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. 

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