Author: Paul Constant

The 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 lead with mercy. All of this is bad, but it’s not shocking.

The one thing that has shocked me the most in the past couple of weeks is how eagerly the media and corporations have bent down to kiss the ring of the incoming president. If you think that’s an overstatement, I urge you read this breathless “analysis” by a CNN reporter about Trump’s “testosterone-fueled return to power,” making “hyper-confident move[s]” and giving “stunning, freewheeling news conferences” and I ask you to explain to me how this is any different than something state media would write in a dictatorship. The fact that Google is changing “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America” on its Maps product is another sign that the most powerful institutions in the country are simply bowing down to get out of the way of the would-be dictator.

The media is largely trying to tell us that we’re not seeing what is right in front of us by playing the both-sides game, and big corporations are re-segregating their institutions by repealing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that were put in place to combat racism, sexism, and other forms of institutional bigotry.

Things are not great, is what I mean.

I have to acknowledge that I’m saying this from a place of privilege. People I know have already witnessed ICE raids and been stripped of human rights because they identify as trans, and other people I know have lost their jobs or are likely to lose their jobs because of the “shock and awe” wave of executive orders trying to unspool the last little scraps of progress that have been made by Democratic presidents stretching back to LBJ. 

I also know that eventually, political and community leaders will step forward and bring a real fight to Trump and Trumpism. I don’t expect to see those leaders come from current Democratic leadership. Chuck Schumer is not going to save us. And I haven’t been able to listen to any of the Crooked Media podcasts since the election, for instance, because it’s pretty clear that Obama Democrats aren’t coming to the rescue, either. 

There is a cavalry on the way. I believe that. Even though the media bizarrely gave Musk’s Nazi salute a pass, ordinary Americans responded with the appropriate amount of shock and horror. Probably the strongest institutional response to Musk’s action came from ordinary people on Reddit, who immediately banned links to Musk’s toxic social network. Good for them—I wish the media had even half the clarity and courage of convictions that they demonstrated. The BBC, for instance, said Reddit was responding to Musk’s “arm gesture,” which is a shamefully toothless descriptor of something that we all saw with our own eyes.

Despite everything you’re seeing on TV and in the papers, you’re not losing your mind—this isn’t a normal situation, things are unstable and their actions are unlawful, and Nazis are trying to steal democratic power from the people. I think a majority of people are disgusted and waiting for a person or a movement they can circle around. 

But the cavalry is going to take time, and this last week-and-a-half has been pretty demoralizing. I predict a painful spring full of depressing headlines, and then we’ll have to see where the media and state and local leaders land in the summer, after the shock of the new fades off. For right now, it’s all so very crushingly goddamned disappointing.

I’ve Been Writing

For my Neighborhood Reads column, I wrote about Metsker Maps in the Pike Place Market, which is an incredible map and geography-themed store full of maps and books and map-and-book-related products.

I’m on the Pitchfork Economics podcast this month, talking with journalist Kurt Hackbarth about the surprising success of Mexico’s progressive left, which has stayed in power at a time of unrest by keeping broad economic successes at the forefront of everything they do. It’s an optimistic conversation during a pessimistic time.

I wrote about 24 of the most exciting books that are already on the schedule to be released in 2025 at the Seattle Times. 

And I wrote about some of the most promising paperback releases of January. 

I’ve Been Reading

(I’ve read a lot while on holiday in the past month, so I’m only going to touch on the most noteworthy books.)

Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman is probably the book that most surprised me this month. It’s a novel about the small political machinations that follow a shift in staffing at a fictional big box chain store in rural America. If you’re looking for big thrills or toothsome anticapitalist screeds, you’ll have to look elsewhere. But speaking as someone whose first job was at a Sears, Waldman absolutely nails the sticky interpersonal dynamics of work in a chain store. Modern American literary fiction doesn’t often devote itself to the working poor, and this book deserves credit for doing so with a lot of heart.

Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is a fun road trip adventure novel about a lazy young man who winds up driving a mysterious woman and her titular Black Box of Doom across country, kicking of a wild chase that threatens to destroy America as we know it. I really enjoyed how this one played out—I felt like I was watching a modern version of Cannonball Run or Smokey and the Bandit, with a lot of social commentary about incels and social media mixed in.

Backflash, a comic written by Mat Johnson and illustrated by Steve Lieber, is a fantasy story about a man who discovers that he can use nostalgia to mentally travel through time to witness events in the past. I didn’t see this book get a lot of coverage in the comics press, and that’s a real shame—it’s one of the more inventive graphic novels I’ve read recently. It’s funny and it addresses adult issues with a lot of insight and heart.

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie is an interesting short non-fiction book written by a couple who document their passionate affair in photography. At the same time, Ernaux is undergoing treatment for breast cancer and the two realities—of unfolding love and growing fear—begin to interlace.

I was intrigued to learn about a popular young novelist who goes by the pseudonym Homeless, so I read their most recent novel, My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor. I daresay that the book, about a heartbroken young person who perceives their own depression as an ever-present cartoon whale, is not for me. But I would happily give this book to any young person who is struggling with learning how to be a person in their early 20s. Just as Mark Leyner taught me about the absurdity of modern life when I was a young man, I think Homeless is probably helping a lot of young people learn about sincerity and irony in modern times. 

What I Want in a Music Service

I think I’m getting rid of my Spotify account. Last year, Spotify announced that it simply wouldn’t pay musicians whose songs were streamed less than 1000 times in any given year, which strikes me as outright theft. And the company has laid off a bunch of employees and instead stuffed their product full of broken AI. 

For instance, if you wonder why your Spotify Wrapped absolutely sucked raccoon taint this year, it’s because Spotify leadership fired the human being who designed Wrapped and figured AI would do a good enough job. Instead, people’s Wrapped were inaccurate and half-assed. 

One thing about me is that I absolutely hate listening to commercial radio because I can’t stand hearing the same music over and over again. My brain lights up whenever I find new and new-to-me music, and my brain feels itchy when I’m exposed to classic rock. Spotify used to do a great job of recommending new music that surprised and delighted me, but now the algorithm is so choked with paid promotions and dumbed down that it’s almost impossible to find anything interesting that I haven’t heard a million times before. 

And even worse than all that, some people are accusing Spotify of actively producing music with AI in-house in an attempt to stop paying human artists for their work. Everything they’re doing is basically the opposite of what an organization intended to support musicians and people who love music would do. 

At the moment, I’m on Apple Music and while the recommendation engine isn’t great, it’s also not hitting me with a paid promotional pop-up for a band that I have no interest in every time I open the app, either.

But there are three features that I would kill for in a good music service that to my knowledge no music service currently offers, and I thought I’d throw them out into the universe in the hopes that someone would create them:

1. A TRUE RANDOM SHUFFLE BUTTON. Everyone knows that shuffle is broken, right? When I hit “shuffle” on a playlist with three thousand songs, I shouldn’t hear the same two songs every time. This has been a problem going all the way back to the iPod days, when my beloved little Shuffle device continually returned to a handful of songs and seemingly would never play certain other songs. Why is a true “shuffle” feature so goddamned hard to implement?
2. A “PLAY ONLY NEW-TO-ME MUSIC” BUTTON. Both Apple and Spotify lean way too hard on playing music that I’ve already liked in all their recommendation playlists. This reminds me of the online retail problem where if you buy a waffle iron, every targeted ad you see for months afterward is trying to sell you more waffle irons because it assumes you must like waffle irons. Sometimes I want to hear only new things, and streaming services make that incredibly hard to do.
3. A “PLAY ONLY MUSIC BY WOMEN” BUTTON. It took me decades to realize that I just generally prefer music sung and performed by women, but most of the playlists presented to me by music streaming services are way overindexed in favor of male artists. I’ll occasionally find good women-only playlists on services, but I’d love to be able to create that experience whenever I want. (And I guess they could make a “PLAY ONLY MUSIC BY MEN” button, too, but clicking that button would frankly be sicko behavior.) 

Anyway, I’ve done a lot of spiraling, complaining, and dwelling in darkness this email, so let me leave you with something that I absolutely love: I think FKA twigs’s new album Eusexua is the first perfect album of 2025. I’ve been listening to it end-over-end for the past week and I keep discovering new things to love about it.

If you prefer guitar-based rock, this might not be the album for you. It’s packed with electronic beats and feels very much like a club album, but at its heart Eusexua feels like a deeply personal statement, and I don’t feel comfortable only categorizing it one way. 

I’ve always been an FKA twigs fan, but this album feels like an artist coming fully into her voice. If you enjoy Bjork or electronic-era Madonna, this could be your thing. And I also recommend listening to it as an album, from beginning to end. There’s a very intentional journey strung through these songs, and that journey has been a rare joy for me in a month that has otherwise been almost entirely joyless. 

That’s all for this month. Please remember to take care of yourself, and please don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Paul

Hello! 

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 it—I’m just writing this from the past. I generally spend the last newsletter of the year writing about some of my favorite art of the year. And in that respect, it’s honestly been kind of a tough year. 

I saw some movies I enjoyed. Conclave is a lot of fun if you like grown men in full-length gowns gossiping about each other, for instance, and Carrie Coon delivered two great performances in Lake George and His Three Daughters, both of which are interesting films. I liked the way Anna Kendrick’s movie Woman of the Hourdebunked some of the true crime myth-making around serial killers. Dune 2 was a great sequel. Challengers was interesting, and so was The Bikeriders. Tilda Swinton’s performance in Problemistawas an all-timer, and even I was charmed by Glenn Powell in Hit Man. But none of those movies rocked my world—they all had some serious flaws or felt underdeveloped. Maybe this is an aftereffect of the writer’s strike that delayed projects in Hollywood last year, or maybe it’s pandemic-related malaise, or maybe it’s just me and my mental state. 

For TV, it was much the same. I liked the usual sitcoms including Only Murders in the Building and What We Do in the Shadows, but big and largely enjoyable shows like Interview with the Vampire, Penelope, Kaos, and The Decameron all fell short of blowing my mind. My favorite show of the year was an old one: I devoured both seasons of Detroiters, which I had never seen before, in the haze after the election. It was a great little comfort watch, very funny and a bigger-hearted than Tim Robinson’s current Netflix show, I Think You Should Leave. And Sam Richardson is always a goddamned delight.

In books, September was a big month for me in that Dash Shaw’s exceptional comic Blurry, and John Ganz’s history When the Clock Broke. Charlie Huston’s magic-as-nostalgia novel Catchpenny was one of the most fun things I read this year, along with The Husbands.  New Nigeria County was probably my favorite audiobook—maybe a cheat because it’s a full-cast novella that wasn’t published in book form and created specifically for audio. 

And that’s it. To be clear, I’m not making the case that the entire world is entering into an artistic slump—I’m mostly failing to get into a place where I can successfully receive art that moves me. I didn’t do a good job of going to readings, plays, and art shows this year at all, for instance, and I feel like I spent too much time doing comfort reading and viewing, which feels good in the moment but is often kind of empty calories in the long haul. I’ll try to be a better consumer of art next year.

I’ve Been Writing

I wrote about 11 new paperback releases in December that you can spend your bookstore gift cards on. 

And I interviewed four great local bookstore owners about their favorite cozy reads of the year. The booksellers behind both Nook and Cranny Books and Ridgecrest Books also were kind enough to share their favorite books of the year. 

I’ve Been Reading

Jasper Jones is an Australian novel about two boys who come across a dead body. It’s kind of an Australian John Irving novel—a big and complicated story that’s a little bit cliche and a little bit unsettling. This was a gift from someone who went to Australia, and it was interesting to read some popular fiction from there that largely hasn’t made a dent on this side of the world. 

The Work of Art is a big old coffee table book full of interviews with artists about their process. I took this out from the library because I don’t have much need for giant art books around the house, but it’s got some very interesting interviews. I don’t recommend reading it all at once like I did—this is definitely a book that’s best enjoyed dipping into occasionally. 

I listened to Entitlement by Rumaan Alam a while ago and the audiobook really didn’t work for me. But I just took the physical book out from the library as a Peak’s Pick selection and read it and enjoyed it a great deal. It’s about a poor young Black woman who goes to work for a billionaire who wants to give his money away, and there’s a lot of very incisive observations about class in America.

Consent is a memoir by novelist and painter Jill Ciment about her relationship with her husband of decades, who she met when she was a 17-year-old student and he was her 47-year-old married art teacher. She previously wrote a memoir about their relationship, but that was before the time of Me Too, and now she’s reinvestigating her feelings now that she has a new vocabulary to explain the beginning of her relationship. She would certainly have been described as being groomed if the two met under the same circumstances today, and her feelings about their marriage have changed with the times. It’s a thoughtful and interesting book. 

I really liked the Misery-in-reverse premise of The Last Word, Taylor Adams’s new thriller—it’s about a woman who gives a self-published book a one-star review on Amazon and the author tracks her down and begins tormenting her. But my problem with the book arrived about halfway through—spoilers, I guess—when the author is revealed as an impossibly cartoonish incel, complete with fedora, neckbeard, katana, and Mountain Dew addiction. I made the rare decision to abandon this book halfway through because it just became a litany of incredibly easy “fuck this nerd” jokes. It’s possible that later on in the book Adams flips the script on all the fat-shaming and easy mockery of socially awkward men, but I wasn’t invested enough to push my way through. 

I’ve read a couple of interesting sci-fi books this month. Chrysalisis technically a podcast—it’s a complete story told as part of the Dust podcast series—but I listened to it in one continuous four-hour stretch and it is absolutely a sci-fi novella. It’s about an AI that has survived the human race and taken to the stars, only to seek vengeance on the alien race that made Earth unlivable, and it’s a full-cast ensemble. And Helen Phillips’s Hum is about a world where robot helpmates are everywhere, and it has a lot to say about our modern panopticon, with its ever-present advertisements, viral parent-shaming, and endless subscriptions. This is one of the better books I’ve read this year, I think.

Thus Endeth This Curséd Year

Holy cow was 2024 not a fun year. My personal life was fine and there were lots of enjoyable moments, but as I’m writing these words in the middle of December I’ve never been so eager to put a year in the rear view mirror. Part of the problem, too, is that I know that next year’s headlines are going to be an endless slog of frustration, misery, and chaos. 

I’m not a New Year Resolution kind of person, but I’m going to make an effort to try to figure out how to be smarter about my energy expenditures in the months ahead. I definitely need to be smarter about choosing the right moments to worry, and to act, and to rest. 

And in the interest of not ending on a down note, I do have some fun comics projects coming up next year, including one I should be able to write about in the January edition of this newsletter—February at the very latest.

I hope your 2024 was filled with fun and art and that you got to share it with people you love. And I hope that 2025 is full of more art and sharing and people we love.

Happy holidays,
Paul

Hi!

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 thoughtful and engaged group of people.

I want to be clear about where I am because I know for a fact that a lot of you are really freaked out right now: I don’t feel as though the future is lost, or that American politics is a hopeless endeavor. But I do think that this year’s presidential election pushed back years—maybe decades—of progress, and it’s going to be a lot of work just to tread water for the near future.

What does treading water look like? For one thing, it means we’re going to have to work extra hard to ensure the safety of anyone who’s not an upper-middle-class straight white Christian. There are about to be a lot of laws and policies enacted that will punish anyone who’s part of a vulnerable subgroup. Some of those laws will make life a little more annoying and difficult for those folks. Other laws will aim to strip away some of their rights and their dignity. All of those laws will be morally wrong. You can’t ethically legislate someone’s personhood, or put their essential humanity up to a vote. That means all of those laws and policies will need to be loudly and publicly fought.

And for another thing, it’s going to take work just to figure out where you should spend your time and energy. That’s part of the plan—the people who are coming into power want you to get tired. They want you to be confused about what’s actually happening and which actions require a response.

One more thing that I think will be different this time: The culture isn’t going to be as eager to fight as it was in 2016. CEOs have already bowed down to the incoming administration and the mainstream media seems to be doing its best to normalize evangelical Republican extremism. A lot of organizations are going to go out of their way to stay “apolitical,” which of course is a political choice to allow the status quo to unfold.

There are a couple of things that I need you to remember. First and foremost: Donald Trump is not some all-powerful, omnipotent chess-master who plays five moves ahead of everyone else. He is a grifter who is good at gumming up the system and then taking advantage of the chaos that ensues. If you fall into the bad habit of thinking of him as some sort of a cartoon supervillain who can anticipate and block his opponents’ every action, you’re giving him way too much credit and making your life more difficult for no good reason.

And if you’re trying to think about where to put your energy in the weeks and years ahead, you should always choose the action that protects people who have less power than you. That means not spending your time posting on social media about some Russian collusion conspiracy when you could be attending a protest to defend the rights of trans people instead. It means not buying the next Maggie Haberman tell-all documenting the palace intrigue of the next administration, and instead supporting Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA+ authors and businesses with that money and attention.

I can’t lie: This sucks. It’s not the future that I signed up for. This is certainly not how I thought I’d spend my late 40s and early 50s. The better world that I imagined myself moving toward feels further away today than it did twenty, ten, or even two years ago.

But nobody can predict the future. Who knows? This might be the moment when the conservative alt-right’s reach exceeds its grasp. Nobody is ever prepared for the future, and the past always feels obvious in retrospect. As bad as it feels right now, action is always better than inaction, and communal action is almost always better than action taken alone. Finally, no matter what a prevaricating Prince of Denmark might try to make you believe, it is always better to be than it is to not be. So let’s get down to being.

I’ve Been Writing

For my day job I wrote this week’s edition of The Pitch, which is all about why air travel has become so terrible over the last forty years, and why it’s not likely to get any better over the next four years.

For the Seattle Times, I profiled Arcane Comics, a local comic book store that’s been ahead of its time since it launched two decades ago.

I also wrote about ten of the most exciting November paperback releases.

And I asked local authors, literary nonprofit leaders, and other luminaries what books they’re most excited about giving this holiday season.

I’ve Been Reading

In the days before the election I read War, Bob Woodward’s book about the last days of the Biden Adminstration and the 2024 Trump campaign. The book felt like an outright warning, a siren alerting us to the fact that a second Trump Administration would be meaner, uglier, and much more unhinged than the first. And here we are.

After the election, I fell into reading biographies. I really enjoyed Dorothy Parker in Hollywood, which was a well-researched biography of Parker’s late-life entanglement in the movie business. I’ve read a few Parker biographies and I’d say that if you were to only read one, it should be this one. All the others are too obsessed with the New York portion of Parker’s life, when in fact her turbulent relationship with Hollywood is far more interesting.

And while I’ve always found Johnny Carson to be a fascinating figure—his chilly Nebraskan anger was always coiling under the surface even as he served as the most cordial host on American television for decades—I can’t recommend his new biography, Carson The Magnificent, because it is overwritten and overwrought and generally exhausting to read.

Speaking of smug narrators: All the Worst Humans is a confessional memoir by a man who served as a PR agent for some of the worst people in the world, including Muammar Gaddafi. The author keeps commenting about what a terrible human he is, but the book feels way too braggadocious to be truly desiring of forgiveness. It’s kind of similar to Catch Me If You Can in terms of smarminess.

One of my favorite newsletters is local author Steven Arntson’s Steven Richard Newsletter, so I was happy to see that he published a compilation volume. If you’re a fan of heightened absurdist comedy like The Onion or McSweeney’s, you’ll find a lot to like here. It’s a collection of humorous pieces including a song about a junk drawer, a few jokes about nihilists and realists, and robot toddlers.

Seattle cartoonist Brett Hamil is putting out a serial comic now, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Bald Knob, it’s the story of the residents of a small town who keep getting in the way of their own ambitions, and issues #1 and #2 are available now. At a time when comics feel a little too invested in maximalism and absurdity, I’ve been enjoying Hamil’s turn toward comic realism. He writes about stupid people who are almost heartbreakingly un-self-aware. There used to a lot of cartoonists working in this space in the 1990s, but now Hamil is out there charting these waters on his own.

Cities Made Differently by David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky is an illustrated encyclopedia of different concepts of cities, both real and fictional. They write about cities being constructed in deserts and underwater cities and cities that are panopticons. It’s a very beautifully designed book that will get you thinking playfully about the purpose and forms of cities.

Lynne Tillman’s novella Weird Fucks was the first fiction I was able to read after the election. It’s a collection of encounters with men—some weird, some depressing, some sinister—and it’s the kind of book you can really just absorb on an aesthetic level, swinging from beautiful sentence to beautiful sentence like Tarzan in a jungle.

Screenwriter and cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan’s memoir They Went Another Way is a book that every aspiring screenwriter should read, because it perfectly captures the absurdity and frustration of working in the entertainment industry. Kaplan presents the rise and fall and rise and fall and maybe rise but then complete and total fall of a single project—a sitcom about a May/December romance starring Glenn Close and maybe Pete Davidson—in a series of diary entries. It’s a mundane book, relaying all the meetings and canceled meetings and boring texts and small talk that go into making a TV show in the streaming era, but Kaplan’s bracing honesty about all the bullshit that a Hollywood writer has to endure makes the book feel raw and honest. It’s like Waiting for Godot, only Godot is a Hollywood studio rep holding a paycheck for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

On Being Wicked

I was very entertained by the Wicked movie. It’s got singing, dancing, excellent performances, talking animals—what more could you ask for?

However, the entire phenomenon of Wicked—by which I mean the bestselling book that came out in 1995, the Broadway musical that has sold out shows for 21 years, and last week’s number one movie in the country—feels to me like a symptom of a larger problem in American entertainment.

In short, I think too many writers over the last 30 years or so have taken the basic writing lesson that “every villain is the hero of their own story” to instead mean that “every villain is a hero until they make a single, tragic, bad decision.” And that’s just not the case.

The drumbeat of films and books starring the great villains of popular culture has been increasing in recent years. Malificent, the Joker, Darth Vader, and even Cruella DeVille—the aspiring puppy-skinner!—have starred in vehicles meant to transform them into sympathetic figures, tormented by complicated pasts and destined for tragic futures.

You might argue that this storytelling trend—along with shows like the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Ozark that put villains in protagonist roles—is a good thing because it reveals the inherent humanity behind even the worst individuals.

And while I am desperate for true reform in our criminal justice system that humanely addresses the systemic burdens that create criminal behavior, I don’t think that rehabilitating the image of cinematic monsters is a real first step toward that better world. This doesn’t feel like an attempt to be restorative, or to find the humanity in those who have wronged us; it feels much more sinister and inward-looking to me.

The truth is that sometimes, there are monsters. Nothing could justify the heinous acts that Hitler urged people to commit in his name. Charles Manson deserved to be locked away from society. Donald Trump undoubtedly had a wretched childhood, but that doesn’t explain away his lusty desire to execute the Central Park Five or to separate children from their families and place them into internment camps.

So why do our entertainment conglomerates feel the need to retroactively psychoanalyze some of our most hissable villains? Part of it is just the unquenchable thirst for content: Every idea has to have the last ounce of interest squeezed out of it, and villains have always occupied an outsized chunk of audience mindshare.

But I wonder if some of it has to do with self-reflection. The more we learn of the world, the more it becomes clear that the wealthiest people in the world are basically looting the poorest people in the world. With our inability to address climate change, we are looting the future in order to avoid changing the way we live in the present. We seem more aware of our own monstrousness than in any other time in history, but we also seem unable to do anything about it. So why not distract ourselves with films that serve as a meditation on the sympathetic, vulnerable, innocent child inside Darth Vader? If he’s a good guy deep down, aren’t we all?

I think a lot about this graphic, which shows that in one Star Wars video game, a majority of players in the developed northern hemisphere chose to play as the Empire while players in the southern hemisphere chose to play as the Rebel Alliance:

What does it mean that our collective unconsciousness seems to be desperate to sympathize with the villains and idolize the evil empires? It almost feels too on-the-nose, but maybe the simplest answer is true: Maybe, after all is said and done, we are the baddies.

Yeah, that about sums up my mental state. Maybe you’re doing something fun and uplifting and cool right now? If so, tell me about it by responding to this email. I could use some happy news.

Anyway, take care of yourself.

Paul

Hi!

I know I usually post once a month, and I’m sorry to bother you a second time in one week. But I feel compelled to publish an additional post because…well, frankly, I’m currently in the darkest sustained emotional state that I think I’ve ever been in, and I assume that some of you might be in a similar spot. Tuesday was brutal, and the darkness doesn’t seem like it’s going to lift anytime soon.

But a piece of information and analysis in my boss Zach Silk’s newsletter today helped me to make a little sense of what happened in this election, and I wanted to share it with you. We Americans often think of ourselves and our politics as happening in a vacuum, but that’s simply not true. We very much live in a global community, and our politics tend to follow global trends. 

And friends, right now the globe is in the middle of A Big Trend. First, take a look at this graph from the Financial Times. You don’t have to understand all of it for it to make sense; I’ll give you the context you need below:

Okay, so. What this chart is telling us is that the incumbent parties in every single developed country on earth that had an election this year have lost a significant amount of vote share. This has never, ever happened since World War II, which is when they started keeping these kinds of records. 

Everywhere on earth, people are anxious because of the pandemic and the high inflation and weird economic conditions that followed the pandemic. And they’re responding by Throwing the Bums Out, regardless of who “the bums” are. They want to punish their leaders because of the massive disruption they’ve experienced in their lives.

What does this mean? First of all, it means that I don’t think there’s anything the Harris campaign could have done to stop this global tsunami from hitting America. There’s no single policy position she could have taken that would turn this around. Americans didn’t reject her because of her messaging, or because too many celebrities endorsed her.

In other words, absolutely do not believe those dumb pundits who are saying that Harris lost because of trans rights, or because she’s a woman of color. Anyone who says the electorate is sending a clear message about “woke identity politics” and pronouns is simply projecting their own bigotry onto reality. Anyone who says this is proof that Americans will never elect a woman for president is wrong. That’s all bullshit. It’s just not true. 

No Democrat could have won this election, unless maybe they were from waaaaaay outside the administration and they actively ran against Biden and pretty much every other establishment Democrat the whole time. It was a virtually impossible job. 

I realize that might sound fatalistic, but there’s actually some good news hidden in that chart. If you look at where America is—it’s the red dot—you’ll see that it’s at the very top of the vertical line. That means Harris actually outperformed every other incumbent party in the developed world. 

But there’s no second-place medal in politics. Winning is everything, right?

That’s not quite true. That chart shows us that the absolute worst-case scenario could have been a bright red electoral map and a downticket disaster for pretty much everyone with a (D) next to their names. That was a realistic scenario that we were facing, if we lost by 10 or 20 points like those other democracies this year. But instead, Democrats kept the House and the Senate pretty close, and Democrats won state offices around the country. 

These election results are the difference between an unchecked Trump Administration romping their way to dictatorship and a world in which state attorneys general and lawmakers fight those bastards every single step of the way, slowing them down and tossing monkey wrenches into their machinery. 

Most importantly, Harris’s best-in-the-world performance means that all that work you did during the election helped protect us from that worst-case-scenario loss. I don’t ever want you to think that what you did didn’t matter. You made a huge difference this year, and you will continue to make a difference. You fought back a historic tide and you created an opening that we might be able to use to escape the worst of what’s to come. 

Please don’t mistake any of this for complacency, or a sign that we should allow the Democratic status quo to stay in place. I’m not sending another goddamned red cent to any of those vultures who send hyperventilating fundraising text messages with siren emojis ever again. That kind of glib elitist politicking is in the past, and it can stay there. 

We need to rip up the party organization and start over again. We can’t rely on the exhausted Clinton-Obama coalition to eke out another win; that coalition collapsed in this year’s election. Instead, we need politicians who can find new ways of communicating new ideas to the American people.

The 2026 midterm elections need to be transformational, sending a convincing message that the American people will not stand for any of this phony strongman bullshit. And because of what you did this year, I do believe that there will be a 2026 election. It’s not much hope, but it’s enough for me to wake up in the morning.

So basically, I’m writing to say thank you for making a difference. There’s a lot of work to do somewhere down the line, but not right now. For right now please take care of yourself and your people, and make the time and the space to feel the feelings. You’ve earned the right to put yourself back together again at your own pace. I’m going to be doing the same.

Thanks again,

Paul 

Hi!

I like to think I know a little bit about politics. In the weeks after his disastrous debate performance, I had expected President Biden to eventually retire his presidential campaign and pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. I figured that Biden would wait until after the Republican National Convention to make that announcement, thereby allowing the Republicans to waste a week making attacks on a presidential nominee who would not be on ballots in November. Just based on my feel for history and for the personalities in the moment, I figured all that would happen.

But I was surprised by how surprised I was when Biden actually announced that he was standing down his campaign for a second term. Even though I was certain it was going to happen, the enormity of that letter took me by surprise. After spending his whole life in pursuit of the presidency, giving up a potential second term had to have been one of the hardest things Joe Biden had ever done. It was a sacrifice, and he made it because he thought it was the right thing to do for the country—such a rare, commendable decision from an elected leader. 

And then I was immediately surprised again by how quickly Kamala Harris lined up her party behind her candidacy for president. As the endorsements rolled in, and then the donations from ordinary Americans started avalanching in right after, Harris was in full control of the moment. There were a million ways that a candidate could have screwed up that rollout—had anything leaked in the days before Biden announced, for instance, it would have created the perception of Harris being too openly ambitious, or somehow dirty-dealing.  But Harris handled it all flawlessly. I saw not a single misstep in that first week.

Even more surprising for me was Harris’s first speech as a presidential candidate. She had completely risen to meet the moment. Harris has always been a good public speaker, of course, but there’s some ineffable quality that a good presidential candidate has—they’re able to absorb the hopes and dreams and aspirations of a room full of thousands of people and then reflect the very best of those hopes and dreams and aspirations right back at the people. I watched Barack Obama learn how to do that in the first few months of his 2008 presidential campaign. But Harris had it right from her very first speech in Wisconsin. It turned on like a light switch, and she’s been operating at that very high level ever since.

There are lots of things that can go wrong from here, of course. Harris has traditionally not been very good at interviews—she responds like a lawyer, being too cagey and trying to turn questions back on her interlocutor—so I’m nervous about her first few big interviews on the world stage. She has a number of incredible options for vice president, but any choice carries with it its own risks. We’ve all seen vice presidents stumble and fall when they step into the spotlight, and with less than 100 days to go, this is a campaign that can’t afford any stumbles. 

But for right now, I just want to say that while none of the news has factually surprised me, I have been surprised by how smoothly it has all gone. I’ve been delighted to watch the party adopt a new voice and a new strategy for dealing with the creeps and weirdos of MAGA world. And most of all, I’m surprised by how good I feel at this point in the handoff from Biden to Harris. I don’t know if I expected to feel positive—even hopeful—at the prospect of a Harris presidency. But I am excited—and more than a little scared, but mostly excited—by this new candidate and the possibilities that she presents.

Don’t get me wrong: Joe Biden has easily been the best president of my lifetime, and I would have happily voted for him again. But watching Biden willingly hand the party over to a new generation, and then watching that generation take the reins with vigor, humor, and charm, has been downright inspirational. It’s exciting to feel like good things are possible again, and it’s amazing what a difference a month can make in changing the national mood.

I’ve Been Writing 

I wrote two issues of The Pitch, which is the weekly middle-out economics newsletter that’s ordinarily written by my boss, Civic Ventures President Zach Silk. Zach took a much-deserved vacation earlier this month, and I stepped in with an essay about how far away from the mainstream the Supreme Court has strayed and an essay about the Biden Administration’s new overtime rules.

For Civic Ventures, I also narrated a video about why Red Lobster went into bankruptcy. (A lot of media outlets reported that the chain sold too much shrimp for too low a price. It’s a great, funny story, but it’s not true.)

For the Seattle Times, I wrote about local author Cherie Priest’s new novel, The Drowning House, which takes place on a remote Washington state island whose best-known geographic feature is Mystery Bay. The island sounds too good to be true, but it is very real.

If you’re in the north Seattle area, you might consider schlepping up to Edmonds to attend the first Writers-in-Conversation event at the Cascadia Art Museum. Event curator Michael McGregor will be interviewing great Spokane novelist Sharma Shields about what it means to be a writer in and from the Northwest. I wrote a preview of the event in the Times.

I also wrote about a wonderful new bookstore up in Shoreline called Ridgecrest Books. Everything about this store, from the thoughtful design to the excellent selection of books, is extremely well-considered.

And I picked some of the month’s most exciting new paperback books.

I’ve Been Reading

The Ghost of Us is a supernatural-themed young adult queer romance by Seattle author James L. Sutter, who has also helped create some very popular role-playing games including Pathfinder. It’s a surprisingly sweet story, and a gentle enough romance that those of you who are feeling overwhelmed by Everything Going On might find some worthwhile refuge in its pages.

I guess I was in a sapphic romance mood this month. C.L. Polk’s Even Though I Knew the End is an urban fantasy novella about a Chicago detective who sold her soul to a demon. Just as the payment comes due, though, she’s fallen in love with a woman and she doesn’t want to leave.  

André Gide’s Marshlands is a novel about a man who is writing a book called Marshlands, except he’s not so much writing the book as he is telling people at parties that he’s writing the book. And as the idea of Marshlands keeps changing, the writer’s life changes to more closely resemble the plot of the book that he is (or isn’t) writing. It’s a fun metatextual experiment of a novel that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, which I read right after Marshlands, similarly blends fiction with pandemic memoir, confusing the line between novel and tell-all. They made for an interesting back-to-back reading experience.

Jeff Jarvis’s Magazine is part of the Object Lessons series of books, which promise short, pithy investigations into the stories behind everyday objects. This one is ostensibly an ode to the role that magazines play in our everyday lives, but I enjoyed it most because Jarvis begins the book with a memoir of his time creating Entertainment Weekly, which was by far my all-time favorite magazine. The highs and lows of working on a magazine like EW have to be read to be believed.

I listened to Gretchen Whitmer’s new memoir, True Gretch, and it is one hundred percent intended to lay the groundwork for her national ambitions. But while most of those sorts of books are pretty dull—think of The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama’s bland second memoir—True Gretch is fun, brief, and funny. (The audiobook runs less than four hours, which is a genuine blessing.) I recommend the audio version because it includes a few snippets of some of her speeches, which adds a little more life to the mostly safe political prose.

L. M. Chilton’s novel Swiped is a thriller about an older single woman who reluctantly gets on a dating app. She slowly realizes that all of the men she meets through the app wind up murdered within a day or two after their first date. It’s a light, funny mystery that blends romantic comedy and serial killer fiction into an enjoyable beach read.

The Summer That Wasn’t

I don’t know if I have too much else to say this month. I’m working on a couple of comics projects that are taking up a lot of my time, and my day job has been incredibly busy lately. I’ve been enjoying the summer, but unlike those more locked-down pandemic years, I don’t feel quite as physically in tune with the season as I have been in the past. I haven’t been waking up with the sun this year, and I haven’t noticed the comings and goings of various wildflowers on my walks as the summer days pass. I keep looking up from my laptop to find that whole weeks have drained away and now we’re already rounding the corner into August.

I’m not complaining, though. Some years you’re in sync with everything around you and some years you’re just shoveling your way out from under everything. I’m still getting out and walking in the sunshine, and I’m still taking some time to go to the movies and soak in some air-conditioned blockbuster gaudiness. Hopefully in a month or two I’ll be able to catch a breath and watch the autumn roll in. If that sounds like your kind of thing, I hope the same for you, too.

See you next month,

Paul