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

I’ve Been Writing

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

I’ve Been Reading

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

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

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

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

Let’s All Go to the Movies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you in a couple weeks,
Paul

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

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

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

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

I’ve Been Writing

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

I’ve Been Reading

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

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

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

Teach the Children Typing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve Been Writing

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

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

I’ve Been Reading

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

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

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

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

Nothing to Do but March

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

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

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

Take care,
Paul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve Been Writing

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

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

I’ve Been Reading

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

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

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

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

Think Small, Think Regional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve Been Writing

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

I’ve Been Reading

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

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

The Culture Wars Are Coming for the Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

Paul

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

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about polarization and the us-versus-them mindset that started developing during President Obama’s first term and really ran wild under the iPhone and algorithmic social media. It worked out very well for the very rich people who pay to develop those algorithms that we have been forcefully divided along party lines. 

That’s not a coincidence, of course. There’s a reason why the algorithms have chosen to divide us by political party when there are millions of other ways to categorize people within a culture.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about a passage in the Thanksgiving edition of my boss Zach Silk’s newsletter The Pitch about Elon Musk’s decision to slash USAID’s program of international economic assistance.

“The history of civilization is full of stories of the super-rich exploiting the poor, but rarely has economic injustice ever been this literal: The richest man in the world personally ordered the funding cuts that killed more than a half a million of the poorest people in the world,” Zach wrote.

“That’s a new kind of class warfare — one enacted by the super-rich on the have-nots,” he continued. “And in case you’re wondering where you fall on the sides drawn by Musk, keep in mind that your personal wealth is much closer to any one of the poor people who have been helped by USAID’s food programs than it is to Musk’s approximate half-trillion-dollar hoard of wealth.”

That’s a bold statement, but it’s true. Economically speaking, virtually every person alive in America right now has more in common with the poorest people who are starving in poor nations around the world than they do with Elon Musk.

The experiences of Musk and Bezos and all the other centibillionaires are so far removed from our daily life that they’re basically a whole other species. We don’t have the same lives, we don’t have the same goals, and we certainly don’t share the same values. They think of themselves as planet-spanning beings who have tremendous influence over the levers of power (true) and the future of the human race (highly doubtful, in the long run)—basically, they see themselves as gods who are not subject to human laws.

I cannot emphasize enough how detached from the experiences of normal humans these centibillionaires have become. Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, routinely engaged in mock dogfights with his son, David Ellison, over the Pacific in their personal planes. As an adult man, Elon Musk could not figure out how to properly toast Pop Tarts. Jeff Bezos built a sauna shaped like a UFO and he now seems to be addicted to cosmetic surgery. 

On the other hand, I think most American families could relate to the needs, fears, and goals of a family struggling to survive in Dhaka or Port-au-Prince. Their day-to-day existence is very different, but those fears of providing for your families and aspiring to a better existence for your children are very similar. 

Put another way, the ICE agents who are imprisoning and deporting immigrants have much more in common, economically, with the families they’re tearing apart than they do with the President of the United States—a billionaire who owns at least one golden toilet and who publicly slapped his son for not wearing an expensive suit to a baseball game. 

It is in the best interest of the very rich that we don’t see those values that connect us. It’s much better for them if we continue to fight about whatever social media is injecting into our daily feeds, and that we elect people who promise to do battle for our side. Those elected leaders, on both sides of the aisle, have gone on to pass laws and kill regulations that allow the handful of super-rich people to accrue more wealth than anyone has ever possessed in the history of the world. 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we should set aside our values to work together. Nazis, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and other anti-social agitators should be shunned and shamed and ridiculed and frozen out entirely. Nobody’s freedom or autonomy should be up for debate. But the global population of Nazis is very small. The algorithms just popularize and platform their speech because it attracts attention, and so it feels like there are way more of them than there actually are.

I don’t know how to elevate the similarities that we share. Proximity tends to create empathy. I’m nowhere near the first person to suggest that we have to be better at getting back together again.

But I also know that if we wanted the polarization and hatred to grow, we would continue to do the exact same thing we’ve been doing. So that suggests to me that the best way to change the status quo is to stop giving social media our attention. Once we unhook from the algorithmic drip, maybe the next steps to finding a common ground will be more apparent. 

But on an even smaller scale, I think it’s important to exercise those empathy muscles. Lately, when I’m out on a walk or on my commute to the office, I’ve been looking for things I have in common with people. Whether they’re wearing expensive clothes for a job interview or they’re huddled in a blanket from a shelter, I try to notice if they’re tired, if they’re annoyed, if they’re happy or content or optimistic, and I think about times when I felt that too. 

History shows that the super-rich don’t tend to do too well when everyone else gets sick of them. This has happened many times before, and it will happen again. It just takes a few seconds of attention on the things that really matter to reorient ourselves and head in the right direction. 

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I asked booksellers at four different Seattle-area independent bookstores to list three or four books that they’re recommending to customers as gifts this holiday season. There are some great books in this one that could be just the trick if you’re stumped on a good gift for someone on your list.

And at my day job, Goldy and I podcasted about our favorite economics books of 2025 on the Pitchfork Economics podcast. 

I’ve Been Reading

I regret to inform you that Ian McEwan has Still Got It. Or more accurately, after the highs of his early 2000s hot streak and the lows of his 2010s fallow period, McEwan is back on top. His latest novel What We Can Know is an excellent book—a light sci-fi novel set in a future wracked by climate change, and the historian who are obsessed over a potentially world-changing poem that was read once at a dinner party in the early 2000s and then disappeared. The book has all the qualities that I love about McEwan—his wit, the way he suggests lost worlds in an offhand sentence two-thirds down a page—and none of the ponderous or self-important qualities that he developed in the last decade. 

Perfection is a buzzy little novel by Vincenzo Latronico and translated from Italian into English by Sophie Hughes that I outright hated in the beginning. The book initially introduces us to its two characters by taking an extensive inventory of all the stuff in their apartment. Okay, consumerism is bad, but David Fincher basically made this point better in ten seconds or so in the opening scenes of Fight Club. But it’s a short book and I’m glad I hung on because it’s less of a novel about two American graphic designer expats living in Berlin and more of an anthropological outlining of a very recent period in American history—that Obama-era period of optimism that immediately curdled into the mess we’re living in now. There’s a clarity to the criticism that makes the critique itself into the narrative, not the actions or emotions of the characters. 

In a Little Free Library that I often frequent, I encountered a copy of Sidney Lumet’s book Making Movies. I’ve read lots of books about screenwriting before, and I’ve read plenty of director biographies. But this was an interesting fusion of craft book and memoir. Lumet basically gives away all of his secrets, bluntly explaining choices that he made while directing the lighting, shooting, and editing that shaped classics including The Verdict, Network, and Dog Day Afternoon. It’s such an ego-free and thoughtful explanation of the art of making movies that I felt inspired to go back and revisit some of Lumet’s catalog.

I didn’t really read Schott’s Significa from cover to cover, but I did spend some quality time this month dipping into it. It’s a taxonomy of specialized languages used by different professionals—the terms bartenders use to quietly signal to other bar workers that a patron is cut off, for instance, or the turns of phrase popularized by magazines including Time and The New Yorker. I took this one out from the library, but it might be a book that I’d like to buy for my library one day.

Into the Sun is a lost sci-fi classic about climate change that was written a century ago by Swiss author CF Ramuz. This new translation by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan is fascinating. I don’t know if I can call it a good book, or even a particularly enjoyable book to read, but the way the narration flips back and forth between first and third person feels like a new way to write a novel about a disaster. It’s kind of a painful, stuttering read, but I think a modern novelist might be able to take some ideas from this book and adapt them into narrative styles for the internet age. An interesting read, for sure.

That’s it for this issue! I hope your holidays are happy. I’ll be back on the last day of the year with some of my favorite art of 2025.

Paul