Against Washington
Hi!
Lots of states have been updating their flags recently. Some of them are eliminating blatant racist iconography—shout out to Mississippi for going from the most hateful state flag to the prettiest—but lots of others are just moving away from the boring old “seal featuring a white guy or two on a field of a single color” formula. (Minnesota is a good example of the latter.)
People online have recently been calling for my home of Washington state to change its flag, and I could not agree more. Just on aesthetic grounds, we deserve a better flag than a boring pointillist portrait of George Washington on an ugly seal in the middle of a bland field of green.
But I want to go a step further than the folks on the internet: I think when we change Washington state’s flag, we should also change the state’s name.
Washington state was named to honor George Washington, a man whose name is already on a very large iconic monument in the seat of our nation’s power, which is also, confusingly, named after him. His face is on our flag, as I mentioned, and it is also on the roughly 11 billion one-dollar bills and hundreds of billions of quarters currently in circulation. All of which is to say that we as a nation are not in danger of forgetting about poor old George Washington anytime soon.
George Washington never visited the area that would become Washington state, and the people who decided to name the state after George Washington never visited here either. They changed the name from Columbia, for fear that people would confuse it with the District of Columbia. Now, people frequently confuse Washington state with…Washington DC. There is literally no good reason to call this land Washington.
So what should we call it? Even though I like the sound of the word, we don’t necessarily have to change the state’s name back to Columbia. We could call it Tahoma or another local indigenous name. We could name it Cascade or Cascadia after the bioregion, or Evergreen after our state’s nickname. The important thing is that it’s time for us to move on from Washington. It’s a name that looks back in history, while we deserve a name that celebrates the amazing people and beautiful land that make this state such a wonderful place to live.
I’ve been writing
First, I wrote about all the great paperback releases of August.
And second, I wrote about Kingston’s Saltwater Bookshop—a great independent bookstore that shares space with a delicious bakery. You might think that Kingston seems too far away from Seattle for a day trip, but there’s a delightful fast ferry that zips from downtown to Kingston in about a half an hour.
I also talked about some of the economics books that attracted my eye this summer on a special summer reading list episode of the Pitchfork Economics podcast.
I’ve been reading
Let’s open with an admission: I’ve been kind of awash in the politics this month, scrolling nonstop and watching almost every minute of the DNC, and so I’ve read far fewer books than usual.
I started re-reading Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower on July 20th, 2024—the day that the the narrative begins in the book. Reading the book on the day that the protagonist begins writing the book was a unique thrill, and given that the story is told in diary entries that stretch out beyond 2025 I’m honestly surprised the publisher didn’t offer a service in which chapters of the book are emailed to readers in “real time.” Though I’m very burned out on dystopian fiction, it’s astonishing how much of our present world Butler got correct.
I’m addicted to reading books about the craft of writing. I’ve read dozens, if not a couple hundred, of these kinds of books. Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words is a book that urges would-be-writers to sit down and slam out 1000 words per day to get into the habit of writing, but it also includes a number of short essays by writers about the craft of writing, so it kind of serves as a compendium of how-to-write books. For me, it was kind of a generic, repetitive reading experience since I’m well-versed in the form. But if an aspiring writer told me that they wanted to read only one how-to-write book, this might be the one that I suggest because it offers so many different flavors of writing lessons.
Kent State, Derf Backderf’s non-fiction graphic novel (man, we have to make a better term for these) is a truly impressive comic. It’s an account of the shooting of Vietnam War protestors that weaves many different viewpoints and experiences into a single narrative. The shooting was a catastrophic failure that required many different procedures, rules, and social norms to fail all at once, and that failure changed the country forever. My one complaint about the book is that Backderf reported on what happened to the major players in a single text page at the end of the book, rather than drawing their fates in comic form. I’m sure he was running up against deadlines and constraints of the medium—it’s hard to span several years in a single page of comics—but the comic does such excellent work documenting what happened before and during the shooting that the “after” part feels a little like an afterthought.
Taha Ebrahhimi’s Street Trees of Seattle has been all the rage in local bookstores this summer, and it’s always nice to see books about being a pedestrian in Seattle top the local bestseller charts. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t as compelling for me as, say, Seattle Walk Report—but that’s a personal failing. I’m just not as interested in trees as I am the human-made landmarks that Susanna Ryan writes about in her walking guides. But this is still a must-have for any Seattle pedestrian’s personal library.
I enjoyed Todd May’s short philosophical exploration of whether the human race is a net good in the universe, Should We Go Extinct? Like most philosophical books I found it to be a little bit silly—May keeps returning to the idea that the human race can be said to be worthwhile if the “total number of units of happiness” that we produce is higher than the misery we cause, which is just quantifying something that is completely unquantifiable. But I enjoyed it as an extended thought experiment, and I also appreciated the book’s brevity.
My friend (and newsletter reader) Dave recommended the audio version of Sam Anderson’s civic history of Oklahoma City, Boom Town, and this is exactly the kind of book that I love to read on audio: The story of a place told in endearing anecdotes that capture the eccentricities, big personalities, and outright crimes that make a city so interesting. I visited Oklahoma City once when I was younger, and I found it to be positively delightful—a slow-moving city with a lot of civic pride. Anderson’s take on the city feels similar. There are some writerly flourishes that I think don’t necessarily work—the passage that suggests Timothy McVeigh’s frustrating experience as a sports fan is a direct cause of the Federal Building bombing felt like it was reaching way too hard—but this is a great account of an underrated American city, and I wish more writers would tackle this kind of big-hearted, open-minded civic history.
More President Talk
In last month’s issue, I said two things that turned out to be surprisingly controversial with readers. I wanted to address those both here.
First, several of you wrote in to ask why Entertainment Weekly was my favorite magazine growing up. To do that, I think you have to put the magazine in context. EW was really the first magazine to look at the business of entertainment as a business. It didn’t have the salacious gossip of The Enquirer or the sugary-sweet personal-interest profiles that People magazine offered of celebrities. Instead, it provided an overview of the big movies, TV shows, books, and music that were being released that week, and the critics approached every piece of art on its own terms.
EW wasn’t a fawning fan publication, but it did take popular culture seriously. It wasn’t perfect, but the magazine’s collective voice resembled how I approach pop culture: With a sense of humor and irreverence, but also an eagerness to get swept up in the good stuff. I read it cover-to-cover for many years, and doing so made me feel conversant in just about every aspect of American pop culture. Of course, now the culture is too broad and too fractured to accomplish that in a single weekly magazine, but from the 1990s through, say, 2012, EW did a pretty good job of hitting the highlights.
Second, I was surprised by how many of you wrote in to say you were surprised by the fact that I called Joe Biden the best president in my lifetime. This one might take a little more time to unpack.
Okay, so first I think I have to address the fact that every person who wrote in was surprised that I passed over Barack Obama. And it is true that Obama is the second-best president in my lifetime—and the gap between Obama and Biden is much smaller than the yawning gap between Obama and whoever comes in third (technically, I was around for Carter’s presidency though I don’t remember any of it because I was too busy chewing on the lead paint on the windowsills of my childhood home.) It is true, as reader David wrote, that the Affordable Care Act is a huge achievement that changed the political discussion in America, and I don’t mean to take anything away from Obama.
But Joe Biden, to my mind, is at least the most transformational president we’ve had since LBJ, or maybe even FDR. (To be clear, since my day job is immersed in political economy I place a lot of emphasis on economic achievements. That’s the yardstick I’m primarily measuring with.)
I don’t think you can underestimate the transformative power of the Green New Deal passed under the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Act. We haven’t seen all the benefits of these three pieces of legislation yet, but it has drastically sped up our transition to green energy and the fight against climate change, returned manufacturing jobs to parts of the country that were decimated by NAFTA and other free trade agreements, and fixed a lot of regional problems like lead pipes and inequitable digital access.
I believe income inequality is the single greatest problem facing American right now. And I realize that a lot of the economic benefits of the Biden Administration have been temporarily dulled by the global inflation crisis caused by pandemic-era broken supply chains, but the fact is that Biden has single-handedly reversed a third of the income gap that started under Ronald Reagan. (PDF) He’s the first president in my lifetime to oversee a huge rise in wages at the bottom of the income scale. He’s the first president in my life to doggedly combat monopolies and huge corporate mergers. And he’s the first president in history to walk a picket line.
There’s a lot more, but I worry that this is getting too dense. I can direct you to some resources if you’re still curious after all that, but I suspect most of you have closed this email by now.
Anyway, one final note: Please know that none of this means that I think Biden should have kept running for president. In fact, I think stepping down from his campaign for reelection and unequivocally endorsing Harris is another huge point in his favor. Assuming that Donald Trump doesn’t become president and undo everything he’s accomplished in the last four years, I think history will remember Biden as one of the greatest presidents, and I think he established the foundation for tremendous, transformational developments in the future.
That’s all for this month. I’m working on a special project that I can’t wait to unveil later this fall, and I’ve got a couple of exciting literary events scheduled, too. I’m excited to share them with you in the months ahead.
Hope you’re well,
Paul