Author: Paul Constant

Every time I opened a newspaper in my late teens and early 20s, when the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was at its height, I half-expected to read news that Rushdie had been attacked. But that was decades ago, and so much time has passed that this month’s heinous attack on Rushdie was somehow a shock.

And the photos of the aftermath of the stabbing—a single drop of blood on a familiar beige chair, arranged on a familiar stuffy stage in front of a familiar well-to-do older white audience—turned my stomach in part because it felt so disquietingly normal. I’ve been on plenty of stages just like that, interviewing authors. I know what the atmosphere in the room was just a few minutes before the attack: I know the sounds the audience made, the volley of questions and answers, the mild electric buzz of finally breathing the same air as someone whose books you’ve adored. I’ve spent a lot of time in variations of that room.

But I’ve never been in a room where an author is stabbed by a member of the audience. I can’t imagine feeling that terror, experiencing that jarring moment where reality readjusts itself around a strange new normal. I’d call it unthinkable, but someone thought it. And now it’s real, and now we all have to live with it.

There have been plenty of inspiring words written about how literature will prevail, and how there will always be writers brave enough to speak the truth no matter the cost. I’m glad that those pieces exist and I took comfort in them. But I’m personally having a hard time perceiving this moment as a battle in the epic war between good and evil.

I haven’t spent any time learning about the attacker, so I don’t know anything beyond the fact that he was caught and arrested on the scene. Odds are pretty good he will claim he did what he did because of religion, but it really could have been any reason. There are always young men who want nothing more than to destroy something larger than them—something they don’t, in their youth, have the patience to comprehend.

Rushdie was doing what writers do. I’m glad he was doing it, and I hope he’ll soon be back to it. I admire his bravery, and the bravery of everyone in that room who stood up to help, even while I desperately wish that it had never happened. I hate that one angry young man can assert his will on the world through an action like this, even as I’m comforted by the fact that writers will continue to write, despite the monstrous actions of those who just want to burn our libraries down to the ground and plunge the world into darkness. They’ll never win, but sometimes they knock the wind out of us.

I wish Rushdie a swift recovery. I have not a single doubt in my mind that he’ll continue to be a light in the world, standing against the night of ignorance.

I’ve been writing

This kind of feels like cheating, but I pre-scheduled this month’s newsletter. By the time you read this I’m just back from a vacation on the Washington coast—away from work and the news and, perhaps most importantly, the internet. So everything I’ve written this month has not yet been published in time for me to link here. I’ll include those links next time.

For the Seattle Times, I profiled Mercer Street Books, one of the most gorgeous bookstores in the city. This was an emotional piece for me to write for a lot of reasons, and I really hope the story will inspire more Seattleites to seek the shop out, because it is an absolute hidden treasure.

For Business Insider, I wrote about the many different definitions of what it means to be in a recession, and why our current economic climate doesn’t really match any useful definition. I also wrote two pieces about about the Inflation Reduction Act: First, why it’s a big win for the average American, and then why its tax on stock buybacks is a tremendously underrated development.

I’ve been reading

Last month, I said I was trying to not read brand-new books for a while. Many of you chipped in with brilliant backlist recommendations, and I’m going to be reading off that list pretty heavily for the next few months. I begin, awkwardly, with two recommendation-adjacent books because I couldn’t track down the actual recommended titles.

Amber recommended sci-fi author Sherri Tepper, who I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read. The local used bookstore didn’t have any of the Tepper titles Amber recommended, so I picked up the only option available: A novel titled Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Published in 1997, it’s a dystopian future set in a millennial America in which fundamentalists have taken over, a presidential candidate rides a crest of fascism by stoking the public’s anger at women, and the nation is on the verge of a violent coup. I don’t imagine this is one of Tepper’s best books, but I really enjoyed the political satire—even though it hit too close to our current reality for comfort. This definitely won’t be the last of her books that I’ll read.

And Frances recommended Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, but the only Hrabal immediately available at the library was I Served the King of England, which I’ve always meant to read. What a fun, artful shaggy dog joke of a book this is! With the hotel trappings and the European sensibilities it reminds me a little bit of Stefan Zweig‘s fiction, only a lot wilder and less restrained. I suspect that when I finally get my hands on Too Loud a Solitude I’ll enjoy it a great deal.

And then a few newer titles I had on waitlists came in from the library. Jerry Stahl’s memoir Nein, Nein, Nein! is about Stahl having a breakdown while on an extensive tour of historical Holocaust sites. Be advised that it’s written in that kind of macho 20th century male literary cadence—think Hunter S. Thompson—but Stahl is funny enough, and emotionally aware enough, that it doesn’t feel like a pose.

Funny You Should Ask is a comic romance novel about a journalist who is assigned a profile of a hunky but dumb American movie star. I thought it was charming and fun, but the idea that an American actor would ever be given the role of James Bond was so ridiculous as to make the book feel like science fiction. And even though the book acknowledged that female journalists falling for their subjects is a tired trope, it still asked us to buy into the trope. So this one kind of qualifies as a guilty pleasure because I had to overlook two big flaws—but a guilty pleasure still counts as a pleasure as far as I’m concerned.

A Novel Obsession is a novel about a writer who becomes obsessed with her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, secretly befriends the ex, and then writes a novel about the whole experience. It’s a dark thriller with an unreliable narrator, and it’s a real page-turner—though it doesn’t quite follow all the way through on its delicious buildup.

I also re-read the first twenty or so Sandman comics to refresh my memory before I begin watching the Netflix series. I last read these books in the 1990s, but they were such essential texts to me that I remembered a lot more than I expected to. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that unlike a lot of comics from the late 80s and early 90s, these books still read very smoothly. Neil Gaiman seems to have an innate understanding of exactly how many words each panel can hold without making the page feel too wordy and overwrought. And I was also impressed how, even with a rotating cast of artists, settings, genres, and times, Gaiman’s writing somehow made the series feel of a single piece. There’s a pulse in the writing that is unmistakable and continuous, even if the art switches from a cartoony 90s-style in one issue to a gritty abstract horror style in the next. I don’t exactly know how Gaiman does it, but now that I’ve written comics I’m even more impressed with how successful this comic is.

That’s all for this month

Briefly, I just wanted to touch on a couple of topics I’ve brought up here in months past.

First: I do still plan on leaving Twitter if Elon Musk buys it—he’s confirmed he’d bring Trump back to the service, which is a hard quit from me—but since it looks like Musk’s deal might fall apart in court I’ve been cautiously tweeting again.

Second: I definitely still feel that literary burnout I was talking about last month, and the Penguin Random House trial has only made me feel worse about the state of publishing. It confirmed all my worst suspicions about mainstream mega-publishers being vapid and incestuous, paying their authors and staff way too little while also giving multi-million dollar advances to famous people, and having no idea how to run a sustainable business. Add in the Barnes & Noble gossip and things look pretty bleak to me. I think I’m going to slip a little further into backlist land and catch up on some classics for the next little while, so your recommendations continue to be much appreciated.

And many of you are asking after Obie and Wally. The boys are doing just fine. They’re happy, loving the sunny summer weather, and enjoying each others’ company a great deal. Oberon turned 8 this year, and he’s every inch a distinguished older gentleman. He’s leaner and not as muscular as he used to be, but he’s still prone to silly bursts of energy and leaping when he’s excited.

And Wallace has calmed down a little bit, after hitting his 4th birthday last month. He’s unusually vocal for a greyhound and he used to bark at any stranger who got too close. But he’s less prickly and more trusting now. I think in addition to age and familiarity, he’s realized that he’s in his forever home and that he doesn’t need to continually be on guard for danger. He’s on a very sweet emotional journey. I love that he greets me with a little dance, hopping from one paw to the other, when I arrive at home after a long walk.

I hope you had a terrific summer.

This week’s heat wave has forced the dogs and I to retreat to the one room in my house with air conditioning for 21 hours a day. Because my life right now is pretty much crammed inside these four walls, everything is feeling kinda insular and maybe a little claustrophobic. I’m also finding it pretty hard to focus, so this introduction is just going to hit a couple random points before we careen, full-speed, into this month’s update.

I traveled to Alaska earlier this month for a work trip, which was a lot of fun. Alaska is one of the few states I’d never visited, and while I stayed pretty close to the Anchorage area, I saw enough—the mountains, the mud flats, the mind-bogglingly great Anchorage Museum and the magnificent Alaska Native Heritage Center—to know that I want to return sometime. And I stayed masked in high-risk situations and managed to avoid Covid, which felt like a real triumph.

I also realize I’ve been pretty quiet on the comics front lately, but trust me when I say there is progress. The next project is moving slowly, but I’m incredibly happy with what we’re cooking up and I’m excited for you to see it. Hopefully we’ll make some solid steps forward this summer and have something to show you later this year.

In the meantime, please read Snelson: Comedy Is Dying, and also check out new work by my comics collaborators: Alan Robinson, who absolutely nailed the art on Planet of the Nerds, is doing a great job on The New Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics. Alan is not only drawing a super-cool Spider-Man, he’s also working with Peter David, who was one of my favorite comics writers back in my teens and twenties. And Fred Harper, who melted my face off with his incredible work on Snelson, has a new comic coming out soon with the estimable Stuart Moore called Highball, which is about alcoholics in spaaaaace. They’re both brilliant artists and excellent collaborators, and anything they do is worth your attention.

I’ve been reading

In the Seattle Times this month, I profiled Mercer Island’s own Island Books, a (surprisingly large) neighborhood bookstore that’s been a community lynchpin for nearly 50 years. This store has some of the best booksellers in the Pacific Northwest, and my only regret is that I didn’t have the word count to properly give all of them credit by name.

I’m also really happy with this month’s crop of Business Insider pieces; I’ve gotten to cover some of the most pressing economics issues as soon as they’ve hit the headlines. Topics include:

• CEO pay hit record heights this year. You know what else happened? Thanks to inflation, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour hit the lowest value an American minimum wage has held since 1966. Those two data points are absolutely connected.
• I wrote about why the American appetite for taxing the rich has never been higher in my lifetime.
• I explained why the Federal Reserve’s insistence on raising interest rates in fact might not solve the inflation crisis but will almost certainly immiserate millions of Americans.
• And I unpacked the weird situation that unfolded on Twitter earlier this month when Jeff Bezos and Big Oil teamed up to dunk on an innocuous tweet President Biden wrote about gas prices. The billionaires and oil companies probably aren’t on your side, people.

I’ve been reading

I picked up Ella Baxter’s debut novel New Animal from the staff recommends section of Paper Boat Booksellers in West Seattle, and I’m so glad I did. It’s the story of a young woman who, in the wake of her mother’s death, wrestles with grief by getting involved in the BDSM scene. It’s a really interesting and funny book about control, loss, emotions, and having to sit with yourself. And it was an interesting companion for another debut novel I read this month, One’s Company by Ashley Hutson. This one is also about a young woman who wrestles with grief and trauma, but the protagonist of One’s Company wins a large lottery jackpot and spends part of her fortune building a huge temple to the sitcom Three’s Company, and then she decides to spend the rest of her life reliving classic episodes of the sitcom. Thematically, One’s Company and New Animal are very similar books but they venture in some very different directions. I do feel like the protagonists of these books would get along if they ever met, though.

I read three super-interesting nonfiction comics this month. New Yorker cartoonist Sofia Warren’s Radical: My Year with a Socialist Senator seems to have been tailored directly to my interests: it’s a journalistic comic about the nuts and bolts of what it’s like to run a state legislative campaign, and also (uh, spoiler alert) how to actually govern after you win. Featuring revealing interviews with staff and the state senator herself about the complex and frustrating process of politics, this is one of the clearer and easier-to-understand books I’ve ever read about state politics. Lewis Hancox’s YA memoir Welcome to St. Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure is an accessible comic about growing up trans in an environment that doesn’t make any space for people who fall outside the cisgender experience. Hancox’s cartooning is deceptively simple and it reminds me of some of the best in the autobio field, including Tom Hart and James Kochalka. And Shelly Bond, Imogen Mangle, and Laura Hole’s Filth & Grammar: The Comic Book Editor’s (Secret) Handbook is the Understanding Comics of comic book editing—an explanation of what comics editors actually do. I didn’t know half of what they cover in this book, and I’ve written hundreds of pages of comics.

I mentioned in the last issue that I adored the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. A friend loaned me an anthology edited by the directors of that film, A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur, and it’s a pretty special piece of art unto itself. It’s less of an anthology and more of a literary collage—an exploration of alternate universes in literature with contributions from Etgar Keret, Ted Chiang, and a classic story from Jorge Luis Borges. There’s art and small books stitched inside the larger book and it’s just a really fun experiment. This feels like the kind of book that McSweeney’s used to publish in its heyday, and I wanted to read a million more books just like it as soon as I finished.

Jon Raymond’s latest novel Denial brings the author’s usual melancholic lonely Pacific Northwestern vibe to dystopian fiction. As is typical for Raymond, the dystopia is more of the slow-moving and depressing variety. I enjoy Raymond’s quiet narratives and his beautiful spare prose a great deal, but this one didn’t move me as much as his more down-to-earth novels The Half-Life and Rain Dragon. But that could just be how I’m meeting this book—I’m so tired of living in a dystopia that the idea of spending more time in a slightly more depressing dystopia is just exhausting.

And Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, Alexandra Lange’s history of the rise and fall of the 20th century’s most popular architectural monstrosities, was just the summer book that I needed. I’ve always been fascinated by malls, and the history and psychology of shopping malls in America was a nice low-stakes subject that I could get lost in for a while. Lange’s a great and intelligent tour guide for this exploration and if, like me, you spent much of your late teens working in a mall (pour one out for Sears and Roebuck,) there’s likely a little pang of nostalgia hiding in these pages just for you.

That’s all for this month

For a number of reasons, I’m feeling pretty burnt out on the publishing industry at the moment. I’ve been reading, selling, and writing about brand-new books for the last 20+ years, and I kind of feel as though I can’t stop staring at the strings at a puppet show: Everything feels orchestrated by publicists and manicured by agents and perfectly safe and more than a little bit incestuous. The new arrivals table at my neighborhood bookstore hits me more like a burp of stale air than a refreshing breeze.

I think I might have to take a step back from the look-at-me of it all and get lost in some old books for a few months. Maybe a Steinbeck and a Highsmith I haven’t read yet, maybe some funky old 1970s sci-fi paperback by some guy I’ve never heard of before.

If you’ve got a hidden backlist classic that made your toes curl, I’d love to hear about it—anything from high art to genre trash, so long as the author isn’t currently doing a podcast reading tour or endlessly retweeting praise on Twitter. Send me an email (thisispaulconstant at gmail) with your decades-old faves and help me temporarily climb off this hamster wheel of literary inanity, please.

Take care of yourself,

Paul

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to read that Seattle author Neal Stephenson, who invented the idea of a metaverse in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has partnered with a blockchain company to create a real-life metaverse. The disappointment comes from the fact that I’m a big fan of Stephenson—I nominated him for a Genius Award in Literature nearly ten years ago, after all. But my lack of surprise comes from the fact that he’s always been a bit of a libertarian, and I wrote in this very newsletter just a few months ago that he’s been way too appreciative of billionaires in his last few books.

You could say that the warning signs have always been there. I’m not one of the many fans who got burned by Stephenson’s involvement in a Kickstarter to create a sword-fighting video game system that basically returned nothing to its backers. But Kickstarter has always been a disappointment factory, and I just assumed that Stephenson’s enthusiasm for the project had blinded him to what was possible.

This, though? Stephenson’s most recent novel, Termination Shock, is about the global devastation that climate change will cause, and so his involvement in a technology that is apocalyptically terrible for the environment is doubly disappointing. And of course Snow Crash, which I read and loved in the 1990s like most book nerds my age, felt at the time like a cautionary tale about exactly the kind of technology that he’s actually creating.

I don’t think I can in good conscience continue to read Stephenson’s books. I just can’t support an author who profits from the monstrous ideas that he once tried to warn us about. I’m also shaken by the fact that Stephenson willingly went into business with Peter Vessenes, a serial crypto investor who has left a swath of dissatisfied customers and partners in his wake.

I might reinvestigate Snow Crash in order to determine if I completely misinterpreted the book when I read it decades ago, but I can’t really see myself giving Stephenson any more of my money or attention aside from that. I’m done.

I’ve been writing

Any month in which you get a chance to interview Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is a good one, right? Talking to Dr. Kendi was an honor. I’m always a little blown away when I meet someone who speaks in complete, perfect sentences and paragraphs. Part of that skill, of course, is because Dr. Kendi is a brilliant man. But I also had the sense when I interviewed him that he was very careful about what he said because he knows that if he were to accidentally drop a single word out of place in an interview like this one, his enemies—by which I mean white supremacists—would immediately use the quote as a weapon against him. He’s aware of the tremendous responsibility that he carries, and I deeply respect his strength.

I also wrote about Vashon Bookshop for my Neighborhood Reads bookstore profile column. What a lovely bookstore—it’s partly a vacation-friendly island bookstore for tourists to pick up beach reads, but it’s also a vital community hub for Vashon’s year-round residents. I’ve watched the shop evolve over the course of my many visits to Vashon through the years, and it’s just a pleasure to learn about the store’s history.

For Insider, I wrote about a new study showing that nations around the world which worked to shrink income inequality also reduced political divisiveness. The head of the UN-sanctioned group that performed the study makes a policy recommendation that she believes would help resolve both political and economic disparity in America. And the piece I wrote about why childcare is an absolute necessity for working moms reads a little different on publication, because it was written before, but came out after, the Supreme Court’s shameful decision to overturn Roe.

I also wrote about an interesting theory from an author: The idea that the invention of public policy grad schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s actively made public policy worse, because the standardization required in “rating” policies meant students and teachers measured prospective policies through economic terms. The most cost-effective policies are now deemed the “best.” But by those same measurements, the best policies in America—Medicare, Social Security, etc.—would never have been adopted.

I’ve been reading

I realized when I read Bainbridge Island author Jon Mooallem’s excellent new book of essays, Serious Face, that I miss regularly reading good magazine writing—by which I mean non-fiction essays that run for thousands of words and don’t feel rushed to get to a point. Mooallem is one of the best non-fiction writers in the state of Washington, and this book—full of eccentrics, scam artists, historical weirdos, and literal Neanderthals—is a showcase of his many talents. There’s even a celebrity profile of sorts, in the form of a long and self-referential interview with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman that gets hijacked by the early days of the pandemic. This book would be a great vacation companion—the kind of book you can pick up, lose an afternoon in, and then throw in your bag as a guest on your next adventure.

I found a pristine copy of Tananarive Due’s The Good House in a Little Free Library on one of my walks, and by the time I fell asleep that night I was a hundred pages in. It’s a story about an intergenerational curse in a small town in Washington state, and though it takes a while to get started, Due knows how to pay off a slow burn. The next time you’re getting ready to pick up a bottom-tier Stephen King novel just because you’re bored and in the mood for a horror fix, do yourself a favor and pick this one up instead.

Tripp Mickle’s book about Apple’s tumultuous years following the passing of founder Steve Jobs, After Steve, is full of juicy corporate gossip. Unfortunately, Mickle frames the narrative as a battle for the company’s “soul” between number-crunching new CEO Tim Cook and art-loving design guru Jony Ive. Based on the detailed quality and unbalanced quantity of anecdotes about Ive, though, it’s obvious which “side” of the “struggle” most of Mickle’s sources are on. And the very premise that Apple has a “soul” to lose represents a dangerous kind of corporate anthropomorphization that I believe a journalist shouldn’t indulge. If, like me, you’re interested in an insider account of how giant corporations get things done, there’s plenty of gossip here to enjoy. But you also have to be careful to continually keep the source in mind, and interrogate the narrative for secret agendas.

Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust is a complex novel about a tycoon and his massive business empire in the early days of the 20th century. It’s sharply written, and it smartly avoids the trap of trying to be an overstuffed DFW-style “everything novel,” which it easily could have been. Unfortunately the narrative is broken into several discrete chunks, and those structural choices sapped the narrative of some necessary velocity.

Biloxi, a novel by Mary Miller, is a simple story about an unpleasant old man who has made an incredible mess of his life. Then he gets a dog and things start looking up, until he realizes that the dog belongs to someone else. Biloxi is really an exercise in voice—a damaged, prickly man who is aware of, and desperately wants to fix, about half of his toxic traits. I really enjoyed it, but I could see the unlikable narrator turning a lot of people off.

Amy Bloom’s memoir In Love, about her husband’s early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis and their joint efforts to seek out legal assisted suicide for him, completes my recent reading trilogy of nonfiction books about marriages and relationship disasters. (I wasn’t crazy about Foreverland, but I enjoyed Heartbreak quite a bit.) It’s probably not surprising that Bloom’s book is my favorite of the three, but be warned—it’s a totally heartbreaking exploration of what it means to be the partner who has to not only say goodbye to the one they love, but also help shepherd them through to death. It’s shot through with wry humor and optimism, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone in a tender emotional state.

Seems like there’s a little bit of a clone trend happening in popular culture. From the gorgeously contemplative Mahershala Ali film Swan Song to the action flick Dual, creative people are investigating the idea that clones are something disposable. Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 is a sci-fi thriller along those lines—the story of a clone on a deep-space colony whose only job is to die on dangerous missions, be cloned, and keep doing the dangerous work until he dies again. Of course, something goes wrong and Mickey7 and Mickey8 come face-to-face, even though strict and vaguely religious colony rules forbid “multiples.” The narration suffers a little too much from the wiseass-in-space vibe that has plagued sci-fi since The Martian‘s massive success, but it’s an interesting read, and if you’re at all interested in the high concept you’ll want to read this book now: it’s apparently set to be adapted as Bong Joon Ho’s followup film to Parasite, starring Robert Pattinson.

That’s all for this month

Just above, I wrote about a new storytelling trend I’ve noticed in sci-fi books and movies: clones becoming sentient, breaking free from their disposable fate, and transforming into their own autonomous beings. I’ve been wondering why this particular story is floating around in the collective unconscious right now.

Of course, America loves a story about a worker drone who self-actualizes themselves into free will. It appeals to our national idea, the concept that if we just work hard enough, we will somehow make enough money that we won’t ever need to worry about money again. But this clone craze feels a little more pointed than just the usual bootstraps narrative, and I have a theory about why.

From Spider-Man (live-action) to Spider-Man (animated) to Doctor Strange to Loki to the Flash to Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, a lot of our blockbuster brain space right now is keyed into the idea of the multiverse. And setting aside Everything, Everywhere, All at Once for a moment—which truly feels to me like a generational achievement in filmmaking and a deeper exploration than all the others—the idea behind these multiverse stories is that no matter what you do or where you go, you’ll always wind up in some version of the life you live now, albeit with endless cosmetic variations.

I’ve always disliked the Destined Chosen One narrative because it ultimately doesn’t have any drama to it, and I think the multiverse narrative is just a slight twist on the Chosen One narrative without a climactic (franchise-ending) battle.

It’s a little surprising to me that Spider-Man has become the premier multiversal superhero, because to me it takes some of the specialness away from the character. I like Peter Parker because he’s just some kid who found himself thrust into a role that demands every ounce of his attention. And no matter how likable Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire are, I think Tom Holland’s Peter Parker feels a little less special when he’s on screen with the others. When you get a bunch of Spider-Men together, being Spider-Man shifts from a complicated moral choice to yet another version of the destiny narrative—a role the universe forces him to play. (And note that I don’t include Miles Morales in this Too Many Spider-Men argument. Miles’s whole thing is that he’s someone who has chosen to respond to Peter Parker’s choice in his own way—he’s a unique take on the Spider-Man story, and not a blurred photocopy.)

All of which is a long way of saying that I wonder if all this clone pontificating is a pushback to the disposable multiversal variants we’re seeing in superhero films and TV shows right now. We can be more than just a background character in a multiverse-spanning epic, these stories argue. We can be whatever we want. We have free will, and we can make better choices. There are a lot of problems with that narrative, too—libertarians love it for a reason—but I would choose to be the protagonist of a Rogue Clone story over a Multiverse story any day of the week.

Anyway, this is a long one. Sorry. In conclusion, please enjoy a photo of Obie and Wally, who have been absolutely loving their occasional warm and sunny walks.

I’m in the pits right now, friends. The news is all heartbreaking, the weather in Seattle is pretty dire, and nobody knows for sure if Covid is or is not going to throw the mother of all comeback tours in the fall.

I’m also tearing my hair out over the fact that a judge in Virginia ruled that two books for young readers are obscene. I can’t believe that last story isn’t getting more attention, by the way: If the ruling stands, it would be the first time in 50 years that a book would be banned in the United States on the grounds of obscenity. It could be illegal to own a book in certain parts of America. Chew on that for a while, and then try to tell me that cancel culture on college campuses is the real problem right now.

So in order to chase the late-spring blues away, let’s talk about a few things that I’ve been grateful for lately:

• We’re still waiting for the really good summer foods to come in—Rainier cherries, where are you?—but I was very excited to find this strawberry curry recipe at Atlas Obscura. I’ve been cooking a lot of Indian food for the past year, thanks to Meera Sodha’s excellent cookbooks, and this summery treat of a recipe felt quite in line with what I’ve learned from Sodha.
• I managed a 72,000-step (36-mile) walk around most of Lake Washington on the last day of April that left me feeling pretty good, although my new Nike hiking sneakers left my feet covered in huge blisters, which is why I wasn’t able to complete the walk all the way around the lake (That’s what I get for straying from my beloved Brooks hiking sneakers.)
• I’m not traditionally a huge Harry Styles fan, but his new album, Harry’s House, is phenomenal. The opening song, “Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” is a bop and while the album flags a little toward the end, it’s definitely worth listening all the way through.
• I also love Seattle musician Hollis’s new album Subliminal, and that will be sharing space with Styles (and, presumably, Lizzo’s new album that comes out in July) on heavy rotation all summer long.
• Last month, stand-up comedian Gary Gulman reached out to me on Twitter to say he enjoyed the comic I made with Fred Harper, Snelson: Comedy Is Dying. He also invited me to his show at the Moore in Seattle on May 28th. I already knew I enjoyed Gulman’s work—his HBO special, The Great Depresh, is well worth your time, and he’s got a small but hilarious role in Amy Schumer’s very good Hulu sitcom Life After Beth—but I wasn’t prepared for how much I’d love his live show. At nearly two hours, he ventured everywhere from cancel culture to toasters to stage magic, and he simultaneously provided a running commentary on how the set was going all the while. It was a deeply funny, gorgeously written show. If you’re a reader—and if you’re getting this email, you are almost certainly a reader—I can’t encourage you enough to check out Gulman on his Born on Third Base tour if he’s anywhere near you this summer or fall.

I’ve been writing

I loved talking to Tacoma author Peter Bacho about his memoir Uncle Rico’s Encore for The Seattle Times. Bacho grew up in Seattle and his book is all about his experiences with the local Filipino community—their labor victories, their efforts to change the city for the better, their complicated ties with the country they left behind. He was a funny, fantastic interviewee.

And also for The Seattle Times, I wrote about Blue Kettle Books, a cross between an indie bookstore and a food truck. The owner and operator of Blue Kettle, Monica LeMoine, is driving Seattle’s newest—and smallest—bookstore to festivals, breweries, and farmer’s markets all over the north end. I was really interested to learn about her process for stocking the shop: There’s room for about 800 titles, so she has to be very choosy. And I love her mission to take the books directly to people who otherwise might not visit bookstores.

For Business Insider, I wrote about a new proposed tax on Big Oil’s profit markups, three very progressive policies in President Biden’s proposed 2023 budget, and the private equity firms that murdered Toys R Us in the name of a quick profit.

I’ve been reading

Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, features a character who, like Emily St. John Mandel and her runaway bestseller Station Eleven, recently wrote a blockbuster novel about a pandemic. Usually those self-referential characters are a huge turnoff for me, but St. John Mandel’s self-insert was possibly my favorite part of this book. It’s not as good as Station Eleven, but it similarly brings her empathy and sensitivity to science fiction tropes like pandemics and moon bases.

I really enjoyed Florence Williams’s nonfiction book Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, which begins with a brief memoir of Williams’s marriage falling apart unexpectedly through no fault of her own and then transforms into her exploration of the science and history of human heartbreak. There are ninety ways this book could have gone bad, but Williams dodges them all.

I was enthralled by two short works of fantasy this month: Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland is a fable about the origins of Iceland’s short-legged horses , and Spear is Nicola Griffith’s gorgeous feminist reexamination of the Arthurian legend. These are both short books that don’t lean into traditional fantasy tropes, and I was haunted by the both of them in very different ways. Ask me to pick a favorite and I’d give Griffith the edge—but I have to note that I am not impartial because I am maybe the only person on earth to have ever been thrown from the back of an Icelandic horse, so I hold a little bit of a grudge toward the little bastards.

I was also swept up by two similar books about bizarre animals: The Soul of an Octopus is a heartbreaking and fascinating exploration of the consciousness of octopuses, and The Sound of a Wild Snail Chewing is about a woman who, during a long illness, is charmed by a wild snail that a friend places on her bedside table. Neither of those animals are recognizably human in any way, but the authors do a fantastic job of explaining what makes them worthy of our attention—and our emotions.

Written by Ram V and illustrated by Filipe Andrade, The Many Death of Laila Starr is a comic about what happens to the personification of death when a scientific genius makes death obsolete. Basically, death gets laid off, and she decides to get her revenge on the inventor of immortality. It’s a charming story about a subject that’s prone to cliches, but the creative team dodge every obstacle in their path. Maybe the nicest thing I could say about this book is that I think it stands up alongside Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series with its personification of grand concepts and its mythologization of the everyday.

The most interesting parts of Claire Stanford’s new novel Happy for You were the segments in which the main character, an academic born of a Japanese mother and a Jewish father, struggles with the boxes that website intake forms try to categorize her into—does she check “Asian-American” or “Other,” for instance? Our hero is airlifted out of grad school limbo and into a large tech company’s project to map and measure human happiness, and Stanford does good work exploring that fuzzy area between computational precision and human messiness. The book doesn’t find a satisfying conclusion but I loved the way it explored its themes so much that I didn’t really care.

And John Scalzi’s latest sci-fi novel, The Kaiju Preservation Society, is a summer blockbuster of a book. It’s about a loser who gets hired by a company to travel across dimensions and keep an eye on the giant city-destroying monsters on the other side, and Scalzi is having great fun drilling down into what a creature like Godzilla would really be like—giant parasites and all. If you’re looking for a big, fun science fiction thrill ride to take on vacation this summer, I think this might be the one for you.

That’s all for this month

A couple weeks ago, I walked to the Fauntleroy Ferry Terminal, took the ferry to Vashon Island, and then walked to downtown Vashon. I can’t recommend Vashon as a walking destination because there are no sidewalks on most of the island, so the only obstacle between your body and traffic hurtling at 45 miles per hour in the opposite direction is a little white strip of paint.

But as I was nearing Vashon, I saw a sign by the side of the road near the entrance of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit:

A few years ago, I’d done a little research into labyrinths in the Seattle area (apparently, there are 24 of them, according to the World-wide Labyrinth Locator) but I’d never actually visited one before. So I stopped and walked the path. While the Vashon Labyrinth follows the formula of a labyrinth—it’s just a circuitous path around a circle with a central area for meditation—it’s a fairly low-key affair. The path itself is just a rut dug into a lawn next to the church:

Now that I’ve officially walked one labyrinth, I understand the appeal. Part of the reason why I enjoy frequent miles-long walks is that it serves as a form of meditation for me—once I pass mile 20, my brain stops cycling through the usual array of annoying repetitive thoughts and I start to feel a little less like a restless brain in a jar and more like a body existing in the world.

The labyrinth, then, serves as a kind of focused meditation exercise that distills the meditation of walking: You trust the path, you round the corners, and you can see the whole path around you, so you just patiently put one foot in front of the other. At the center, you pause and look at where you’ve been, and then you reverse your steps. I bet if you were to do some breathing exercises while you walked the path, it would be even more calming.

Maybe this fall, I’ll start including Seattle-area labyrinths into my walks. I can’t see labyrinths taking the place of my regular walking practice, but they’re an interesting exercise for someone who walks an average of ten miles a day: Going nowhere in particular, slowly, for no reason, and taking the longest possible route to get there. I could probably use some more of that in my life, and I bet you could too.

Back when I blogged multiple times a day for a living, I loved a good story about some crank trying to ban a book in her kid’s school library. The parent in question would always have some dumb quote that I could ridicule, I could talk about how great the book they were trying to ban is, and the author would likely have some well-written comment about the importance of freedom of speech that could cap the post off. Boom: Aggregation complete.

It’s kind of an open secret that authors used to dream that someone would try to ban their book somewhere, because those attempts at censorship would always inspire a nice big bump in sales. Occasionally, depending on how much media attention a parent would get for their crusade, a backlist title would even wind up on the bestseller list after a few years of relative obscurity. Book-banning was kind of cute back then, a little literary cottage industry built on the backs of a few vocal idiots.

It’s not cute anymore.

This week, a Tennessee school board voted to ban the teaching of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. This follows an all-out push to ban the works of Black authors including Toni Morrison from curricula and school libraries around the country. Officials are working hard to ban LGBTQ-themed materials from school libraries and classrooms around the country—including in my home state of Washington.

This current book-banning craze is entirely different from the kinds of bans I used to write about on a monthly basis. How, you may ask? For one thing, the calls are coming from inside the house. These aren’t some random oversensitive parents or lone wolf staffers calling for the books to be banned: They’re the school boards themselves. The Tennessee board in question voted unanimously, 10 to 0, to ban Maus. And if the school boards themselves aren’t behind the banning, then the parents are in highly organized groups who know how to play the media into believing that they represent a majority of parents in the area. This is a planned, rehearsed action, it’s spreading around the country, and it’s working.

One wealthy evangelical Christian talking about how Kurt Vonnegut is a Satanist is a clown, a punchline to a bad joke. Entire school boards banning the teaching of slavery and the Holocaust in public schools is a white supremacist fascist movement. When you work to erase a nation’s history, you are engaging in fascist behavior. And here’s the thing about being a fascist—it doesn’t matter if your intentions are good, or if you have Black/Jewish/LGBTQ friends, or if you’re just concerned about your child feeling uncomfortable. If you behave like a Nazi, if you apologize for a Nazi, if you’re friends with a Nazi, you’re a Nazi. Full stop.

I can’t lie and pretend that I’m feeling very hopeful about the future of this country. In the very best-case scenario, I believe we’re looking at a lot of bloodshed and struggle before this fever breaks. I don’t even want to type out the worst-case scenario here because I think it would still sound insane to the general public. But this is where my head is at right now.

I’ve been writing

I’m pretty happy with how my Seattle Times profile of Phinney Books came out, and it seems to have gotten a fair amount of attention. Phinney Books and its sister store Madison Books are, in my opinion, the best bookstores for browsing in Seattle right now, by which I mean I’m very likely to walk out of the store with a huge stack of small-press books that I didn’t even know existed before I walked in. A big part of that has to do with Phinney By Post, their amazing subscription program that delivers one little-known but beautifully written book to your mailbox every month.

I also interviewed Booker Prizewinning author Bernardine Evaristo about her new memoir Manifesto for the Seattle Times, in time for her talk at Seattle Arts and Lectures. She’s a bold and original thinker, and I very much appreciated the way she allowed her book to reject the classic memoir narrative structure—it’s a writing manual, a gossipy essay about sex and identity, and a manifesto for changing the world, all under one cover.

We all know the Federal Reserve has the power to make money—that meme from a while back about money-printer going brrrrrrr is pretty famous by now—but at Insider, I wrote about the way that the Fed distributes the money that it makes. Turns out, they just give it to Wall Street, which sucks! I offer a couple of ideas for better uses for all that money, including giving it to ordinary Americans.

And I wrote about the shameful fact that the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25 per hour, and why that matters even though much of the country has moved far beyond that embarrassingly low amount. But the thing is that $7.25 is not even technically America’s minimum wage: The lowest wage an employer can pay in America right now is $2.15 an hour, which is the tipped minimum wage. I wrote about tipping’s unbelievably racist roots and why we should abolish the tipped minimum wage.

I’ve been reading

My coworker Annie recommended a French thriller by Hervé Le Tellier just out in paperback called The Anomaly. She said she started reading it and couldn’t put the book down until she finished it, and damn if the same thing didn’t happen to me. I bought The Anomaly at Third Place Books at 9 am on a Saturday, walked home, and I finished the thing by 4 pm. If you’re in the mood for a great page-turner, I would recommend not even reading the back jacket copy of The Anomaly—just know that it’s a supernatural or sci-fi thriller about a big cast of international characters, and prepare to be surprised with how the story unfolds. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn fun.

Benjamin Lorr makes no secret that his book The Secret Life of Groceries owes a deep debt to Eric Schlosser’s great fast-food muckraking expose Fast Food Nation–Lorr adoringly name-checks Schlosser several times in the book. And while Groceries doesn’t quite do for grocery stores what Nation did for fast food restaurants, it is still a fascinating journey into the “dark miracle” of the modern American grocery store. There’s some disgusting food trivia in there, but that’s not even the most shocking part of the book—that would be the part where Lorr unveils the actual slavery that still takes place in the international fishing industry. Lorr is a gifted writer, but he does overwrite at times—a few passages felt a little too voice-y, like aspiring gonzo journalism written by an overeager J-school student.

Empire of Pain is exactly as horrifying and maddening as my friend Davida promised it would be, but boy does Patrick Radden Keefe make his expose of the Sackler family’s many crimes against humanity a compulsively readable experience. The story tracks multiple generations of the pharmaceutical empire, and Keefe’s narration alternates between gossipy, heartbreaking, enraging, and informative. Even if you think you know the full story behind the opioid epidemic—say, you watched the excellent Dopesick miniseries on Hulu—you’ll still want to read this book to understand the full enraging story of how wealthy people literally get away with mass murder in America. I don’t know how anyone could read this book and come away with the idea that our economic system doesn’t require top-to-bottom reform.

Tamara Shopsin’s Laserwriter II is apparently a big nostalgia trip of a novel for people who were into computers back in the 1990s. I was a late adopter—I didn’t own a laptop of my own until like 2002 and I wasn’t really online at all until 2001—but I still enjoyed the book, which is about aimless young people working at a computer repair shop in New York City. Even though I don’t know what the characters are talking about a good fifth of the time, the weird specificity around 1990s technology provides a compelling backdrop, and the book never feels like it wastes your attention.

I’ve read a lot of Terry Pratchett, but I haven’t read all of Terry Pratchett. That means I occasionally have the lucky opportunity to read a Terry Pratchett Discworld book that is entirely new to me. This month, I read Making Money, a Pratchett novel set in his satirical fantasy realm that’s all about money and the economy. It’s not my favorite of his books, but he’s such an entertaining writer on the molecular level that just from a pure craft standpoint you can’t help but occasionally sit back in awe at a passage.

Termination Shock, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, is about climate collapse and it begins with a queen crashing a plane and meeting a man who kills wild boars for a living—which is to say it starts very strong. However, the book kind of lags for a big portion of the middle. I have to say that if you only have the time or the energy to read one climate-collapse-themed sci-fi novel, it should be Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. Also, I can’t be the only person to recognize that Stephenson tends to write books featuring billionaires as leading characters these days. And while he doesn’t idolize the billionaires, he also doesn’t really come to terms with the fact that it’s impossible for someone to amass tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth without deeply exploiting a whole lot of people. Stephenson is one of our best contemporary writers, but I really believe that unless he comes to terms with the economics of exploitation in his work, he’s in danger of becoming a kind of sci-fi court jester for the oligarchy.

that’s all for this month

Phew! This was an intense one. Maybe let’s close with a little bit of dog news, shall we?

January was a big month for our two greyhounds. At the beginning of the month, we marked one full year with Wallace, the blind rescue we picked up from Greyhound Pets Inc., and four full years with Oberon, the big princely fella we adopted from Royal Hounds. When we first adopted Wally, I wrote in this newsletter that he and Obie had the demeanor of “friendly coworkers.” Now, they are absolutely inseparable. Wally relies on Obie as his seeing-eye dog, and Obie’s ego really thrives on having a younger dog to follow him around.

As Obie did during his first year with us, Wally has softened a lot—he’s learned that he can come up to us and ask for cuddles and comfort whenever he needs it, and that seems to have created an emotional stability in him that he didn’t have when we adopted him, basically, straight off the racing track. Their days are full of walks, snacks, naps, meals, and pets, with the occasional trip to the weekly greyhound run at the dog park in Steilacoom to keep them socialized and engaged with the world.

If you’re in a position to adopt a dog, I really couldn’t recommend the experience enough. They’re expensive, and they take up a lot of your time, and they generally require the kind of stability that many people aren’t able to provide. But dog ownership has been one of the great and consistent joys of my life—learning how to adapt to these non-human mammals and communicate with them has opened my mind in a lot of very important ways. I don’t know how I would have gotten through the pandemic without them.

I hope your month has gone well, and that you’re not in as dark a mental space as I am. There are lots of wonderful things in the world, and I hope your life is full of them.

Earlier this month, for the first time in almost two years, I double-masked up and went to one of the two big chain movie theaters in downtown Seattle. And I want to be positive about rejoining life after lockdowns, but it was an objectively terrible experience.Before the pandemic, I went to the movies a lot—roughly once a week or so. Since the last pre-pandemic movie I attended in March of 2020 (a screening of the excellent Portrait of a Lady on Fire) I had forgotten how much of the experience of going to a corporate movie theater just outright sucks.

First, you get your backpack checked by an apathetic teenager, in case you’ve forgotten that mass shootings regularly happen in America. Then you sit through an infomercial preroll, six obnoxious advertisements for cell phone carriers, a Google ad, and Matt Damon shilling cryptocurrency with a monologue about how history hates losers.And then the blockbuster I attended just wasn’t worth my full attention for more than two hours—it was a dumb, predictable, boring experience that was practically designed to be half-watched by someone sitting on their couch, scrolling around on their phone.Now that I’ve fallen out of the habit of going to the movies, I can see that the act of going to a corporate movie theater is depressing.

Happily, the big chains and blockbuster movies aren’t my only option. I’ll go out of my way to attend more thoughtful movies at independent movie houses from here on out—places like The Ark Lodge, The Beacon, Majestic Bay, and the Admiral Theater, which place the moviegoer over quarterly shareholder statements.

But I wonder how many of these experiences I’m going to have in the months and years to come—a return to normal, only to realize how unpleasant normal really was. Think of all the mind-numbing waiting in line I didn’t do over the last couple of years—the security-theater screenings I didn’t have to go through, the queasy corporate sponsorship announcements I didn’t have to tolerate, the awkwardness of liminal spaces that I didn’t experience. How many returns to normalcy am I going to experience in the future, only to be let down by the banality of it all?I realize this may sound ungrateful. I have my health, and I’m very lucky to work for an employer who isn’t making my coworkers and I rush back into a workplace, so I’m the last person who should complain about any of this.

But I also suspect that I’m not alone in feeling an emotional drag as The Great Letdown gets underway, and I wonder if anything positive can come from this crushing disappointment. Maybe going out in public doesn’t have to be a disappointing, invasive, uncomfortable experience? Can we build a better way to be a human in crowded public spaces?

(Note: I wrote this introduction before Omicron Variant panic started spreading across social media over the long weekend. I’d like to remind you that the best thing you can do right now is keep wearing masks indoors, get your vaccinations and boosters, and do not panic. The smartest people in the field are gathering information and until they update us, the truth is that we know very little—but at least we know what we don’t know, which is a way better place to be than the uncertainty we felt in those first days of March of 2020.)

Find me online

In an episode of Pitchfork Economics earlier this month, my coworker Goldy and I interviewed superstar journalist Sam Quinones about his new book on the synthetic opioid crisis, The Least of Us. Quinones was among the first to sound the alarm on America’s opioid crisis (and to spotlight the Sackler family’s responsibility for the crisis) and his new book talks about why fentanyl will likely be even worse for America than opioids. It’s a striking piece of journalism from someone who clearly loves doing the work. (I also recommend the Hulu dramatized miniseries about Oxycontin, Dopesick, which is predictable but informative, and packed wall-to-wall with great acting, particularly from Michael Keaton as a small-town doctor and  Michael Stuhlbarg, who correctly plays Richard Sackler as a hissing vampiric supervillain.)

I also wanted to call your attention to a piece on the website Comics XF in which two comics critics—Will Nevin and Cassie Tongue—engage in a dialogue about three issue of the comic I created with Fred Harper, Snelson: Comedy Is Dying. Tongue and Nevin don’t love everything about the book, but they thoughtfully engage with it and really drill down into what Fred and I are trying to say with it, which is really all that any writer can ask for. In fact, I’d go so far as to call this a dream come true—the kind of intelligent criticism that most writers never get at any point in their careers. I’m so grateful to Nevin and Tongue, and to Comics XF for their attention.

I’ve been writing

For Business Insider, I wrote about how friction-free mail-in voting transformed me from a pretty good voter into someone who votes in absolutely every single election. I also wrote a piece about how the tax code advantages white families and disadvantages Black families that turned my inbox into an orgy of racist whitesplaining for a weekend. 

My most recent BI piece is an examination of the work of a Seattle expert in homelessness, Josephine Ensign, and her clear-eyed analysis of what American cities need to do to really end homelessness once and for all. 

And for the Seattle Times, I profiled Chris Jarmick, the co-founder and owner of Kirkland independent bookstore BookTree, which is a great used and new bookshop that can brag about its amazing kids’ section and the great personalized advice for readers that Jarmick offers.

I’ve been reading

It’s probably fitting that my enjoyment of Lisa Halliday’s novel Asymmetrywas asymmetrical. The novel is broken into three sections, and the first, longest, story—a novella, really, about a young woman who enters into a relationship with a very old, celebrated novelist—is by far the most interesting segment. The second and third sections continue the story began in the first, but from different perspectives that don’t feel nearly as compelling as the story of the relationship. I’m glad I read the book, but I wonder if I might have enjoyed a standalone novella of the first story even more.

Bewilderment, the latest novel from Richard Powers, is a sly and emotional work of science fiction that just pushes out a little bit on the edge of what is scientifically possible right now. About a father and son who are trying to learn how to be a family after a significant emotional loss, it’s an engrossing story, but I have mixed feelings about the very end of the book—no spoilers—and I’m curious if I’m the only reader who felt it ended too abruptly.

I enjoyed two new books by great nonfiction writers this month—Fuzz, by Mary Roach, and On Animals by Susan Orlean. The former is a collection of essays grouped around the idea of what happens when animals break human laws, and the latter is a collection of short essays about animals. I don’t think these books count as major works for either Roach or Orlean—they’re pretty light—but sometimes you just want to read some beautiful, funny writing about animals.

A Touch of Jen is a debut novel by Beth Morgan about a young couple that have an unnatural fixation on a minor Instagram influencer. They insinuate themselves into the influencer’s circle of friends, and then everything goes screwy. It’s an uneven but well-written exploration of what social media is doing to our fantasies, and our lives.

The word “harrowing” gets used a lot to describe books, but Donald Antrim’s One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival is an undeniably harrowing book. It’s a first-person account of Antrim’s suicide attempt in 2006, and his long and rocky road back to sustainable mental health. It’s a slender book—I white-knuckled my way through the whole thing in a night—and it serves as an even-more-raw companion to William Styron’s excellent autobiographical exploration of depression, Darkness Visible. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who is currently Going Through Some Things, emotionally, but it could serve as a resource for people who are currently living with people who are Going Through Some Things.

Kristen Radtke’s Seek You is a collection of essays about modern American loneliness told in comic book form. I really like the way Radtke addresses non-fiction comics—for the most part, she draws one image per page to illustrate her point, allowing her to alternately illustrate some hard-to-visualize concepts in her prose and also enhance the emotional argument with illustrations, like a montage of pro-Trump yard signs in a section about what loneliness is doing to the American psyche. I hope dozens more cartoonists are working on books like this, because this style of pictorial essay should become a robust sub-segment of the American comics genre.

Lauren Groff’s Matrix is a weird and wonderful novel about a nun who tries to make sense of a confusing and dangerous world by taking control of her nunnery and protecting her sisters through elaborate measures. Based on a true story from medieval times, Matrix is a bizarre, moving story of faith, devotion, and mortality.

That’s all for this month

As you may know, I go for long walks around the Seattle area, usually on Saturdays. Earlier this month, I found two enormous piles of peeled oranges in an office park in Renton that borders on the Black River Riparian Forest. This was a mystery that captured my interest: no peels were anywhere in sight, the oranges were otherwise unmolested, and the large piles were carefully constructed to the point that they were almost pyramids. 

I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who thought these oranges were worthy of investigation. Garrett Kelly and Jeremy Puma of the delightful Seattle-based supernatural investigation site Liminal Earth went and checked out the pile of oranges and made a video documenting their weird adventures on that same site. 

Do I believe in the supernatural? Absolutely not. But I acknowledge the weirdness of finding two big stacks of uneaten, meticulously peeled oranges on a random walk, and I invite any and all possible explanations for the weirdness because I go on long walks exactly for this kind of meandering, fanciful thinking. I’m glad Liminal Earth is there to join me when my wanderings get weird.

And if you’re an urban walker, I highly recommend the trail that runs through the Riparian Forest, for what it’s worth—it’s gorgeous, it connects to a great trail that runs all the way south through Tukwilla down to Auburn, and it’s quiet. Don’t let potentially demonic piles of citrus fruit distract you from the beauty of nature.

Finally, let me just confirm for the record that I got a booster shot with absolutely no aftereffects save a sore arm, and the process was quick and efficient and I highly recommend it.

I hope your holidays are proceeding well and that you’re staying safe, not panicking, and getting boosted. As a gift for reading this far, please enjoy this gif of Obie and Wally, who are feeling a little skeptical about all this rain we’ve been having: