Hi! 

The news is all bad. This year started off badly and it quickly got much worse. I expect there’s more awfulness to come.

I don’t have much to say about any of this except one thing: It’s important to remember that the Trump administration isn’t doing all of this—the kidnapping of other nations’ leaders, the shock troops invading American cities, the daily humiliations of enemies, the murder and torture and kidnappings—because it’s part of some genius plan. 

This is not the measured and deliberate unspooling of a brilliant mastermind’s blueprint. These are frightened people doing everything they can as fast as they can in order to retain control over the reins of power. They are terrified because they know that if they let up for even one second, people will turn on them. So they keep throwing everything at the wall. It’s not governance. It’s pure panic.

And the thing about fear is that people make mistakes when they’re afraid. They go too far, they overreact, they expend so much energy on the short term that they don’t realize they’re destroying themselves in the long term.

Our job right now is to document their offenses, to protest when we can, and to remember everything as clearly as we can. But most importantly, our job is to survive this onslaught. They can’t keep up this pace forever and they’re burning through goodwill and allies with each passing day. If we survive this, the chances are very good that we’ll get to see them experience the consequences of their actions. That’s what gets me out of bed on the tough mornings. 

I’ve Been Writing

For the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I talked with journalist Osita Nwanevu about his new book The Right of the People, which is an aspirational book that outlines the need for a new constitutional convention that rebuilds American democracy to work for everyone.

I wrote about 18 of the most intriguing books that are slated to come out in 2026, and I also wrote about a dozen interesting new paperbacks released in January. 

I’ve Been Reading

I found a copy of Emily Adrian’s 2025 novel Seduction Theory in a Little Free Library recently. It’s the story of two married college professors who cheat on each other in very different ways—one physically and one emotionally. This book builds to a very exciting final scene and I enjoyed it very much, though I thought the central couple of the book was presented as a little bit too perfect: beautiful, brilliant, emotionally intelligent. And the dynamics of the couple were also weirdly uniform—the man was slightly worse of a writer than the woman, he was a little bit less attractive, his career was more tenuous and he was not quite as loved by the community, and so on. A few more ragged edges would have ramped up some more delicious tension. But it’s a short book, and if you’re into academic novels it’s well worth it.

The second academic novel I read this month was The Material, by Camille Bordas, which is about a very dramatic day in the life of an MFA program for aspiring stand-up comedians. As someone who has written a whole-ass graphic novel about stand-up comedy, this felt right up my alley. The Material shares some sensibilities with Snelson: Comedy Is Dying—particularly what it means to be an aging comedian and whether there is such a thing as cancel culture. While most modern novels feel bloated and overlong, this is the rare one that left me wanting much more. I wish Bordas hadn’t constrained herself to a single day with these characters and this story. I wanted a deeper and more full exploration of all the themes.

If you’re looking for an audiobook to whip through in order to start your books-read tally for 2026 with some padding, you couldn’t do much better than Blake Crouch’s novel Famous. Like many of Crouch’s books, this one is about a doppelgänger—in fact, it’s narrated by a man who happens to look exactly like the most famous movie star in the world. It’s a wild, twisty story told by an absolutely irredeemable creep, and it’s only four hours and 40 minutes long—which is exactly how long it should be.

Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (no relation to the Tom Cruise white savior movie of the same name) is one of the most significant novels of my life. I read it at a time when I was breaking free from a lot of the expectations and traps that a white dude in his early 20s at the turn of the millennium was likely to fall into—an addiction to Great Man Syndrome, an unconscious bias to Big Important Books by Big Self-Important Dudes, that sort of thing—and it helped change my idea of what a great novel could be. Your Name Here, DeWitt’s latest novel, an audacious metafiction co-authored by Ilya Gridneff, is not the same joybuzzer to the head that The Last Samurai was. It’s stubborn and almost willfully obtuse and seemingly full of inside references. I’m glad I read it, but I don’t know that I can recommend it to anyone who’s not closely following DeWitt’s career. 

I was hoping that Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists might offer some insights into the importance of ritual and community in secular life. And I suppose the book does offer some of that. But it’s all too silly to take seriously. In the first quarter of the book, de Botton proposes that instead of church, atheists should attend a restaurant that invites people to ask invasive questions of other diners and also once a year hosts no-holds-barred orgies. I hope someone else has written an intelligent version of this book, because I’d sure like to read it. 

Every once in a while, I like to try reading some manga because I am woefully detached from the world of Japanese comics. Over holiday break, I read the first volume of Rooster Fighter, by Shu Sakuratani. It was exactly the kind of manga that I like to read—episodic, beautifully crafted, and so silly that it feels like it was drawn in an ongoing gas leak. It’s about a rooster who wanders around the world fighting giant demons. The rooster has a Clint Eastwood-style interior monologue that reveals him as a tough guy, and typical tough-guy things happen to him, but they’re always undercut because he’s just a rooster. This was a lot of fun and I’m excited to keep reading the series when I need a goofy lil escape from the horrors of the news.

The Dog Days of Winter

The first week of January is a big week for dogs in our household. January 4th marked the eighth anniversary of the day that we brought our first greyhound, Oberon, home. Obie was my first dog and he has trained me to be a dog person through-and-through. 

January 3rd was the fifth anniversary of the day we brought our second greyhound, Wallace, home. We were thinking about getting a second dog to keep Obie company in the winter of 2021, when we spotted a posting for a blind greyhound just off the track who needed the companionship of a confident older greyhound. After a visit to Greyhound Pets Incorporated, we found that the two of them hit it off and Wally came home with us that night. Wally had a small amount of vision left when we first got him, which helped him learn the layout of the house and our neighborhood before he went completely blind. 

Wally is loud for a greyhound. He compensates for his blindness by barking and leaping in the air to make himself seem big any time he’s confronted with something he doesn’t understand, which can make walks a challenge. But at home, he’s become a real sweetie. Nothing makes him happier than to be in a room with his people and Obie, and he’s prone to letting out a long, satisfied groan when he feels safe and contented. 

And then January 5th marked Obie’s 12th birthday. Twelve is pretty old for a greyhound, and Obie really started to show his age last year. We’re treating him for arthritis, he pulled a muscle that incapacitated him for a while in the fall, and he most notably was hit with a bad bout of pancreatitis in the summer that probably could have killed him if the good folks at Blue Pearl emergency vet in Tukwila hadn’t put him on a course of strong painkillers that helped him survive the attack. 

But aside from his regular meds for arthritis, all the big health issues have passed for the moment and Obie currently looks very healthy for his age. But an old dog is an old dog, and Obie has some occasional weakness in his hind legs that is just heartbreaking to see. And there are undoubtedly more issues to come.

But in general, owning an aging dog hasn’t been the experience that I thought it would be. It’s not as sad, for one thing. Obie is generally a calmer and more pleasant dog the older he gets, and he’s very comfortable with his role in our lives. I’m grateful for every walk we take, and I’m honored to take care of him as he ages. His trust in us feels more like a gift with each passing day. 

If you’d asked me when I moved to Seattle in the year 2000, I never would have predicted that I’d eventually live in a home with two big dogs. But now I can’t imagine a life without dogs in it. Especially now, with everything feeling so incredibly bleak, sometimes these two not-so-bright retired athletes are the very best part of my day. All of which is to say that if you’re considering visiting a pet shelter and bringing home an animal, you should interpret this email as the universe sending you a sign to do it.

Thanks for reading!

Paul

Hi!

Like many people, I like to reflect on the art and culture that most made an impact on me over the year. Because I take in so much art in the course of an average year, I don’t think in terms of “favorites.” (One of my crankiest opinions is that nobody over the age of six should have a favorite movie or book.) But I want to acknowledge the stuff that stuck with me. At the same time, I’m not reading or watching as much as I used to. So this isn’t anywhere near a comprehensive year-end list so much as an abbreviated diary entry. 

If you want to read more about any of these pieces of art, I wrote about almost all of them in this very newsletter over the past year and you can find the original posts in my archive.

The Best Reading Experience of the Year

For the first time in a while, one reading experience stood way out above the rest: Anna North’s novel Bog Queen. It braids together three narratives that eventually reveal the secrets of a young woman’s millennia-old, perfectly preserved body that is accidentally found in a bog during a murder investigation. I’ve already given this one as a gift several times and I’ve heard no complaints from anyone else who’s read it at my recommendation. 

Honorary mentions for this year include Patricia Lockwood’s hilarious and somehow weirdly tense Covid-era novel Will There Ever Be Another You, and Jon Raymond’s outstanding God and Sex, both of which rattle around in my head at the weirdest times.

The Comic That Stuck With Me

I can’t stop thinking about Jesse Lonergan’s Drome, a death-metal graphic novel epic that is the most joyously experimental book to come out in a very long time.

Additionally, I absolutely loved G. Willow Wilson’s latest comic with artist M.K. Perker, The Stoneshore Register, which is about a refugee who goes to work for a dying newspaper in a weird and magical coastal Washington town. And just last week I read Brian K. Vaughan and artist Niko Henrichon’s astounding Spectators, which is an incredibly horny book-length novel about two ghosts who bond over watching living people have sex while the world around them ends in just about the dumbest way possible. It’s a blend of Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut, and Milo Manara’s erotic comics work, and I think it’s going to stick with me for a long time.

The Music That I Kept on Repeat

In the end, it was kind of not a great year for music! I fell in love early on this year with FKA Twigs’s album Eusexua, and it turns out that no other album came close to that one in terms of repeat listening. Even her companion album to Eusexua that came out last month, Eusexua Afterglow, failed to capture the compulsive listenability of the original album.

I found some singles that worked for me throughout the year, of course, but the only other albums that found themselves working into my regular rotation were HAIM’s I Quit and Noah Cyrus’s second album I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me. 

And of course Kesha continues to be my most-listened artist. It’s good to have her back making bangers on the regular.

The Most Enjoyable Podcast of the Year

Just at the end of the year, tiny local news podcasting empire CityCast finally launched a Seattle edition, and it’s become a daily listen for me. It’s a roundtable format show in which a rotating cast of smart local media types opine on the latest local headlines, and while I dutifully listen to many news podcasts, I actually look forward to listening to this one every morning.

Other than that, it’s been an abysmal year for podcasts. Aside from CityCast, I haven’t found any other entertaining or interesting new shows all year long. And many of the podcasts that I regularly listen to have pivoted to video this year, which means I spend a good deal of time listening to people talk about things that I can’t see. It’s possible that video is going to kill the utility and enjoyability of podcasts for me within the next couple of years. 

Which is a shame! Podcasting is a medium that felt at its best like the golden age of blogging—inventive, irreverent, and indispensable. But now the medium is finally being monetized to death.

The Movie I Can’t Stop Thinking About

Man, I still think about One Battle After Another multiple times a day. What a huge, weird, satisfying accomplishment of a movie. I love Paul Thomas Anderson even though some of his movies don’t click for me—what the fuck even was Licorice Pizza?—but with this one, he’s made a lifelong fan who will go to the theater on opening weekend every time.

But it’s been a pretty great year for excellent movies. Sinners, Weapons, and Sorry, Baby were all stellar movies that I’ll revisit in years to come. And the comic book nerd in me was giddy over Superman being done right after many dark decades of filmmakers fumbling the character.

But with all that said, it seems like middle-of-the-road movies are actively getting worse, on average. Bland movies like Ballerina or M3gan 2.0 feel simultaneously rushed and ponderous, hitting all the necessary marks with zero flair or artfulness. Genre fare feels less curious and more safe with each passing year. Or maybe I’m getting older and crankier.

And Then There’s TV

I watched a lot of stuff that I liked ok, but the two biggest hits for me were sci-fi shows on Apple TV: The second season of Severance and the first season of Pluribus. Both shows attracted some criticism for being willfully slow and taking time to unpack their central mysteries, but I’m a hundred percent on board for both. Let’s allow TV to be more like novels, okay? Weirder and slower is just fine with me.

Also, Netflix’s Death By Lightning, a four-part miniseries about the assassination of President Garfield, was a tremendously fun and funny historical drama. Sure, it simplified some of the details and overexplained itself in the first episode. But you can’t argue with Michael Shannon (playing a good guy for once,) Nick Offerman, Bradley Whitford, Matthew Macfayden, and Shea “goddamn” Wigham starring as the villain of the piece, Roscoe “goddamn” Conkling.

And Finally, Let’s Talk About Socks

Yes, socks. Two weeks ago, my pair of Danish Endurance quarter pro sports socks came out of the laundry with a hole in them. Ordinarily, that would not be the inciting incident for a recommendation. But I wore that pair of socks on almost every one of my long walks, virtually every Saturday for four years. That’s literally thousands of miles, followed by a washing and drying before going out on the road again. Put another way, that pair of socks almost circumnavigated the globe with me before they gave out.

The socks were so trusty and reliable that I just stopped thinking about them. But now I’ve ordered other styles of Danish Endurance socks for everyday use, and I’m just as happy with those socks as I am with the original pair. Forget Darn Tough and just say no to Bombas—Danish Endurance socks are the best I’ve ever worn. 

That’s All for This Year

Thanks for reading this far! I’d love to hear any enthusiastic 2025 recommendations you simply can’t keep to yourself. And I hope you’ve had a great holiday season and that your New Year’s Eve and Day are splendid. I’ll see you later on in January.

Paul

Hi!

Right before Halloween, I was at a family member’s house and children were getting their faces painted for some festivity or another. I noticed that the picture on the packaging for the face paints was not a real photograph of a real human. Instead, the model was clearly created by AI. She had the too-toothy wide grin and tiny nose that you find in a lot of portraits generated by artificial intelligence.

Now, I’m online a lot and so obviously I’ve seen plenty of AI images. And I’ve seen those awful AI-forward Skecher ads on public transit—though I’m pretty sure that every single one of those ads has been defaced with anti-AI sentiment.

I think that box of face paints was the first time I’ve seen an AI image that was printed on a physical box that existed in a familiar space. It felt wrong, sitting there on the kitchen table, an unsettling intruder that signified a blending of worlds. The internet and real life had converged, and both felt a little cheaper for the interaction.

Of course, using an unreal image to advertise face paints is incredibly stupid. The artificial blond lady on the box was wearing face paint—I think she was made up to be a tiger—but obviously she wasn’t advertising the bold colors or smooth textures of the face paints in the box. She wasn’t real. Her face wasn’t really painted. Hell, her face wasn’t really a face.

We all know why a face paint manufacturer would use AI images on their products—because they’re significantly cheaper and faster than paying a real photographer and real models and a real artist to paint the model’s face. But the AI image is also not a useful advertisement for the face paint. Nothing about that image actually represented the quality of the product that was in the package, the way a real photograph would.

I’ve written before about the problem of using AI images to advertise real-world products. “I know people who have lost jobs to AI. It’s not because AI did their jobs better than they did, or even half as well as they did,” I wrote. “It’s because their bosses don’t care how poorly the job is done as long as it gets done quickly and cheaply. We’re learning how little good work matters to a large swath of the population—especially in fields that involve writing and art.”

Anyway, it was in that moment, staring into the vaguely cannibalistic grin of the AI slop model on a box of face paints, that I realized this coming holiday season is going to be the time when AI images significantly break containment into the real world. After the kids open the presents and dad admires his new coffee cup, people’s houses are going to be absolutely packed full of real-world manifestations of AI images, printed on cardboard and slapped onto products and woven into the daily fabric of our lives.

From this point on, all the cheap and gaudy housewares at Ross Dress for Less and TJ Maxx and Marshalls are going to be dripping with AI imagery. Fake models are going to pose with fake products on packages of decorative plates adorned with AI-created images of docks on lakes at sunset, and the wavy sherbet-colored water is going to look plasticine and a little bit oily. It’s now inevitable—AI images are going to become the aesthetic for cheap American junk for the foreseeable future.

This Christmas will be the moment in the zombie movie when the walking dead break inside the compound and start gnawing away. I’m not sure our collective mental health is quite prepared for that to happen.

I’ve Been Reading

Jon Raymond’s prose has always felt to me like a continuation of Raymond Carver’s—short, punchy sentences with just enough room for ornamentation to take a reader’s breath away. I’ve often thought of it as a signature Northwest literary style: Terse like the Nordic language but with something mossy and dark and weird hiding just underneath. Raymond’s latest novel, God and Sex, is basically that Northwestern aesthetic writ large. The plot is a stew of everything I hate about fiction—it’s a novel about a novelist (Boo!) who has an affair with his best friend’s wife (Booooo!) and then feels guilty about it (BOOOO!). But I’ll be goddamned if the book didn’t win me over. I love, for instance, that the protagonist is laboring on a hyper-ambitious novel about trees, which could be interpreted as wry commentary on the extravagant success of Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory. And both the affair and its aftermath somehow feels primal and mythic enough that it didn’t feel like yet another boring book about boring people having boring affairs. Things get weird—there may or may not be supernatural intrusion into the story—but Raymond keeps a straight enough face that it’s hard to tell where exactly he stands. I really loved this one.

Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are favorite genre distractions of mine. I was intrigued by Anthony Horowitz’s first James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, because it contains some passages that were written by Fleming and had gone unpublished until they were included in this volume. On the whole it’s a decent-enough thriller—though the first third, which is set mostly in a West German auto race, was an absolute swamp to trudge through. (The book is set right after the events of Goldfinger and Horowitz felt the need to answer a question that nobody on earth ever asked before: “Whatever happened to Pussy Galore?”) But I listened to the audiobook version of this one, and the real MVP is the narrator, actor David Oyelowo, who seems to be having the time of his life bringing a Bond movie to life with his voice. Oyelowo is an actor I’ll follow anywhere, and his performance lends the book a certain playfulness and urgency that I’m not sure Horowitz is capable of delivering.

I’m a big fan of Kate Zambreno. I particularly love her book Heroines, which really helped open my eyes to the larger feminist literary tradition, and how it differs from the patriarchal tradition of great literature. So it pains me to say that I did not like her new book Animal Stories, which is a series of meditations on zoos and the relationship between humans and animals. The first essay is about a primate house in a zoo that Zambreno visits often, and no less than three times in that essay does she bring up the observation that it’s hard to tell who’s observing who—the apes or the humans. For such an original thinker, she seems enamored of some very unoriginal thoughts in this one, which makes the book feel more cliche and less editorially sculpted than some of her other works.

When Zohran Mamdani name-checked Eugene Debs in his election night victory speech, I realized that while I know who Debs is, I haven’t read a biography of him or gone particularly deep into his life. So I read Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography, written by Paul Buhle and Steve Max, with Dave Nance, with comic art by Noah Van Sciver. Unfortunately, I really didn’t like this book. It switches back and forth between prose sections and comics sections, which is a hybrid style I’ve never felt worked particularly well, and I wound up retaining virtually none of it. If anyone has any recommendations for a good book on Debs, I’d be eternally grateful.

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I wrote about the Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery in Georgetown. The piece is really more about the manager of the shop: the estimable Larry Reid, who did quite a lot of work to advance the idea of comics as a serious art in the 90s and early 2000s. 

Also in the piece, I get to sing the praises of the store’s Damaged Room, which features slightly damaged and out-of-print books at a 50% discount: “In-the-know comics nerds — full disclosure, myself included — have lost dozens of hours to spelunking trips into the depths of the Damaged Room, hunting for unbelievable bargains on gorgeous graphic novels.”

If you love comics and you haven’t visited the Damaged Room, or spoken to Larry Reid, you owe it to yourself to drop by as soon as possible.

See you next month,
Paul

See you next month,
Paul

Hi!

It’s already been a roller coaster of a month, with the election turning decisively toward the Democrats followed almost immediately by eight centrist Democrats blowing that capital and folding on the shutdown with basically nothing to show for it.

But generally, I’m still feeling pretty good about the results of the election. Any off-year election resulting in Mamdani elected in New York City and Wilson elected in Seattle has to represent some kind of change, and the down-ballot races in Georgia and Mississippi and in suburban Pennsylvania were essentially anti-Trump drubbings. It feels like people have had enough of the past decade’s politics and are looking for big, bold solutions. 

There’s a lot of bad stuff to come, of course. President Trump’s staff of ghouls and anthropomorphic Streptococcus bacteria doesn’t care one single iota about their poll numbers, and they may be realizing that they’ve only got a limited amount of time to make all their demented dreams come true. People will suffer, things will break, and the world is in danger.

But listen: If you ever had a big idea, or if you ever wanted to change your community for the better, there has never been a better time to get involved. There are a lot of people out there who are hungry for big ideas and real leadership, and I don’t think that Chuck Fucking Schumer is going to be the one to give it to them. 

So here’s my advice to you: Start small. Jump into your local elections, volunteer with the political group of your choice, speak out at zoning board meetings or at school boards. This election proves that there is real political will out there for something that doesn’t in any way resemble the politics of the last 20 years, and you can help shape what that world looks like if you get involved right now.

Whatever the next big political idea is, I can tell you for sure that it isn’t going to come from a high-priced political consulting firm. It’s going to come from the people.

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I highlighted a dozen or so of the most exciting paperback releases of November. 

I’ve Been Reading

I’m sorry to report that Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Shadow Ticket, didn’t really do it for me—and I say this as someone who absolutely loved Inherent Vice (the novel, not the frustrating movie adaptation.) I enjoyed the first hundred pages or so of Shadow Ticket, which is pretty much pure private dick buffoonery, but the majority of the book felt a little chillier to me than Pynchon’s best fiction. Still, the thing I’ve learned about reinvestigating Pynchon’s work is that it changes over time and sometimes I need to age into it, so don’t skip the new one just because it didn’t sing to me.

I highly recommend listening to the audiobook version of Werner Herzog’s new book The Future of Truth, which is a short manifesto about truth in a time when algorithms can convince humans to doubt absolutely anything. The audiobook is read by the author, and even the darkest observations about AI and authenticity sound smooth and pleasurable when they’re delivered in Herzog’s accent.

I meant to take out Emma Pattee’s novel Tilt from the Seattle Public Library, but I took out a completely different book with a similar title, Amie Barrodale’s novel Trip, by mistake. (An edible may or may not have been involved.) I was about a chapter into Trip before I realized my mistake, but I happily finished the book anyway. It’s about a woman who dies and navigates the spirit world in an effort to save her son. Barrodale builds an interesting and mysterious spiritual afterlife with a set of rules based on eastern philosophy, and I appreciated the thought experiment a great deal.

And I also enjoyed Tilt, once I finally got around to it. It opens on a very pregnant woman shopping for a crib in the Portland, Oregon IKEA when an earthquake strikes. Without power or cell service, she has to make her way across the thoroughly damaged cityscape of Portland on foot in order to get back to her husband. This book is narrated by the mom-to-be to the child in her womb. The conceit mostly worked for me, though there was a part when the narrator describes having sex with her husband to her unborn child that pulled me out of the story due to general ickiness.

I’ve been haunted by RF Kuang’s words to me about why the hero narrative never actually works to effect real change in the world. I tend to think in narratives, and I’ve spent my whole life immersed in stories of one person who makes a difference to change the system, and so it’s very hard to shake myself free from that framework. I want to break out of this way of thinking so I’ve been reading a little bit about alternative ways to be a political actor. Mutual Aid is a short guidebook about building solidarity and community in times of crisis by Dean Spade for Verso Books. It’s an interesting and thorough description of how to use collective action to serve community needs in a way that doesn’t center one person above anyone else. Honestly, I’m still having a hard time picturing how to tell a compelling story about mutual aid that doesn’t violate the principles of mutual aid, but I’m enjoying the thought experiment a great deal.

It’s Not Over?

Earlier this month, I was interviewed by Chaitna Deshmukh, a reporter for the UW newspaper The Daily, about the Short Run Comix Festival. Deshmukh, who had never attended the festival before, wanted my perspective as someone who had been covering and attending Short Run since the very beginning.

The Daily ran Deshmukh’s article on November 7th, and it was positively delightful to experience the festival I’ve been attending for over a decade through fresh eyes.

“As an attendee, there’s a certain awkwardness in going up to artists, reaching out, and picking through hours, weeks, and months of the labor and passion of the person standing in front of you,” she wrote. “For close to an hour, my friend and I walked around, too afraid to make eye contact with anyone or touch anything.”

“I eventually realized that by not looking, I was actually ensuring I wouldn’t like anything,” Deshmukh continued. “It’s okay not to buy everything you flip through, as long as you’re polite, but looking closely was the only way I found the niche work I loved — and at Short Run, almost everything is niche.”

You should go read the whole thing. 

A friend asked if I felt weird about being a historical reference for an article, and honestly I was over the moon about it. Not because I enjoy being interviewed—decidedly not—but because I was thrilled that a smart young journalist is excited to write about arts and books in Seattle. 

I know that every generation of journalists believes they’re the last flickering lights of a golden age that’s quickly receding into the past. But for much of my career as an arts reporter I watched the arts budgets of newspapers get slashed to nothing, and I saw a bunch of literary-focused blogs and online publications disappear. Logically, I understood that it wasn’t the apocalypse for all arts journalism and criticism. But brother, it sure felt apocalypse-shaped to me.

So to meet someone who was excited about learning all about this arts festival that meant so much to me, and who was excited about sharing her enthusiasm for books and arts with an audience of readers, was a big deal. It’s heartening to know that I’m not the last dodo waiting it out on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. 

There are signs of life! All is not lost!
Paul

Hi!

Thanks so much to all the folks who wrote back with opinions about the cadence of this newsletter. Two of you wrote to say you prefer one big edition at the end of the month, the vast majority of you said you would be happy with two editions per month, and a couple of absolute sickos said they’d read as many newsletters as I could send every month. 

So I’m going to listen to the majority and try emailing two shorter (still free!) editions of this newsletter per month—one on the 15th and one on the last day of the month. I hope I don’t drive the two of you crazy with the extra email, and I reserve the right to switch back if the workload gets too heavy or it feels like the new cadence isn’t working.

In this issue, I want to talk about a movie that has been lodged in my brain since I first watched it a couple of weeks back: One Battle After Another. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to be spoiled, feel free to skip over the next section—I’ve got some great book recommendations at the end of this email. But first, let me say that you absolutely should see this movie—preferably in the theater if you can. It’s a movie that took two decades to be made, but it somehow feels as raw and as real as today’s news headlines.

As far as I know, there’s no word in the English language for a very common occurrence that many of us have experienced: An organization founded to solve a specific problem enjoys a certain amount of success and expands to the point where the organization more or less abandons its stated goal and instead becomes entirely devoted to the complex struggle of making sure that organization continues to thrive. 

For instance, when I worked as a journalist I watched firsthand as the Occupy Seattle protests gradually transformed from a campaign to increase the visibility of America’s growing income inequality into a nonstop self-referential debate about the enforcement of urban camping laws. Many huge non-profits have seen their management structure bloat and detach from the people the non-profit is supposed to help, in favor of instead developing a series of more and more ornate fundraising exercises. 

Elsewhere, corporations become so obsessed with unlimited growth that they hire expensive marketing firms to erase the thing that they’re most famous for from the brand entirely. Because there’s only so much money that can be made from the sale of chicken, Kentucky Fried Chicken becomes KFC, for example, and because health-conscious consumers are shying away from sugary fried bread products, Dunkin’ Donuts becomes, simply, Dunkin’—a name that means absolutely nothing.

We humans are easily distracted animals, and so rules are necessary in order to make cooperation possible. Unfortunately, humans are also obsessed with rules and organizations, and that meta-obsession can consume the whole endeavor if we’re not careful. I’ve asked anthropologists and political science majors, and nobody is aware of a term for this process. “Mission creep” isn’t quite right—it doesn’t capture the snake-eating-its-own-tail of it all. And “bureaucracy” doesn’t recognize the ouroboros of idiocy behind the organizational brain-death.

In any case, my favorite sequence in One Battle After Another is a perfect example of this nameless kind of crushing meta-organizational weight. When Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is trying to call the revolutionary organization that he was a part of a couple of decades ago, he’s greeted by a pedantic know-nothing on the phone who’s more interested in nagging Bob for not knowing the secret pass phrase than he is in overturning the state. 

The revolutionary group has even become so institutionalized that its phone line plays Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as its hold music—a decision that is directionally correct but obviously symptomatic of bigger problems behind the scenes. If the revolution ever does come, I’m pretty sure it won’t have hold music. 

But the best part of the scene is that while Ferguson is trapped in organizational hell, and while anti-immigrant troops are circling, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) is calmly walking around, making sure that his underground network of immigrants are emotionally and physically cared for on a personal level. St. Carlos introduces Ferguson to everyone he meets, acknowledging their personhood in ways that the pencil-necked gatekeeper quibbling on the phone with Bob has likely never considered.

In other words, while Ferguson is quite literally struggling to talk the talk, St. Carlos is walking the walk. 

Without ego or pretense he’s getting the job done, and he’s making it look easy. This happens all the time in the real world—the thankless care work that millions of women perform every day, the mutual aid organizations feeding and protecting people from the real-life anti-immigrant forces that are much scarier than One Battle After Another ever could have anticipated. The opening of the film is full of bombs and guns and car chases, but quiet, caring competence is the true revolutionary act. 

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson says that del Toro basically came up with the character of St. Carlos and his underground immigrant railroad on his own, and I’d argue that means del Toro deserves, at the very least, a credit as co-writer of the screenplay. St. Carlos is easily the most memorable character in a movie crammed full of memorable characters. 

I could go on for thousands of words about this movie. Sean Penn ’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw is what happens when you shove the entirety of the Trump Administration into a leathery human-sized sack. Chase Infiniti’s Willa Ferguson doesn’t make herself fully known until the movie is two-thirds of the way through but she never loses the conviction that the movie is entirely her story. And on and on and on. But for me, my thoughts always go back to that one scene depicting a kind of heroism that you rarely see in the movies: Kind, unassuming, brilliant, and competent. 

I’ve Been Writing

I wrote about the most intriguing (and scariest) paperback releases of October for the Seattle Times. 

I’ve Been Reading

I will always buy any book written by Patricia Lockwood as soon as it’s released. I loved her memoir Priestdaddy and her poetry collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. This month’s Will There Ever Be Another You, a fictionalized account of her experiences in the depth of the Coronavirus pandemic, is a continuation of Lockwood’s previous book, the semiautobiographical novel No One Is Talking About This and it’s full of the same surprising images and latticework of carefully constructed sentences. I’ll probably re-read both of these novels together back-to-back because they feel of a piece—but I’ll probably wait to re-read both books until after Lockwood reads with David Sedaris at Benaroya Hall on Sunday, November 16th, so that her reading voice is fresh in my mind. I can’t think of any other writer who is so perfectly distilling the internet’s informal and absurd language into something so personal and profound. It almost makes all the doomscrolling worth it.

I was sideswiped by an amazing novel earlier this month. Anna North’s Bog Queen is the story of a forensic anthropologist who, in the process of investigating a murder, uncovers a 2000-year-old corpse. The novel intertwines the modern-day story of the discovery and its aftermath with flashbacks to the young druid’s life in Iron Age Europe, in the weeks leading up to her death. It’s one of the most engaging and interesting novels I’ve read all year. 

I liked the form of Catherine Lacy’s The Möbius Book more than the content. It’s a flipbook with two front covers that can be read from either side, and the narratives—one told in first person, the other in third person—braid together in different ways, depending on which one you read first. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel as though the narrative earned the interesting format of the book. If you’re going to play with the form of a book like this, your story needs to make that form absolutely essential. I didn’t feel like this one met the challenge.

Vulture, by Phoebe Greenwood, is a novel about war correspondents. It’s a deeply cynical story of the kind of people who charge into war zones for the sake of their bylines. I enjoyed the insiders’ view into the world of war reporting, but it was a little too dark for my already-dark state of mind.

The Bus on Thursday is a novel about a woman who is diagnosed with breast cancer and promptly loses her mind. The novel follows her as her world unravels, putting her teaching job on the line and potentially throwing her into the middle of a murder investigation. It’s a manic, bizarre little book with a fascinating off-kilter narrator—you never know where Shirley Barrett’s protagonist is going to take you on the next page. 

That’s All, Folks

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back in your inboxes at the end of this month. 
Take care,
Paul

Hi!

When I was younger (groan,) summer was the season of pop culture. All the catchiest pop songs tumbled out of the windows of passing cars, all the expensive blockbusters popped off in movie theaters like a months-long fireworks show, and all the grabbiest books by the biggest-name authors weighed down the new arrival tables at local bookstores.

Part of the reason I associate summer with the season of grand pop entertainments is because I was absolutely soaked in the culture of magazines when I was growing up, and all of my beloved magazines published thick summer preview issues full of breathless blurbicles describing all the confections coming our way. And I bought into that enthusiasm with every inch of my being. Every summer, it felt like the world was straining desperately to entertain me, and I was eager to be entertained. 

The pop-culture schedules are still roughly the same. The structures of entertainment industries still favor summer for the release of the crowd-pleasingest cultural artifacts. Podcasters squabble over the songs of the summer and movie theaters still try to entice audiences with big names and bigger CGI spectacles. But something—some urgency, some wildness, some fun—is missing

Maybe now that I’m older, it’s just as simple as the fact that none of this is aimed at me. But based on my limited peer group, I don’t think people between the ages of 13 and 30 have the same enthusiasm for pop-culture summers that I did back then. Everything feels a little smaller and more fractured now than it did when the monoculture was drawing its last breaths at the end of the 20th century. 

So in the spirit of the listicles in my beloved magazines of yore, I thought I would compile a little list of my favorite summer entertainments—the pop culture that has distracted me from the ongoing collapse of the United States of America.

First up, it will probably surprise no one to know that I absolutely loved Superman. I’m aware it’s not the best comic book movie, but it might be my favorite just because it nailed everything that makes me love Superman: David Corenswet was earnest and not at all corny, Rachel Brosnahan nailed the prickly brilliance of Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult understood that Lex Luthor is motivated by envy. Around the time the heroes in the movie were (minor spoiler alert) fighting their way through a rainbow river of negative protons or what the fuck ever that emptied out into a black hole in a pocket universe, I realized that James Gunn was trying to capture the joy of being a kid picking up a comic book from a drug store spinner rack. You don’t always have a clear idea of everything that’s going on in the comic you just bought, but you are desperate to learn everything about this weird and colorful universe in your lap. The Fantastic Four movie was one of the best Marvel movies since the pandemic began, but it doesn’t even feel like it’s playing in the same league as  Superman. Superman felt like it had something important to say about goodness and kindness and living in a cynical world, and I appreciate that kind of investigation in a blockbuster.  And in maybe the biggest surprise, KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix was far and away the most fun animated movie of the summer. In fact, it could potentially be the best animated movie of the year—not earth-shattering, but artful and fun, with catchy original music all the way through. 

The two songs I’ve enjoyed most this summer blend pop with a little bit of melancholy that suits the time. Miley Cyrus’s “End of the World,” which urges us to “pretend it’s not the end of the world,” is exactly what I’m thinking as I go for a long walk in the sunlight and try to momentarily stop thinking about the human rights violations that are probably happening within a couple of miles of me. Reneé Rapp’s sexy, snotty “Leave Me Alone,” with its chorus of “Can I tell you a secret?/I’m so sick of it all,” reminds us that there’s a very fine line between copping a bitchy attitude and falling into a deep depression. And the purest fun of all is Kesha’s “Boy Crazy,” whose video is decidedly NSFW. It’s so good to have Kesha back.

TV has not been particularly great this summer. The fourth season of The Bear recaptures most of the mojo that the disastrous third season squandered. It felt good to see these characters work together again after a weird season where everybody felt detached and mopey—in fact, I think I’d advise new Bear viewers to skip the third season entirely and instead jump from the superlative second season straight to the fourth. And probably the best single episode of TV I saw this summer was the final episode of the second season of Poker Face, which cleverly builds on previous episodes of the season and adds to the show’s mythology in a satisfying way.

Now we’re entering August, which is traditionally a little bit of a pop culture purgatory. Every so often a fun genre flick will break free from the sludge of misfit movie releases, and occasionally one final audacious pop song will escape containment, but for the most part the fireworks show is over, and Serious Autumn is about to begin. Based on how things in the news are going, I imagine I’ll be yearning for the distractions of summer by the time September 30th rolls around. 

I’ve Been Writing

I wrote about July’s best paperback releases for the Seattle Times, and I also wrote about the excellent Long Bros. Books, a fine antiquarian bookstore and bar in Pioneer Square. This is a remarkable shop that every Seattle book-lover should frequent, owned and operated by a true character who knows more about Seattle than just about anyone.

I’ve Been Reading

I took a short trip to Maine earlier this month, and while walking around Portland I pulled a signed paperback of John McPhee’s book The Headmaster out of a Little Free Library. I never would have thought to pick this book up while browsing a bookstore, but I’m so glad kismet dropped it in my hands. It’s a profile of a longtime headmaster of a small New England boys’ school, and the whole time I read the book I was picturing it as directed by Wes Anderson—a whimsical, quirky, colorful sketch of one man who accidentally devoted his whole life to creating an institution that helped transform boys into good men.

A novel I brought on my trip to Maine, Grifter’s Game, was about the exact spiritual opposite of McPhee’s good-hearted character study. It’s the story of a con man who falls in love while pulling a scam, and the ending of this book is so dark, so mean-spirited, that I kind of had to just set the book down and let it wash over me in silence for a while. If you’re in the mood for a quick and dirty Jim Thompson-like crime thriller, this one’s for you.

The Last Bookstore on Earth is a fun genre story about a young woman who runs a bookstore in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey. It’s not world-changing, and I actually might have appreciated more bookselling in the plot. But this is a fun vacation distraction for bookish types.

The Anthropologists is an airy piece of literary fiction about a married couple trying to find an apartment in a foreign city. They develop a few friendships, and their relationships get more complicated as they learn more about their new friends. It’s one of those books where we never learn anything concrete about the characters—where they’re from, where they’re going—but this is one case where that literary vagueness actually pays off by evoking a very particular emotional journey at a certain kind of uncertain period of life. It’s a tone poem about feeling estranged from reality, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Ginseng Roots is a book-length graphic memoir by Craig Thompson, author of Blankets, about growing up in a small Wisconsin town that happens to have the world’s best land for growing ginseng. Much of the book is made up of Thompson investigating the global trade of ginseng from Wisconsin to Asia, and I wound up enjoying the non-fiction parts of the book more than the memoir itself—though it is interesting to see Thompson reinvestigating and atoning for the one-sided way he portrayed his family in Blankets.

John Scalzi’s latest, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, is a novel made up loosely linked chapters about what happens when one day the moon suddenly and for no reason turns into cheese. Scalzi seriously explores the physics of the situation—it turns out that a giant ball of cheese the size of the moon would almost immediately start collapsing in on itself—and then wrings every cheese pun imaginable out of the situation while featuring a huge cast of people whose lives are transformed by the situation, from astronauts to politicians to billionaires to ordinary folks. This one is pretty much just a thought experiment run wild, but I had a lot more fun with it than I did with Scalzi’s last couple of books.

The Disappearing Middle-Class Author

I’ve been thinking a lot about a post that local author Cherie Priest wrote on her blog. In theory it was supposed to be a post celebrating the release of her latest novel, a haunted house thriller called It Was Her House First. 

But Priest, as she explains, is going through it right now and so her post is kind of an extended explanation of how hard it is to be a non-superstar author in the year 2025. It’s the first public airing of many complaints and observations that authors have shared with me off the record over the last few years, and I think anyone who cares about books should read it.

This one sentence is the thesis statement: “Publishers spent less and less on promotion (and there were fewer and fewer venues to spend it), and authors were expected to do more, and more, and more.”

Too many people still have the mistaken belief that publishing a book is shorthand for Making It Big—once that book comes out, you become a Published Author and your career has forever changed. But publishers do very little in terms of publicity these days, and very few media outlets devote any time to books. The reality is that most authors are lucky to sell a few hundred copies of their books, and they’re pretty much expected to sell those books by themselves.

I’m not going to pretend that the publishing industry ever treated writers fairly. It’s always been exploitative and exclusionary. But there used to be a few middle-class novelists out there who managed to make a modest living from writing, whereas now it feels like you have one Stephen King and you have ten thousand authors with day jobs trying to find the time to do promotional podcast interviews that they had to schedule themselves. 

The middle has been cut out of the publishing industry. You’re either a blockbuster hit or you’re a nobody. It’s probably not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time that the economy is getting hollowed out, with fewer and fewer Americans landing comfortably in the middle class. 

Call me crazy, but I would much rather live in a world in which hundreds of authors are able to make a decent living than live in a world where one billionaire author is able to launch a franchise and then spend a chunk of her fortune to try and wipe out the civil rights of a minority. And I’d rather live in a world where millions of Americans are able to afford homes, healthcare, and retirement than live in a world where one Nazi with an electric car company is in the headlines all the fucking time. 

Anyway, it seems to me that the publishing industry isn’t a legitimate business plan anymore. It’s a pyramid scheme that bets everything on one big name breaking out per season while thousands of other suckers take the fall. 

That’s a lot of complaining, so here’s what I want to do about it: I think for my part as a reader, I’m going to try to focus more on reading books from small presses and try as hard as I can to step away from the big five publishing conglomerates that have hollowed out the creative class. And if you have any ideas on how to establish a literary middle class, I’d love to hear them, too.

Enjoy your purgatorial August and I’ll see you next month, when the days become noticeably shorter.

Paul