Hello! On the first Saturday of this month, I did my annual(ish) walk around Lake Washington. Let’s start with the stats that people most frequently ask about: I left the house around 4:30 in the morning and got home around 10 pm. According to my Pedometer++ app, it was 109,284 steps, and 60.4 miles. I […]
Read More What I’ve Been Reading and Writing: May 2025Hi! I cannot tell you how much I needed spring to show up. Here’s a picture of Wally that really captured how I felt last week as the good weather arrived: The world is still on fire, of course. The news that broke me this month was the government sending a four-year-old American citizen with cancer to […]
Read More What I’ve Been Reading and Writing: April 2025“Sarah Wynn-Williams’s insider account of her time at Facebook arrived nearly under cover of darkness, with no promotion from the author or publisher until a week before its publication on March 11,” writes Jonathan Zavaleta at Rolling Stone. “Shortly after its publication, Facebook successfully won an emergency ruling from an arbitrator to block Wynn-Williams, the former […]
Read More What I’ve Been Reading and Writing: March 2025Hi! I hope you’ll forgive a little bit of self-promotion up top. I’m excited to announce that this month I published a new comic book as part of my day job at Civic Ventures that is free to read. It’s called Trillion Dollar Heist, and it explains a very real trick the super-rich use to steal […]
Read More What I’ve Been Reading: February 2025The new administration has been as shitty and chaotic and brutal as I expected, and Elon Musk actually managed to sink lower than my already-basement-level expectations by outing himself as a Nazi. Religious leaders are posting about “the sin of empathy” and calling on people to “properly hate” other religious leaders who ask Trump to […]
Read More What i’ve been reading and writing: January 2025Hello! Once again, I’m writing this newsletter a little earlier in the month in order to take a couple of weeks off from writing. So if something terrible has happened, or some news has broken that seems like the kind of thing that I might ordinarily comment on, you can rest assured I’m not ignoring […]
Read More What I’ve been reading and writing: December 2024Hi! Lots of you wrote back in response to the special newsletter I sent out right after the election. I read all of the emails and I tried to get back to everyone but there were a lot of emails in a short time, so I apologize if I missed you. Thank you for being such a […]
Read More What i’ve been reading and writing: November 2024Hi! 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 […]
Read More Let’s talk about the electionHello! I hope to keep it brief this month because, let’s be honest, the politics are eating our collective brain. On the Friday before Thanksgiving, I’m volunteering at the Beacon Hill International School’s 2024 Read-a-Thon. It’s one of the school’s biggest annual fundraising events and also an all-day celebration of books and reading. I’ll be reading […]
Read More What i’ve been reading and writing: October 2024Hello! I have a very special appearance coming up soon that I wanted you to know about. On Wednesday, October 9th at 7 pm, I’ll be interviewing Irish novelist Paul Lynch, author of the 2023 Booker Prizewinning dystopian novel, Prophet Song, at the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library. It’s free, and it should be a […]
Read More What i’ve been reading and writing: September 2024