What I read on my summer vacation (2020 edition)

Summer 2020 was the opposite of what we’ve been told a summer should be: it wasn’t carefree, it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t restful or rejuvenating or rehabilitating. From the pandemic to the clamoring hoards of aggrieved white supremacists in our streets to the wildfire smoke that’s clotting the air over the Northwest as I write […]

In an economic crisis, Seattle gets a new chain of indie bookstores

At the end of May, Ada’s Technical Books co-founder Danielle Hulton made a remarkable announcement: Ada’s would be taking over operations of local minichain Fuel Coffee. By any metric, buying three neighborhood coffee shops in the middle of a global pandemic and economic collapse is a bold move. Even more surprising, though, was Hulton’s announcement that the […]

Zadie Smith Cancels the Apocalypse

Is it sacrilege to admit that I prefer Zadie Smith’s essays to her fiction? If you asked me to identify Smith’s most admirable qualities, the clear and precise thinking of her non-fiction work would be at the top of the list. Given her trademark thoughtfulness, it shouldn’t have surprised me that Intimations, the short book […]

Outsider arts hub Push/Pull is building community online

The coronavirus pandemic has made it almost impossible to operate the arts venues where people tend to gather and linger: galleries, arts education spaces and bookstores were all closed for months. For Ballard’s Push/Pull — a combination of outsider art gallery, small-press bookstore and education space — COVID-19 could hardly have been more devastating. Director Maxx Follis-Goodkind says 2020 […]

A Face in the Crowd

A couple times an hour, a tiny swatch of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting flashes across my Twitter feed, courtesy of an automated account called @Bruegelbot. Bruegel’s paintings—and here we’ll just refer to him as “Bruegel,” setting aside the other painters with the same surname—are notoriously busy, packed with tiny figures going about their […]

The “subversive” idea that breaks economics: What if people are largely decent?

Even if you don’t know Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s name, you’ve likely heard him speak. In January of last year, you probably saw a viral video on social media of Bregman speaking truth to power in front of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. […]

Bailey/Coy’s Legacy: Why We Need LGBTQ+ Literary Spaces

In the late 1970s and very early 1980s, Capitol Hill was one of the few neighborhoods in the country where LGBTQ+ people could largely live out of the closet. To the young people moving to Seattle from more regressive parts of the country, the area around Broadway — with its openly queer arts organizations and […]

How Seattle book workers have adapted to coronavirus shutdowns

Bookish people, the stereotype goes, are introverts who prefer to stay home. So you’d think the recent social distancing measures would be a bibliophile’s dream: An excuse to read alone for weeks on end. That’s not the case for Queen Anne Book Company bookseller Tegan Tigani, who has been working from home since March 25. During a […]

Why the Seattle Review of Books Is Going on Hiatus, and What’s Next for Me

Over at the Seattle Review of Books, co-founder Martin McClellan and I just announced that the site is going on indefinite hiatus. This was by no means an easy decision. I’m carrying a deep sense of sadness piled on top of all this other coronavirus weirdness, and I feel in many ways even more unrooted […]

Closed by coronavirus, this Wallingford poetry bookstore found a way to open online

It’s a tiny storefront — just 500 square feet — but Wallingford bookstore Open Books has always been an especially inviting space. Its owner, Billie Swift, has watched people fall in love with the shop again and again. “We are across the street from a physical therapy center,” Swift explains, and patients who are early […]