We’ve hit the portion of the summer that’s best described as “overripe.” People are annoyed and aggressive, drivers are even more unhinged than usual, and it feels like every trash bin is overflowing into the streets. I don’t know how other cities do it, but in Seattle, at least, we need a good chilly rain […]
Read More What I’ve Been Reading and Writing: August 2025Hi! When I was younger (groan,) summer was the season of pop culture. All the catchiest pop songs tumbled out of the windows of passing cars, all the expensive blockbusters popped off in movie theaters like a months-long fireworks show, and all the grabbiest books by the biggest-name authors weighed down the new arrival tables […]
Read More What I’ve Been Reading and Writing: July 2025Hi! Sometimes the summer solstice leaves me feeling a little depressed. I’ve always seen the solstice as a time to celebrate and luxuriate in the long warm days, but also a time to mentally prepare for the dark days ahead. I think it says something about the way I see the world that my innate […]
Read More What I’Ve Been Reading and Writing: June 2025Hello! On the first Saturday of this month, I did my annual(ish) walk around Lake Washington. Let’s start with the stats that people most frequently ask about: I left the house around 4:30 in the morning and got home around 10 pm. According to my Pedometer++ app, it was 109,284 steps, and 60.4 miles. I […]
Read More What I’ve Been Reading and Writing: May 2025Hi! I cannot tell you how much I needed spring to show up. Here’s a picture of Wally that really captured how I felt last week as the good weather arrived: The world is still on fire, of course. The news that broke me this month was the government sending a four-year-old American citizen with cancer to […]
Read More What I’ve Been Reading and Writing: April 2025“Sarah Wynn-Williams’s insider account of her time at Facebook arrived nearly under cover of darkness, with no promotion from the author or publisher until a week before its publication on March 11,” writes Jonathan Zavaleta at Rolling Stone. “Shortly after its publication, Facebook successfully won an emergency ruling from an arbitrator to block Wynn-Williams, the former […]
Read More What I’ve Been Reading and Writing: March 2025Hi! I hope you’ll forgive a little bit of self-promotion up top. I’m excited to announce that this month I published a new comic book as part of my day job at Civic Ventures that is free to read. It’s called Trillion Dollar Heist, and it explains a very real trick the super-rich use to steal […]
Read More What I’ve Been Reading: February 2025The new administration has been as shitty and chaotic and brutal as I expected, and Elon Musk actually managed to sink lower than my already-basement-level expectations by outing himself as a Nazi. Religious leaders are posting about “the sin of empathy” and calling on people to “properly hate” other religious leaders who ask Trump to […]
Read More What i’ve been reading and writing: January 2025Hello! Once again, I’m writing this newsletter a little earlier in the month in order to take a couple of weeks off from writing. So if something terrible has happened, or some news has broken that seems like the kind of thing that I might ordinarily comment on, you can rest assured I’m not ignoring […]
Read More What I’ve been reading and writing: December 2024Hi! Lots of you wrote back in response to the special newsletter I sent out right after the election. I read all of the emails and I tried to get back to everyone but there were a lot of emails in a short time, so I apologize if I missed you. Thank you for being such a […]
Read More What i’ve been reading and writing: November 2024
Paul Constant 