking it out for a spin the when you’re taking some time off and have extra attention to commit to reading.

    Michael Pollan developed a very clear pattern to his career in the early 2000s: first he writes one important and culture-changing book (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and then the publishes a few books on the same subject that just aren’t as compelling because they feel made up of outtakes from the big important book (In Defense of Food, Cooked, Food Rules). But while How to Change Your Mind, his treatise on psychedelics, was clearly supposed to be the big important book of this new cycle of his work, I actually enjoyed his most recent bits-and-bobs book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, even more. It’s a swift-moving and wide-ranging guide to human consciousness that unfortunately takes a long and unnecessary detour into AI, but it still changed my understanding of how my own brain works. (I wish Pollan had asked all the interview subjects who claim that we have a moral responsibility to treat AI humanely if it develops consciousness why they don’t seem to give a shit about human suffering at home and abroad, even though we know that starving children in Sudan, Gaza, and Haiti are just as conscious as you or me.)

    Unplugged is one of those books you accidentally read on vacation because it’s suddenly available after you’ve read everything else. It’s a memoir from Tom Freston, one of the founders of MTV who got his start importing goods from the Hippie Trail in Afghanistan and India, and it’s a pretty generic American business story with a couple of great anecdotes spread around to keep you interested. The opening chapter, when Freston is fired from his job as CEO of Viacom and is greeted on his way out the door by dozens of applauding employees, is pretty cringy, but things improve from there. 

    Walking Into the Night by Olaf Olafsson is a novel that fictionalizes the story of William Randolph Hearst’s real-life butler, Christian Benediktsson. It’s a slender novel that asks how someone could possibly take on a role that forces them to supplant their very personhood in service to a wealthy eccentric, and I enjoyed it. But Benediktsson’s pre-butler history wasn’t as interesting as his time serving Hearst, and I wanted the book to offer more hot gossip about Hearst’s inner sanctum. It was all a bit too chilly and austere for my tastes.

    Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World is a novel set in a dystopian Japan in which the breeding of children is outsourced entirely to in vitro fertilization. Through the application of omnipresent government propaganda, the marriage between a man and a woman is considered to be a strictly family arrangement, to the point where sexual activity between husband and wife is considered a taboo. Instead, people are encouraged to develop romantic relationships with fictional characters in their manga and anime. This was a short, zippy novel that asked some truly bizarre questions and pushed some ideas of sex and gender roles in child-rearing to the absolute limit.

    Don’t Cry Because It’s Over—Smile Because You Should Buy a Bookstore

    Lots of people have come to me in a state of panic about the announcement that Ada’s Technical Books on Capitol Hill will be closing. Does this portend doom for Seattle’s independent bookstores, they want to know? Are books finally finished once and for all?

    Honestly, this news doesn’t freak me out at all. For one thing, the owner of Ada’s, Danielle Hulton, is one of the most straightforward people I know in the local book scene, and I take her at her word that she was ready to move on from bookselling for personal reasons. So far as I’m concerned, this says nothing about the industry at large.

    And also: Ada’s 16 years of independent bookselling is not a failure. Businesses come and go. Not every bookstore can be a precious legacy business handed down from generation to generation. It’s perfectly okay for a business to shutter after a good run. This is one of my pet peeves about sites like Vanishing Seattle—they treat every business closure as a tragedy or a death, when in fact cities are meant to change. It sucks when one of your favorite places goes away, but I guarantee you there are other favorite places out there waiting for you. Seattle has dozens upon dozens of independent bookstores, and while none of them are as specifically devoted to science and technical books as Ada’s, I promise you can find another bookstore out there that speaks to you and your needs.

    Which kind of leads to my big point: Hulton is now ready to sell off the three Fuel Coffee locations that she bought and transformed into small bookstores six years ago. If you’ve ever wanted to run a small neighborhood bookstore/cafe, I urge you to consider this your big chance. These are beautiful spaces in Montlake, Capitol Hill, and Wallingford that are just dying for an opinionated and passionate bookseller to come in and take them over.

    I personally feel as though the three Fuel locations were underutilized in terms of programming to activate the communities. I think they’d be ideal spaces for book clubs, small readings and musical performances, and other creative community events. 

    I know there are at least three people out there who have always dreamed of owning a bookstore in Seattle. To those people, I urge you to check out the Fuel Coffee locations and dream big. There’s bookselling magic waiting to happen in those spaces. All it would take to make it happen is someone like you.

    Dream big! 
    Paul

    P.S. Confidential to those of you who are just here for the dogs: Obie and Wally just had their annual vet visits and are doing very well. Obie’s on a pain management program for his arthritis but he is doing spectacularly well for a 12-year-old greyhound. Wally is a sporty little fireplug whose teeth need a deep-cleaning that he is sure to not enjoy, but he is otherwise the picture of health. 

    Obie, a handsome elderly greyhound with red hair, is demonstrating how he can touch the top of his nose with his tongue. Good boy, Obie.

  • The Movies Are So Back

    This will be a shorter post because the last couple of weeks have been a little busy with vacations and presidents threatening nuclear holocausts and other fun distractions.


    I’ve Been Writing

    Did you know that you can get from downtown Seattle to Poulsbo on just two seats of public transit, in less than an hour and a half? That’s what I learned while writing about Away With Words, a bookstore and bath and body shop that’s owned by a husband and wife team. A store that sells both books and homemade soaps and lotions might seem like an odd pairing at first, but it’s very clear when you walk in that the shop is intended as a spa for the body and the mind. Now that I’ve been, I don’t understand how there aren’t shops crossing Waldenbooks with Bath & Body Works in every mall in America.

    I’ve Been Reading

    I found Mega Milk on the front tables of Island Books on Mercer Island. It’s an essay collection by the writer Megan Milks, essentially, about their last name. They explore the science, industry, and culture surrounding milks of all kinds. I very much enjoy these kinds of books where an estimable talent focuses their attention on a single subject from a variety of perspectives.

    Racebook, the latest from sci-fi writer Tochi Onyebuchi, is a collection of essays about his relationship with the internet, as both a cultural critic and a Black writer. He’s a smart and observant thinker and I got a lot from the book, but I was barely able to stay focused during the essays about video games. This is no fault of Onyebuchi’s. It’s just that the subject of video games interests me so little that the smartest, most charismatic person in the world would fail to keep my focus on it for more than a few seconds.

    Catapult is a non-fiction book by Jim Paul published in the 1990s. It’s about Jim Paul and his friend Harry deciding to build a catapult together. The narrative is pretty straightfoward and it’s interspersed with pieces of narrative history about military technology, but ultimately it’s a very sweet story about male friendships.

    Katie Kitamura’s short novel Audition was a publishing-industry phenom last year. It’s got a killer premise: A woman one day meets a man who swears that he’s her son, even though she has no memory of him. But to me it felt like a whole lot of premise and very little follow-through—one of those airy books that grabs your attention hard, only to fall apart on the wind.

    Let’s All Go to the Movies

    I kind of like that the “T” is messed up on “The Drama” on Tasveer’s marquee. It feels on-brand with the movie’s slightly off-center tone.

    I recently went to see The Drama at the new Tasveer Film Center in Columbia City. I was thrilled with the experience.

    The Tasveer used to be the Ark Lodge Cinema, and it was my neighborhood movie house. But I absolutely hated going there. Ark Lodge required patrons to wait in line outside the theater while a too-eager employee would question ticket-holders like they were suspects in a pressing criminal investigation and then seize their backpacks and bags for the duration of the movie. 

    Now, this is a bit of a side rant, but I live in a city with lots of public transit options and therefore I have virtually no patience for businesses that confiscate backpacks. I’ve walked out of multiple supermarkets that asked me to leave my bag at the front of the store, for instance, because I’m not going to trust my laptop to a security guard who can’t be trusted to keep the store’s stock of diapers safe. But I begrudgingly made an exception for Ark Lodge because they were a small movie theater in my community and I wanted to support them.

    I’m happy to report that Tasveer doesn’t have a confiscatory backpack policy. Even better, the employees are pleasant and the theater is now run by a nonprofit that seeks to support South Asian cinema and filmmakers. Except for the fact that they haven’t gotten their snack options set up just yet, Tasveer is a tremendous improvement from the Ark Lodge in virtually every way.

    And I have to say that I quite enjoyed The Drama. The Zendaya-Robert Pattinson movie is part rom-com and part, well, drama—with a slight musk of horror creeping around the edges. It’s all about the secrets that we keep from others, and it’s funny and tense and excellently acted and edited. I liked Kristoffer Borgli’s previous film with Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario, but it ultimately fell apart at the end. The Drama sticks the landing, if you’re willing to make a few exceptions for the characters being young and dumb and in love. 

    A lot of ink has been spilled about The Drama’s “twist,” which isn’t really a twist so much as a premise that’s unveiled less than a half hour into the movie, but don’t worry if it’s been “spoiled” for you. There’s a lot to admire about the movie regardless.

    Anyway, I am thrilled to have a functioning first-run movie theater back in my neck of the woods, and I hope you’ll go visit the Tasveer Film Center in Columbia City for an upcoming show. They’re showing a bunch of promising stuff in the next few weeks including the new Soderbergh, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and more. If you’re crunched for cash right now, they’re also running a two-for-one ticket sale on Tuesdays. Hooray for Hollywood (in Columbia City.)

    See you in a couple weeks,
    Paul

  • Cursive and Re-Cursive

    Let’s open with a PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Tomorrow is April Fools’ Day, so expect some people to lie on the internet tomorrow in the name of “pranks.” Before you share anything you see or read online for the next couple of days, please double-check to make sure it’s from a reputable source. That’s always good policy for living on the internet, but on April Fools’ Day it’s straight-up survival. I hate this holiday with every ounce of my being. 

    But rainbows are nice.

    And if you’re in Seattle, I encourage you to take a day off to ride the new 2 Line light rail across the lake to the Eastside. I’ve been doing long walks on the Eastside for the past decade-plus, and I can tell you that big things are about to happen there, now that the Eastside has been connected to Seattle by a permanent rail line. 


    You could easily lose a day or two to exploring the east side by light rail. After two solid decades of reshaping toward transit, downtown Redmond is a great place to walk around. The Bel-Red Goodwill is one of my favorite thrift shops in the area. Bellevue’s Spring District feels like a city neighborhood that’s about to happen—lots of tall buildings and empty spaces, the way South Lake Union used to feel. There are lots of excellent trails that connect to light rail stops. And two of the best independent bookstores in the region—Island Books and Brick & Mortar Books-are now just a few steps away from light rail stations. 

    This is a thrilling development in the history of the region. Bellevue and Redmond are transitioning from the butt of Seattle’s jokes into equal partners in the new Greater Seattle. I expect to see those cities develop in some really interesting ways now that the train is finally here. The days of people trying to pit Bellevue and Seattle against each other are pretty much over: the region is now on the way to becoming a more East Coast metropolis of multiple urban areas pursuing the same goals.

    I’ve Been Writing

    On the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I talked with Misty L. Heggeness, the author of a book called Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy. It’s a great book that uses Taylor Swift as a lens through which to understand how the economy undervalues the labor of women and the work of artists. I loved this conversation so much, and the book was full of insights. (Note: I misnamed the Taylor Swift song “The Man” in this episode, calling it “I’m the Man” instead. My shame is immeasurable.)


    I’ve Been Reading


    My pal Stuart recommended A Luminous Republic, a novel by Argentine author Andrés Barba, and it’s already one of my favorites of the year. It’s about a mysterious pack of homeless children who show up in an Argentine city. They don’t speak a recognizable language, they behave oddly in public, and they start to encroach on the daily lives of the residents. It feels like a dark fairy tale for the 21st century. At first I was so-so on the ending of the book, but it’s still haunting me even a couple weeks after reading, which is a sign of good fiction.


    The Slicks is a longish essay by Maggie Nelson comparing Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift. This kind of academic essay that digs into popular culture and makes odd, presumably illuminating connections between two disparate subjects feels very late-90s, early-2000s to me—a dated and frivolous exercise. (To be completely transparent, I freely admit that I tried to write many essays like this well into the 2010s.) 


    Strange Houses is a mystery novel by a Japanese social media star named Uketsu. It’s about a person trying to solve a long-unsolved crime using floor plans of unusual houses. It’s a cute enough diversion .

    Teach the Children Typing!


    Like most people who attended public schools, I had some excellent teachers and a few truly terrible teachers. But only one teacher taught me a skill that I literally use every single day–her name was Ms. Olore, and she taught Typing I.

    I am a touch typer. I don’t look at the keyboard when I type and while I’ll never win a speed competition, I am a fast and relatively clean typist. 

    If I had taken calculus instead of typing, my life might be completely different. I think my brain was just elastic enough in my teen years to completely absorb typing into my muscle memory, and I’ve made the most of that skill in the three decades since. In fact, it’s occurring to me that my most important thinking now generally happens at my typing speed, meaning that this physical skill has rewired my brain so that they can operate in sync. It’s kind of crazy when I think about it. 

    My experience with learning handwriting in elementary school was pretty much the exact opposite. I’ve always had rotten handwriting, and every time I pick up a pen I can hear my exasperated first-grade teacher scolding me to “pinch and pillow” the pen with my fingers. More than forty years later, I still have no idea what the fuck she was talking about.

    And in the years since I’ve become a writer, my handwriting has atrophied even more. It hurts to write anything more than a sentence by hand, and unless I concentrate on ev er y sin gle curve of ev er y sin gle let ter, you’re going to have to be pretty good at picking up context clues to have any idea what I’m trying to communicate with my writing. I’ve disappointed a couple of longstanding pen pals by giving up handwriting letters, but that’s something I had to do. It’s a clumsy and inefficient way of getting my thoughts down on paper, I’m not great at it, and I physically can’t really do it anymore.

    Last week, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro grabbed headlines with his promise to bring cursive back to public schools. To me, that feels like a play to win over the hearts of sentimental voters around my age who remember fondly the paper they used to practice writing cursive on–the lined paper with the dotted lines running down the center of every line. It’s nostalgia bait, in other words, meant to appeal to those in my generation who weren’t repeatedly harassed for their hideous penmanship.

    Don’t get me wrong–it’s important for kids to learn how to write by hand. Handwriting is one of the first ways that children learn how to organize their thoughts and intentionally communicate with others. But I don’t think cursive has any more or less importance in that process than print writing, and I think it’s silly to prioritize the importance of cursive in a country with public schools as troubled as ours.

    This focus on cursive writing is especially silly when I know lots of teens who can only type by hunting and pecking at keyboards. I don’t know if any high school requires students to take a touch-typing course, and that’s insane in a nation that has prioritized both higher education and technology jobs the way America has.

    Yes, kids are using phones more than laptops. And yes, voice and video are becoming the primary way of communicating on the internet. But typing is still an important skill, and it’s one that I’d prioritize far above writing those capital Qs that look like big floppy 2s wearing lace cufflinks, or those Gs that look like the crest of a long-dead German warlord.

    Writing, to me, has always been thinking. I write in order to figure out what I think of the world—to process events and to organize my thinking about chaotic events. This fretting about the death of cursive is a superficial and silly panic that distracts from the more important issue that’s going unaddressed: We need to make sure that children can organize and communicate their thoughts, and that means they need to learn how to write. Otherwise, we’re going to wind up with a nation of pointy-headed morons who earnestly believe selfhood was invented in 1920 as part of a conspiracy to wipe out CEOs. 

    That’s all for this month. Hope you’re enjoying spring. See you on tax day.
    Paul

  • It’s Especially Ides-y Out There

    Welp, we’re bombing Iran. This is a unique problem for Donald Trump because his signature move when he gets in over his head is to declare victory and move on to the next big attention-grabby thing as quickly as possible. But you can’t just wave away a war with some sleight of hand. 

    One nation can choose to start a war. But once it’s started, ending it requires agreement from all parties. Given that we bombed an elementary school and killed dozens of girls in the first few hours of military action, I don’t think Iran is going to forgive or forget anytime soon. 

    Put another way, Trump’s name and face will probably not remain on the side of all those government buildings in DC twenty years from today, but America will likely still be paying the price a generation from now for what he unleashed this month. Nobody’s wriggling out of this jameasily. 

    I’ve Been Writing

    For the Seattle Times, I profiled Jamie Lutton, the owner of Twice Sold Tales on Capitol Hill. Next year, Lutton will have been a bookseller in Seattle for 40 years. She knows more about bookselling than pretty much anyone in Seattle, and in the piece I recommend hanging out and just watching her work for an afternoon. She’s a world-class book recommender who is also full of all sorts of terrific gossip about authors and publishers and booksellers. (One anecdote that got cut from the piece was her story about a Seattle bookstore that closed decades ago because the owner “wouldn’t hire women, and he wouldn’t hire anyone taller than him—and he was five foot eight!”) This was a fun one to research and to write, and the story includes a little bit of a scoop: Sometime after she crosses the 40-year mark, Lutton is preparing to sell the bookstore to a staffer and retire, though she hopes to still work two or three days a week as a bookseller after she hands the reins of Twice Sold Tales off to Michael Rucker. 

    And for the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I talked with Groundwork Collaborative Executive Director Lindsay Owens about a study Groundwork undertook in conjunction with Consumer Reports. In several cities around the country (including Seattle,) people were enlisted to order the same products from the same grocery stores at the exact same time on Instacart. They learned that Instacart was charging different people different prices for the exact same product. It’s a troubling reminder that prices are changing with technology, and soon stores could use algorithms to leverage our internet histories and jack up prices, charging us exactly as much as we’re willing to pay for every single product. 

    I’ve Been Reading

    Two Women Living Together is a memoir written by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo, and translated from the Korean by Gene Png. It’s literally just about two straight women in their forties who decide to buy an apartment together. They’re not lovers, just platonic friends who have brushed aside societal expectations to marry or live alone as what my parents’ generation referred to as “old maids.” It’s a short book, and to be honest I think it could have probably been even shorter, but it’s an interesting perspective from two people who are quietly living life on their own terms. 

    She’s always been a great writer, but since 2016 Rebecca Solnit has become one of the most important American essayists. Her latest, The Beginning Comes After the End,is more or less a sequel to Hope in the Dark, a similar collection of essays about finding hope and believing that society will change for the better even when things look pretty grim. I must admit that this one felt like it was lacking some teeth. It felt less challenging than other books by Solnit, more primed for comfort. But holy crap do people need comfort right now, so who am I to deny them?

    The first volume of Danish author Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series was an immediate sensation when it was first published in English in 2024. Because the author is Danish and because this story has been divided into 7 volumes, it’s basically pedigreed for literary obsession. In the years since the series has only become more of a phenomenon with serious book nerds. It’s a novel about a woman who is living in a more banal version of the Groundhog Day situation: every morning, she wakes to find it is November 18th all over again. I quite enjoyed this book and its fastidious attention to the minor details of daily life, though I’m not entirely sure my enthusiasm will stretch across six more volumes. 

    I spent most of the last few weeks reading a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God that I found in a Little Free Library. I’d never read Zora Neale Hurston before and the book deserves every last bit of praise that it has received. I was surprised by how hard I had to work to focus my attention to track Hurston’s lyrical prose and the intense dialect. It made me realize that I haven’t been stretching my reading muscles lately by taking on challenging books. Time to fill in some big gaps in my reading life, I think.

    Nothing to Do but March

    I’m glad the days are getting longer. Our dogs were getting sick of winter. Poor Wally, who is typically always game for an excursion, would tremble fearfully every time I went to get the leash for another trip into the wet, dark evening. And Obie carried a little extra anxiety, too. Granted, Obie’s a senior citizen now—a chart on a dog groomer’s wall recently informed me that he’s 77 in human years—but his arthritis pain is being managed and he’s generally a pretty happy fellow.

    But we’re finally at the point where all three of our daily walks take place when it’s light out, and even though it’s still wet and chilly and there was one freaky snowstorm on Friday, the shift in the weather has made all the difference for Obie and Wally’s morale. 

    Wally (left) and Obie (right) on a sunny walk a few days ago. 

    That’s the kind of energy I need to muster for this last big push into spring. March doesn’t make it easy, but there’s got to be something better on the other side. 

    Take care,
    Paul

  • Good Literature Should Fit in Your Pocket

    For a few months, arts media has been reporting that the mass-market paperback has finally gone extinct. It’s been a long time coming. Even at the end of my bookselling career in 2008, publishers were phasing out the form factor and shoppers simply didn’t seem to care one way or the other.


    On the one hand, who cares? Lamenting the end of a very specific type of paperback feels frivolous at a time like this. Mass-market paperbacks were cheap and flimsy and couldn’t survive more than a couple re-reads. The cover art was minuscule and often illegible. So, again, who cares?


    I mean, I do. Honestly, my life would be vastly different if mass-market paperbacks didn’t exist when I was a kid. One of my favorite gifts every Christmas and birthday was a whopping $5 or $10 gift certificate to Bookland, a small chain of indie bookstores in southern Maine. I could get a mass-market paperback and maybe a comic book or two with those gift certificates, and the books that I chose on those occasions basically set the course for my reading life: I started with Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, crashed into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series from there, and then launched into Kurt Vonnegut. 

    If those books cost twice as much, I would probably not even have read half as much as I did in my tween and teen years. And as I got older and the Vonnegut books started to evolve into more prestigious trade-paperback editions, I opted for the mass-market versions just because I liked the way they felt in my hand.


    The approachability of the mass-market paperback is something that means a lot to me. As I made the inevitable white-boy slalom into the works of Vladimir Nabokov, I found his works much easier to digest from between the slightly lurid covers of a used mass-market paperback; those elegant trade-paperback covers with their witty allusions to Nabokov’s wordplay always felt too erudite for little old earthy me. I eventually read every one of Nabokov’s novels in mass-market form. Same with Steinbeck, and Anne Rice, and Terry Southern, and James Morrow and on and on and on.

    I first met Dorothy Parker in a pocket-sized Portable edition that the publisher soon replaced with a larger, non-portable Portable edition. In retrospect, that should have been a blaring early warning sign that mass-markets were on their way out—even Portable collections switched over to cumbersome larger paperback editions, which are only slightly easier to shove into a backpack than their hardcover brethren.

    A handful of the paperbacks that are on the shelves just above my writing desk. 


    We should acknowledge now that something is getting lost as the last mass-market paperbacks slink off the press and into history. Publishers say that the form factor just isn’t popular with readers anymore, and that’s undeniably true. But when most paperbacks now cost about $20 a pop, publishers are also relinquishing their efforts to win over a certain kind of audience—the poor kids who maybe don’t live near a good library, the tourists who consider buying their first book in a decade but wince at the thought of laying out twenty bucks for a romance novel after they just had to drop thirty bucks for a shitty sandwich and a bottle of lukewarm water at the next airport stall over. 

    Literature is essential, yes, but that doesn’t mean that literature shouldn’t make an effort to try to be accessible in many different ways—including price.


    The traditional publishing model dictates that a book comes out in hardcover, and then it arrives in paperback about a year later. And after that, unless it’s a bestseller, it’s basically in the wind, a memory. I’d argue that there would be value in a third step in the life cycle of certain titles: a mass-market release in non-bookstore spaces a couple years after launch, to grab the attention of irregular readers and Dollar Tree shoppers and the growing number of folks who don’t often encounter books in their daily lives.


    On a purely commercial level, it seems as though the egalitarian entryway to literature has been shuttered with the mass-market paperback. And as publishers opt for fancy limited-edition releases with colorful decorated edges and gilt covers that you can only buy at Barnes and Noble or through other exclusive retail deals, it feels as though yet another art form is turning its back on poor people in favor of an upper middle class with disposable income to burn. Those extravagant and rarified types of art are always the first to get cut out of consumer budgets when the recession comes. By rushing after luxury, publishers risk making themselves inessential.

    I’ve Been Writing

    Speaking of those $20 paperbacks, I wrote an overview of some of March’s most interesting paperback releases for the Seattle Times.

    And I guest-wrote an issue of The Pitch this month about the fact that this is the time to come up with big ideas for exciting policies that will help win over voters in the midterm elections this fall. Of course I used the occasion to bring up FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, which to me is the most interesting Sliding Doors moment in American history. What if, for most of the 20th century, we had enshrined a right to health care, work, affordable housing, and food into the Constitution at the end of World War II? What kind of world would we be living in right now?

    I’ve Been Reading

    I listened to George Saunders’s latest novel, Vigil. Like his last novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, the audiobook is a full cast recording that feels more like a radio play than your typical audiobook reading. Also like Lincoln in the Bardo, it’s a book about a complicated man hovering in the liminal space between life and death, only instead of Lincoln, this book features an unrepentant CEO of a world-destroying oil company. It’s an interesting companion piece to Lincoln in the Bardo, but I don’t know that Vigil stands on its own as an especially meaningful experience.

    I read two recent nonfiction paperbacks this month: That Librarian by Amanda Jones and Money, Lies, and God by Katherine Stewart. They are both interesting books about current political conditions—book-banning in libraries around the country and the radicalization of the Republican Party, respectively—and if either of those topics interest you, they’re well worth your time.

    Susan Orlean’s Joyride is billed as a memoir, but it actually reads more like a how-to-write book, except it’s specifically about how to write like Susan Orlean. It’s a fun, anecdote-packed story of Orlean’s rising career at the tail end of the golden age of print periodicals, and if you’ve ever loved a magazine or newspaper with all your heart I bet you’d enjoy this book.

    A while back I read Batman Resurrection by John Jackson Miller, which is kind of a weird duck in the world of movie tie-in novels—it was a novelization of a movie that was never made in between Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie and its sequel Batman Returns. All the characters are obviously based off the movie; this Batman couldn’t be anyone but Michael Keaton, for instance. As a kid who loved those movies more than just about anything, I really enjoyed the book. Its sequel, Batman Revolutions, is not quite as enjoyable a read as Miller’s first foray into the world, but it’s still a lot of fun. If you’re into the pulpy kind of so-called “men’s adventure fiction” that used to make up a significant amount of the mass-market paperback sales I was talking about in the introduction to this newsletter, this will definitely scratch that itch. I hope Miller gets to explore these stories a little more because I will gulp up every one of these books that he writes.

    Think Small, Think Regional

    Late this week, the news broke that Paramount, which is owned by weird nepo baby David Ellison, is buying Warner Bros. and all its attendant properties. That means a rich kid convinced his dad to buy him Bugs Bunny, Tony Soprano, Batman, Turner Classic Movies, CNN, Harry Potter and the Game of Thrones all in one fell swoop, and it means that one man will own a significant share of the globe’s attention. 

    (And let’s not forget that his father was just handed TikTok on a silver platter by their spiritual godfather, President Trump.)

    This is a nightmare scenario, and I’m not looking forward to the decisions I’m going to have to make as a consumer in the months to come. Dropping Twitter on the day that Elon Musk bought it was relatively easy for me, but I love me some HBO and some DC Comics. Still, if Warner falls prey to the kind of pro-fascist manipulation that we’ve seen in CBS News under Bari Weiss, the decision will ultimately be an easy one to make.

    All this underlines for me that we need to get back into the art of building a regional entertainment sphere. Seattle famously was home to a Saturday Night Live-like TV show called Almost Live! back in the 1990s, for instance. 

    Even though technology and the internet have in theory made it easier for people to make and distribute art, it feels like everyone is still shooting for a global audience. We need to think small again, with movies and books and TV shows and podcasts with a hyperlocal focus. If you haven’t already, it’s time to stop giving your money to fascist failsons and instead direct that money and attention to people making art in your backyard.

    Obviously, local news is important. But local art is important, too, and we should expand the idea of what local art is—it’s not just plays and gallery shows and poetry readings but movies and episodic video and all of the cultural artifacts that are so easy to make and distribute now. There are already local book distributors and plenty of independent bookstores and movie theaters in the Pacific Northwest. We need to bring back touring roadshows of movie screenings and multidisciplinary variety shows and find new ways to make and share and consume art on a more human, humane level.

    We have scaled up everything to a planetary scale and that has worked out terribly for everyone except a handful of CEOs and investors and their pet Nazis. It’s time to figure out how to get small again.

    Take good care of yourselves and I’ll see you on the Ides of March.

    Paul

  • A Conspiracy of Dunces

    2026 has been a great year for conspiracy nuts. The latest Epstein Files dump proved every paranoid stoner to be correct. Yes, Epstein was involved in a plot to turn global politics sharply to the right. Yes, he helped create cryptocurrency, which made political corruption much more prevalent. He tried to get involved with the Gawker lawsuit, which eventually undid the blogging era. He colluded with a passel of powerful, disgusting men to try to unspool the progress made by the #MeToo movement. He was present at the dawn of Gamergate and its war on feminism and journalism.

    This all sounds insane, but it’s right there in black and white. As Ryan Broderick said in a recent episode of his excellent Panic World podcast, “If you think that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t fuck with your life in some way, you’re wrong. He fucked with all of our lives for years.”

    Before I whip out the corkboard and red yarn, I want to be clear about a couple of things: First, Epstein’s end goal was not to install Donald Trump as a fascist leader. He “just” wanted to make it easier for himself and his wealthy pedophile friends to make obscene amounts of money through illegal means, and he wanted to make it easier to launder and move those obscene amounts of cash around the world. He was a sick criminal who wanted to essentially transfer power from the governments of the world to the hands of elite, sick criminals like him.

    So no, I don’t think the return of fascism was his end goal. It just so happens that when you tip the world into a consequence-free playground for the super-rich by bombing the pillars of civilization, fascism inevitably rises to fill the void you left behind. Whoops.

    And second, I think that calling this a “conspiracy” is almost giving it too much credit. There is no shadowy cabal of carefully selected captains of industry acting out secret rituals according to ancient texts. There’s no hyperintelligent maestro delicately pulling the strings in order to enact a grand plan. No, our modern world was simply the result of a bunch of rich, barely literate perverts bashing out idiotic emails to each other at all hours of the day and night.

    This is bleak stuff. But in a way, I feel a little better knowing that there is no grand design to all this, and that the agenda was nothing more than a messy get-rich-quick scheme from a bunch of self-pitying wealthy nerds. That our corrupt and regressive culture was created by bumbling human beings means that it can be unspooled by other human beings.

    Now, granted, we have an uphill battle ahead of us. It always takes more effort to create something than it does to break something. But the citizens of the world have crawled out from under a massively corrupt Gilded Age and its attendant rise of fascism before, and that means we can do it again.

    We may be poorer than these so-called elites, but the record proves that we’re definitely smarter than them. And when we look back on the historical record of the 1940s and 1950s, we have a very workable blueprint for building a more democratic, more broadly prosperous world. It can’t be impossible, because it’s been done before—and now we know that our opposition is nothing more than a basketful of absolute numpties who type with their big toes. We can take them.

    I’ve Been Writing

    For the Seattle Times, I wrote about the most interesting paperback releases of February.

    I’ve Been Reading

    Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow is a post-apocalyptic novel, but it’s one with a twist. It’s set on a native Canadian reservation in the Arctic Circle, and the way the end of the world touches that community. At first, they don’t even notice when the outside world shuts down. But slowly, shipments of things like groceries and gas stop arriving, and the harsh winter is right around the corner. Then white people start showing up from the south, and the problems really start. The spare writing style probably won’t appeal to all readers, but I was sucked right into this book. It takes a lot for me to even pick up a post-apocalyptic novel, but this one I enjoyed a great deal.

    I was sick this month, so my reading list is shamefully small this time around. While I was in the throes of the cold, I read a compendium version of J.M. DeMatteis and the late Keith Giffen’s comic book Hero Squared, which is basically about a version of Superman traveling to an alternate universe where he’s a normal schlub. Giffen and DeMatteis wrote what was probably the most important comic I read in my youth—the humorous Justice League reboot that presented superheroes as ordinary people with ordinary problems. I wish I liked this book more, but the villains weren’t particularly well-established and the themes failed to come together in a meaningful way. Still, at a time when I was restless and abandoning lots of books in a cold-medicine haze, it was nice to soak in that old familiar shared authorial voice one more time.

    The Culture Wars Are Coming for the Culture

    This isn’t a trend piece so much as a vibe check: I’ve noticed a worrisome lean to conversations about art on Reddit and Bluesky and comment sections, and I need to write about it a little bit in an effort to understand it more.

    Back during the first two years of the pandemic, I spent time on TikTok. Mostly, I followed comedians and economists. In retrospect, it kind of filled my social needs during lockdown—over lunch, I’d check in on how my parasocial friends were doing and lose a few minutes to scrolling.

    One of the comedians I followed was Jane Wickline, who performed awkward comedy bits and the occasional musical number. I really enjoyed her sense of humor, which ranged from observational comedy to the occasional absurdist skit. And so in 2024 when it was announced that Jane Wickline was joining the cast of Saturday Night Live, I felt a little bit of proprietary pride that someone I’d been following since the beginning made it to the big leagues.

    In the time since her SNL debut, Wickline has been a lightning rod for some of the most vicious criticisms on the internet. Comedy nerds and SNL fans have been remarkably cruel to her in all the ways that anonymous commenters are cruel to public figures.

    But one of the weirdest strains of comments about Wickline are the comments that suggest that she objectively isn’t funny and that the people who claim to like her are lying for some reason. As in, no human being could possibly find Jane Wickline funny and therefore there’s some sort of gaslighting underway—either people who claim to be her fans are paid to post their support, or they praise her in order to advance some other agenda.

    That sort of solipsistic argument—this art is bad and nobody could objectively enjoy it so its fans are not real—isn’t particularly new, but it definitely seems more widespread now. Music comment threads are full of people complaining about “industry plants,” which means musicians who had some pre-existing connection to the music industry that helped them get a foot in the door. Cindy Nguyen at The Santa Clara listed a few artists who have been defined as industry plants: “Billie Eilish, Clairo, Lil Nas X, Chance the Rapper and Cardi B.” I’ve also seen Wet Leg and Lorde in this conversation.

    The term “industry plant” has warped over the years to essentially mean a musician with no real organic support, meaning the industry colluded to shove them down the throats of an unwilling public. Any support of those artists is viewed as artificial and somehow corrupt.

    And the latest example that I’ve seen is the AppleTV show Pluribus. I love the show and its deliberate pacing, but I understand that it does not work for everyone. But the vitriol directed at both the show and its fans on comment threads is kind of breathtaking. And that vitriol also went an extra step, with people accusing the fans of being astroturfed bots who only pretended to like the show in order to drive up ratings. This is a common belief, with some people speculating that the show is “a social experiment to see if an objectively boring and mediocre script can still be successful with enough prestige signaling and astroturfing.”

    This sentiment feels like a new and disturbing turn in the social conversation. Just as social media has amped up hyperpartisanship to the point that many people don’t believe in the basic humanity of people from the other party,* the discourse around art is transforming into an all-or-nothing fight over whether it’s even possible for someone else to like a piece of art that you don’t understand.

    This is moving toward a very bad place. It feels like the algorithm is turning fandom into another never-ending war between two clearly delineated sides that are sworn enemies.

    And it didn’t occur to me until I started writing this that all of my examples of art that internet dudes deem to be something no person could possibly organically enjoy are women-led. That explains a lot—it’s misogyny all along!

    Sigh.

    Take care of yourself and please consider wearing a mask in crowded spaces so you don’t get the cold that I had. See you in a couple weeks.

    Paul

    * But seriously: fuck Nazis. If your “partisan” and “political” beliefs include the argument that certain people are not fully human and deserve to be stripped of their rights and/or shipped off to camps, you are scum who should be shamed and shunned from society.

  • Make Cops Look Dorky Again

    Make Cops Look Dorky Again

    Hi!

    Everything I said in the last issue is still true: The emotionally scarred people in the White House are deeply frightened, and they’re acting out of fear. They don’t know what to do, but they understand that what they’re doing isn’t working. 

    Now that ICE is executing people in the streets, the only sensible political response is to abolish ICE. That is a moderate position that I would expect out of even the most milquetoast politician who wants my vote. 

    We also should unspool the Department of Homeland Security, which was rushed into existence after 9/11 and has not improved our safety at all. And we have to reform law enforcement from the top down. We have to rethink the entire proposition of crime and punishment in America.

    Obviously, we have to demilitarize the police. There is no good reason for law enforcement to use weapons of war against Americans on American soil. When you dress and arm yourself like this to confront American citizens…

    Cops in military camouflage, their faces covered, wearing helmets and carrying machine guns. They look like they're ready to invade a foreign nation.
    Photo by the Oregon Department of Transportation

    …you’re much more likely to act like you’re in a Call of Duty game. Dressing like a soldier on the front lines transforms your self-image into a big, tough hero in a dangerous world, and it transforms every human you encounter into a potential assailant. 

    So, yes: We need to ban local police departments from owning tanks and machine guns and tactical gear used in war.

    But I think we need to go one step further. We need to pass laws requiring local cops to return to the slightly goofy uniforms of the past: powder-blue shirts with short sleeves, dress pants with yellow stripes down the sides, and shiny dress shoes. 

    Even further than that, cops need to stop driving around in imposing black SUVs. They have to instead switch to something more like the practical high-visibility hatchbacks of the London Police Department. 

    A London Police car, which is a bright green and blue checked vehicle with a roof rack and a hatchback.

    Law enforcement is not warfare. The purpose is to protect and serve the people. Officers should look friendly and approachable, and there’s nothing approachable about a creep in head-to-toe camo or the modern, grim-dark aesthetic. 

    There is scientific heft behind this suggestion. Aileen Out of the National Association of Uniform Manufacturers and Distributorswrites that according to “Richard R. Johnson, former military police officer and researcher in the field of interaction between police and citizens, it is not wise for an officer to wear a black uniform.”

    Out explains that Johnson’s “research indicates that this color can evoke negative emotions, making citizens more likely to behave aggressively, which in turn requires the officer to respond more forcefully.”

    Instead, his research “suggests that officers should wear a light blue shirt with dark blue pants. This combination is commonly seen because blue tends to evoke feelings of calm and serenity.”

    I can personally vouch for this. The government agent who I most often encounter in my daily life is my mail carrier, a very sweet guy in a pleasant but not at all imposing powder-blue outfit who putters around my neighborhood in a funny-shaped truck. He is beloved. Everybody around me knows him, he shares kind words with everyone, and when he’s gone we all can’t wait to hear how his vacation to visit family in the Philippines went. 

    No doubt there would be pressure from police unions against a law banning policy from wearing military uniforms. They might argue that some officers would rather resign than return to the days of Officer Friendly. 

    To this argument, I respond: Good! If you’re worried that powder blue shirts might undermine your masculinity, you don’t deserve a job in law enforcement. And it’s not like this military cosplay is a response to rising crime rates. Dorky uniforms were the standard for police officers in the 1970s, when crime rates were significantly higher across the board virtually everywhere in America.

    Police unions around the country complain that police have lost the respect of the people. If that’s their biggest concern, I have an easy solution: If you can seem authoritative while you’re dressed like a train conductor and driving a neon-green EV hatchback, you will automatically win my respect.

    I’ve Been Writing

    For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Seattle’s new literary bar, The Ink Drinker. Located in the heart of Ballard, it’s a bar by book lovers for book lovers—a place where people are invited to pull up with a good book and enjoy a cocktail or mocktail or two on their own, or gather with a book club, or show up for a lecture. Way back when I worked at The Stranger, I wrote an article titled “Seattle Desperately Needs A Literary Bar.” The Ink Drinker is the first real attempt to make something like that actually happen.

    I’ve Been Reading

    Lauren Rothery’s Television is a clever novel about an actor who announces that he will give away his salary and percentage of profits for a movie to one lucky movie-goer. He sets up a lottery system in which people send in their ticket stubs, and the movie is a huge success, but it complicates things for everyone. It’s a terse meditation on the embarrassing connection between art and commerce.

    I don’t often read short story collections, but I was drawn to Curtis Sittenfeld’s Show Don’t Tell after hearing an interview with the author. It’s a collection of stories about middle-aged women in moral quandaries: a story from the perspective of a Karen caught on video behaving in a racist manner, a woman on the road to divorce who adopts a conservative self-help fraud’s recipe for a Godly marriage. They’re witty, brief experiments in empathy, which is exactly what I like in a collection.

    Nathan Gelgud’s graphic novel Reel Politik begins as a comic strip about young idealists who run a dying independent movie house. But the gag—strip format eventually expands as the movie workers seize the means of production and decide to operate their theater with a more collectivist understanding of art. It’s a silly, slight book that echoed some of the themes of Television in a very different way.

    Murderland is partly a sweeping true crime narrative, partly a memoir, and partly a damning account of the excesses of the 20th century. The book explains that the spate of serial killers who lurked around the Pacific Northwest were all at least in part created by the astounding pollution in the Puget Sound region, and the arsenic and lead pollution in the Tacoma area most of all. Caroline Fraser, who grew up in the Northwest at the same time that local monsters like Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and Charles Manson were prowling, collages together the stories of serial killers and environmental crimes into a sweeping story that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

    Radical Cartography is mapmaker William Rankin’s manifesto about how maps can alter our understanding of the world. The information that mapmakers choose to impart in maps, and how they illustrate that information, can make maps more or less equitable. It’s a little technical, but fascinating all the way through.

    That’s All for This Month

    That introduction was a little long, so I’m going to call it here. Things are stressful out in the world. Please remember to unplug occasionally, and take care of yourself and your neighbors. 

    See you in a couple weeks.

    Paul