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Hi!

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 Honduras. And arresting judges is real tin-pot dictator behavior. 

But for now, I’m trying to get out and walk as much as I can, and get as much lush green scenery into my eyeballs as possible because it felt like an awfully long winter and it feels like there’s another awfully long winter lurking right around the next corner. 

I’ve Been Writing

On the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I talked with Mike Konczal about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, which has become all the rage in progressive political circles. 

I was excited to write about three different employees at Third Place Books Lake Forest Park for my bookstore profile series. 

And I wrote about 10 of April’s best paperback releases. 

I’ve Been Reading

When I worked at Elliott Bay Book Company, I was always wondering which of my coworkers would go on to write the Great Elliott Bay Novel. So many booksellers are aspiring authors, and Elliott Bay attracted so many excellent writers that I assumed it was only a matter of time before someone wrote a novel about their experiences there. Here’s a contender for the title: Kim Fay worked at Elliott Bay for years and left right before I started working there in the year 2000. Her latest book, Kate & Frida, is an epistolary novel between a woman living in Europe and a bookseller at the Puget Sound Book Company, which is a (very) thinly veiled stand-in for Elliott Bay. I don’t know if I would call this the Great Elliott Bay Novel, but the details described in the book fondly brought me back to my bookselling days in Pioneer Square. I can’t recommend this one wholeheartedly—the main characters are a little too naive and earnest for me to get completely on board with them—but it’s a charming enough story that surely will appeal to booksellers and the people who love them.

Olivia Waite’s sci-fi mystery novella Murder By Memory takes place on an interstellar ship and it stars a detective named Dorothy Gentleman whose consciousness has been downloaded in someone else’s body. I had a really good time with this one, and I’m excited to read more Dorothy Gentleman mysteries in the (hopefully) near future.

I read two books about the intersection of urban life and the natural world. Thor Hanson’s Close to Home is a short guide to observing all the miracles of nature around us. But I preferred Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots, which was much more useful for my walks that take me into places where concrete highways bump up right next to wetlands that are teeming with wildlife.

The Hole is a novella about a young woman whose husband takes a job in a strange new town. Left to her own devices, she wanders the unfamiliar territory and meets fantastical animals and falls into a hole that seems to be designed just for her. If you want the bizarre touches of Haruki Murakami without all the other Murakami hangups, this one might work for you.

Forgotten All-Star is a biography of a comic book writer named Gardner Fox, who created a lot of the trappings that we still see in superhero comics today. I don’t know if a general audience would appreciate this, but as someone who reads and makes comics I really enjoyed following the arc of Fox’s career, from the golden age of comics on through the silver age and even into the bronze age as well.

I read two independent comics that offer commentary on superhero comics while still being their own thing. The Pedestrian is a comic book about a hero whose power is being a pedestrian—their arch-nemesis is a don’t walk sign. The story involves secret cults and mysterious existential threats and it all feels kind of like Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol, which is very much a compliment. I also really enjoyed Santos Sisters, which aesthetically looks like an Archie Comic, but which thematically feels more like the superhero comics that Jaime Hernandez wrote into Love and Rockets—it’s about two sisters who have adventures with an ever-enlarging cast of characters, until the whole thing becomes a sort of biome allowing the creators to tell any kind of story that they want to tell. I could read the Santos Sisters stories forever—it’s just the kind of cheery, imaginative, fun, and mysterious comic that appeals to me on a very deep level.

A Pair of Recommendations

I wanted to recommend a couple of non-book things that I’ve really been enjoying lately. 

The first is the movie Sinners, which you’ve probably heard of—it’s Ryan Coogler’s first film based on original material. The less you know about the movie going in, the better off you’ll be. But I do want to say that if you haven’t gone to see it because you don’t like horror movies, I urge you to give it a try. Sinners doesn’t really feel like a horror film except in a 20-minute passage in the center of the movie. It’s not interested in horrifying audiences, or scaring the daylights out of you. Instead it’s a movie about music and community and the long pasts we all have trailing behind us. It’s the biggest and best movie spectacle I’ve seen in theaters since probably the Barbie movie. I left fully entertained, and I spent the next two weeks thinking deeply about it. I honestly don’t know what else you could ask of a movie, and I recommend you see it while it’s still in theaters.

Musically, I’ve fallen for a new electro-pop album by a performer who goes by the name Daughter of Swords. The album is called Alex, and Daughter of Swords described it as “a happy-sounding record about the death of humanity on planet Earth.” 

That’s right in my sweet spot—a catchy verse-chorus-verse structure, combined with lyrics like “I feel strange/But it’s just a natural reaction/to a world coming apart at the seams.” If you like The Blow or any of the musicians who came up in Olympia on the K Records label, you might find Daughter of Swords to be up your alley. 

I think that’s all for this month. This one feels more discombobulated than usual. Maybe I’ll be more coherent next month! It’s nice to have goals.

Take care,
Paul

P.S. I shared a picture of Wally, so here’s a picture of Obie being a happy older distinguished gentleman after a sunbath.

“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 director of global public policy at Facebook, from promoting the memoir.” 

Facebook didn’t stop at suing the memoirist into silence. Their PR firm also harassed Washington Post book critic Ron Charles in an unprecedented pressure campaign which Charles said he had never encountered in his nearly three decades at the Post. 

God knows what else Facebook is doing to try to get you to not read Careless People, Wynn-Williams’s memoir. Mark Zuckerberg clearly doesn’t want you to read it, and we all have heard stories about what Mark Zuckerberg will do to get what he wants: According to some accounts, he’ll buy a competitor outright, he’ll steal an idea for a website, and he’ll even allow bad actors to throw elections. 

I don’t know about you, but when a billionaire doesn’t want me to read a book, I am overpowered by an urge to read the damn book. So I bought Careless People, and I read it. Regardless of how you may feel about the subject matter of the book, I urge you to do the same. When Facebook expends resources to silence an author, it’s up to the book-loving public to make sure that book gets in front of as many people as possible. (And I understand if you don’t have the money to buy Careless People—times are tough and the president is driving the economy into a ditch—but you can and still should request it from your local library.)

For what it’s worth, I really enjoyed Careless People. It’s Wynn-Williams’ account of how she basically tricked Facebook into hiring her as a foreign policy advisor, back when Facebook was just small enough that it didn’t realize it needed a foreign policy advisor. I swallowed the book in two big gulps. Wynn-Williams sprinkles enough breadcrumbs of gossip and lurid details in every chapter to keep a reader happily following along to the very end.

Basically, here’s the takeaway: Think of the dumbest boss you’ve ever had—the absolutely most thoughtless, casually cruel person you’ve ever met on the job. Now multiply that idiocy by a thousand, and you’re still not close to approaching the cluelessness of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, and the damage that those two do on a micro and macro scale over the course of this book. 

For instance, Zuckerberg never questions why he always wins every board game he plays with his employees on long flights on his private jet—he just assumes he’s better at everything than everyone else. It never seems to occur to him that he’s surrounded by sycophants and terrified underlings. Sandberg performs feminism in public while gleefully stomping on women who fail to cater to her smallest whim. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so goddamned terrifying.

Let’s be clear: This isn’t some smarmy tell-all. But it is cleverly disguised as a smarmy tell-all. Wynn-Williams knows that people want to read the lurid details of what it’s like to be in the Facebook inner circle, and she knows how to utilize those details to maximum narrative effect. 

But what she really wants to do, as someone who cares deeply about the health of international relations, is send up a warning flare that Facebook is committing unbelievable harms in nations around the world—particularly developing nations. Once you’ve consumed all the salacious details, at the end of the book Wynn-Williams makes a clear-headed case that Facebook desperately needs to be regulated around the world, because these are not people you want to trust with your data. 

They’re more than careless people; they have enough power that their lack of caution and high self-regard have transformed them into monsters. People have died because of their actions, and more will die unless someone takes a stand. Wynn-Williams deserves our respect for taking this principled stand, and this is a book that deserves to be read by everyone.

I’ve Been Writing

Last month, I wrote about Hex Enduction Records and Books, a tiny bookstore in the corner of a small record store on Lake City Way that punches way above its weight. If you miss the small cultural hubs that used to be in every neighborhood of Seattle that carried zines, records, and counterculture literature, you’ll be pleased to discover that their spirit is alive and well at Hex Enduction. 

I also highlighted some of the best new paperbacks to be released in March. 

And on the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I interviewed Lainey Newman, the co-author of a book titled Rust Belt Union Blues, which argues that the decline of unions is more than just an economic and policy failure. She says that unions have declined in part because they’ve stopped filling the social needs of members. Union halls used to be places where people would gather to play pool with neighbors and host weddings and big birthday parties. Unions used to march in parades and participate in communities. As that civic participation declined, Newman argues, so did union membership. 

I’ve Been Reading

Crumble is a graphic novel for young readers about a young girl in a family of bakers who imbue their baked goods with emotions that other people can feel. When there’s a death in the family, the grief in her baked goods start to emotionally harm other people. I liked this one a lot. The artist, Andrea Bell, is a new favorite of mine. She also illustrated a graphic novel for young readers about journalism called The Leak that I really enjoyed.

Obviously we’re in a period of reinvestigating Huckleberry Finn right now. In the flood of tributes and homages and critical reassessments, I don’t want you to miss the graphic novel Big Jim and the White Boy, which is written by David F. Walker and drawn by Marcus Kwame Anderson. It spins together multiple narratives to look at Huckleberry Finn from many different angles, including a framing story in which an elderly Jim and Huck argue over the details of the Mark Twain novel. I know Percival Everett kind of has the last word in this particular subgenre right now with his blockbuster novel James, but I don’t want this beautiful comic to get lost in the flood of press attention that book has (rightfully!) gotten.

When I was at Hex Enduction Records and Books, I picked up a staff recommendation called Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adele Rosenfeld, a novel about a Deaf woman who is struggling with the question of whether to get cochlear implants. There have been a few interesting films, TV shows, and comics that have used their particular qualities to convey the world without sound—silent episodes, comics pages with no word balloons, that kind of thing—but I think this book does a good job of that by just putting us inside the Deaf woman’s head and letting her explain her experiences directly. 

Chelsea Cain’s Heartsick is a thriller about using a serial killer to catch another serial killer that is not going to join the pantheon of great serial killer fiction, but I enjoyed it just the same.

This month, NYRB released another Tove Jansson novel that had not previously been available in America. Sun City is by no means my favorite of hers—that’s still The Summer Book, which I re-read every summer—but I’m glad that I read it. It’s a novel about a retirement community in Florida and a pair of young burned out hippies who live in the orbit of those older folks. I especially loved Chapter 6, in which a woman writes a letter to her son that actually tells the truth, for once in her life. It’s a beautiful little standalone story that evokes the bittersweet perfection of Jansson’s best work.

The novelist Geoff Nicholson died last month. I went through a period in the early 2000s when I read pretty much everything he wrote. I guess you’d call him a midlist author—he never broke big, but he had a small and reliable audience. One of his obituaries mentioned he wrote a nonfiction book called The Lost Art of Walking that I had never read, and so I had to track it down. It’s a slight non-fiction book of the kind that was published frequently in the late 90s and early 2000s—one chapter is pretty much Nicholson just listing songs that mention walking, which feels like a very before-the-internet kind of thing to do—but I was happy to be surrounded by his voice one more time, and to learn that he and I shared a love of long hikes in non-traditional hiking places.

Stuff Is Messed Up

It’s bad. It’s really bad. Students being pulled off the streets by masked thugs for cosigning an op-ed, experts in the history of fascism fleeing the country, an economy sliding into bad territory. 

But I’ve seen some signs of life. Trump won’t let Elise Stefanik goto the United Nations because he’s worried Democrats would win in a Republican stronghold district, for instance. Wisconsin leaders are finally pushing back against Elon Musk’s blatantly illegal vote-buying scheme. And of course, the protests against Musk’s businesses are still going strong.

I don’t want to make any predictions, but it does seem as though Trump is already at a point where he’s starting to take on water—his polling on the economy is below 50% for the first time ever, for instance. If the economy continues to slide, his popularity is likely to tank along with it.

In the meantime, the question in my mind is this: How many people are going to just roll over and let Trump have what he wants? Those executive orders he’s signing that strip workers of union power and end voting by mail have no legal standing. But how much will states and the courts let him get away with, and how often will they push back? 

In the end, I think the most important factor is not whether Trump takes control over the United States—it’s whether our institutions let him take control. If more people refuse to comply, that becomes a positive feedback loop and all of a sudden Trump looks a lot more fallible. Once people start to see a would-be demagogue as a human with human weaknesses, it’s almost impossible for them to reclaim an air of invincibility. 

That should be the goal of everyone who stands against the fascists: You don’t have to beat them, you just have to reveal their humanity. That’s the way to win.

Take care,
Paul

Hi!

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 trillions of dollars from the paychecks of working Americans.

Trillion Dollar Heist tells the story of Marta, a janitor who steps in to stop a CEO from siphoning billions of dollars away from workers and into the coffers of the wealthy shareholder class. Along the way, Marta explains how the richest people in the world have sucked over $70 trillion from the pockets of the American middle class using a method that was completely illegal until the 1980s. You can read it for free on Bindings, a super-cool new site that helps comics creators share their work with readers with a slick interface. 

The comic is drawn by my old pal Alan Robinson (who worked with me on my first comic, Planet of the Nerds,) edited by the great Sarah Star Litt, colored by Pippa Bowland, who also did marvelous work coloring Peter Krause’s art in our short comic about cryptids in the Washington woods last year, and lettered and copyedited by Andworld Design. It’s a beautiful package that is, again, completely free to read. And if you want to download it in PDF form and share it that way, I’ve also got you covered. 

I’ve never written a comic about real-world issues before, and so this book was a fun challenge. I’m excited to make some more comics about economic issues in conjunction with my other comics work, and I hope if you like Trillion Dollar Heist, you’ll share it far and wide.

I’ve Been Writing 

It was a lot of fun interviewing Rick Steves and learning all about his successful travel business, which is based up in Edmonds, Washington. Steves is a dynamo, and we talked about topics ranging from the colonialism of travel to his plans for the future of the company that bears his name. 

I’ve been going to comic book stores my whole life, but even I have to admit that the experience of shopping in them isn’t great for people who just want to browse: They’re often crowded and hard to navigate. So for the Seattle Times I wrote about Phantom Zone Comics, a comics shop in Lynnwood that is owned by a man with lots of experience at clothing retailers like Eddie Bauer. He’s brought that experience to comics retail, and the result is a brightly lit, nicely spaced-out comic shop that is a true pleasure to browse. 

I’ve Been Reading

In the middle of this month, I was hit hard by what I suspect is the flu. Even though I got my flu shot in the fall, it was still kind of a doozy. For more than a week, I didn’t have the mental capacity to read or listen to a sustained narrative, so a few poetry books entered the rotation. 

I really enjoyed Caleb Femi’s The Wickedest, a book that documents one wild night out at the clubs—a celebration of youth and hedonism and dancing. Eve Ewing’s book Electric Arches features a few poems that start out typewritten and then transform into the author’s handwriting—a neat trick that I’d never seen before, and which works perfectly in book form.  Watchmen author Alan Moore wrote a book-length poem about the history of same-sex love called The Mirror of Love that was illustrated by José Villarrubia. It was my least favorite of the three, but yet again I’m in awe of Moore’s wide-ranging talents. 

And then I read three books by young novelists. Maggie Su’s Blob: A Love Story is about a woman who finds a mysterious blob in an alley and trains it to become her boyfriend. It’s a fun but slight book—the kind of novel that keeps you locked in but quickly fades away once you put it down. 

I was similarly half-engaged with Virginia Felto’s Victorian Psycho, a novel about a woman who goes on a killing spree in Victorian times. I’m far from a Bret Easton Ellis fan, but I do think if your novel’s title evokes American Psycho you’d better follow through with some satire or sharp comedy or something interesting. That said, I was not at all surprised to hear that this one is already being developed for a film starring Margaret Qualley, and I could see this being a case of the movie improving on the book. 

Sara Siligar’s Vantage Point focuses on a vaguely Kennedy-esque wealthy family that lives in Maine. They’re confronted with a series of jarring personal attacks involving embarrassing videos and negative press attention, and everything comes undone in dramatic fashion. I do want to warn anyone thinking about reading this one that a character in the book is wrestling with disordered eating, and the passages describing her emotions and actions would definitely be triggering for people in the wrong headspace.

In My Ears

Last month, I wrote about moving from Spotify to Apple Music and I lamented the fact that while I was enjoying Apple Music, it wasn’t as great at recommendations as Spotify used to be. Well, a reader of this email who works for Apple reached out and directed me to this Reddit thread that explains all the different ways that you can find similar but fresh music. And as I’ve been playing with Apple Music in the month since, I’ve found some other neat discovery tools, including a handy pull-up menu that helps you find other songs to add to your queue. After a month of playing around with it, I think I can say that Apple Music is at least as good at recommending new songs as Spotify was back in its heyday, and I’m starting to think it might even be better at recommendation than Spotify ever was. 

And Finally…the Politics

I don’t know if I have too much to add to the daily chaos of politics this month. I’m watching and waiting to see how much damage Trump’s appointees are doing, and what I’ve seen so far has been exactly as bad as I was worried it would be. And as far as foreign affairs go, the administration has successfully accomplished a heel turn, completely reversing our standing in the international community. It would be almost impressive how quickly we allied ourselves with our former enemies and alienated our allies, if the implications weren’t so scary.

One thing I’m encouraging myself to do is to make a mental list of people and organizations who have been unnecessarily complicit with the Trump administration: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Target, Tik Tok, etc. I’d encourage you to do the same. And then the most important step is to never forget that these people happily rolled over for Trump. No matter what: Don’t forgive them, and don’t forget, and always speak loudly and repeatedly about what they did. Trump is not going to be in power forever, but the cowards who aided and abetted him should be shamed and shunned and ostracized long after he’s gone. This is the time to cultivate grudges.

I do think the Trump administration is about to hit some brick walls. People are losing jobs all over America, and even Fox News pundits are basically begging Trump to reverse job cuts that affected their friends. Politics hits differently when it stops being about scoring outrage points on social media and starts actually affecting people in your lives. 

But the one wild card in the Trump chaos for me is Elon Musk. Musk is already doing an incalculable amount of damage to the federal government, of course. But the most worrisome part of all this is that he’s not an elected official and he has a seemingly bottomless reserve of resources that he can use to ensure that he has access to the levers of power for decades to come. If Musk plays his cards right, he could basically be a major player on every single Republican ticket for the next twenty or thirty years, ensuring that we’re never fully rid of him.

Luckily, Elon Musk is an idiot and a narcissist who needs to be at the center of everyone’s attention all the time, and people are getting sick of him. It’s very possible that he could wind up becoming the most unpopular man in America over the next year or so. But the problem is that the world’s richest man ultimately doesn’t have to care that much about what the hoi polloi thinks of him.

That’s why I think #teslatakedown, the rolling protests of Tesla dealerships, is such a great idea. Musk’s immense fortune is still largely anchored by Tesla’s outsized stock valuation, and if we can successfully turn Tesla into a toxic brand that people are embarrassed to be affiliated with, Musk will still be incredibly wealthy but he will no longer be richest-man-in-the-world wealthy. Losing that title would be a catastrophic blow to his power and to his self-image. 

I genuinely think speaking out against Musk and his products is one of the most important pieces of political action that we can take as individuals right now. So if you are the kind of person who goes to protests, maybe you should participate in one of the many Tesla protests happening around greater Seattle tomorrow:

And if you’re not comfortable attending protests, think about how you can help transform Tesla and Starlink and SpaceX and Musk into toxic brands. Maybe you can make t-shirts or stickers. Maybe you can share an original song or a video to social media. Maybe you have friends in your life you can talk to about shunning all things Musk. Every little bit of social action helps. He’s currently the single biggest threat to our democracy, and we all can do our part to help make it absolutely embarrassing for anyone to have their name identified with him. 

In order to save democracy, let’s all give that goddamned Nazi the biggest metaphorical atomic wedgie the world has ever seen. 

That’s all for this month. The next time you receive this newsletter, the days will be longer and the weather will be nicer. That’s something to look forward to.
—Paul

The new administration has been as shitty and chaotic and brutal as I expected, and Elon Musk actually managed to sink lower than my already-basement-level expectations by outing himself as a Nazi. Religious leaders are posting about “the sin of empathy” and calling on people to “properly hate” other religious leaders who ask Trump to lead with mercy. All of this is bad, but it’s not shocking.

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

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

Things are not great, is what I mean.

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve Been Writing

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

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

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

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

I’ve Been Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Want in a Music Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello! 

Once again, I’m writing this newsletter a little earlier in the month in order to take a couple of weeks off from writing. So if something terrible has happened, or some news has broken that seems like the kind of thing that I might ordinarily comment on, you can rest assured I’m not ignoring it—I’m just writing this from the past. I generally spend the last newsletter of the year writing about some of my favorite art of the year. And in that respect, it’s honestly been kind of a tough year. 

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

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

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

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

I’ve Been Writing

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

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

I’ve Been Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus Endeth This Curséd Year

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

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

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

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

Happy holidays,
Paul

Hi!

Lots of you wrote back in response to the special newsletter I sent out right after the election. I read all of the emails and I tried to get back to everyone but there were a lot of emails in a short time, so I apologize if I missed you. Thank you for being such a thoughtful and engaged group of people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve Been Writing

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

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

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

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

I’ve Been Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Being Wicked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, take care of yourself.

Paul

Hi!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks again,

Paul