Hi!

As I threatened in the last email, I’ve turned my website into something more like an old-fashioned blog. At this point, it’s mostly a public media journal, though that could change as it goes. I’m doing this because I’ve missed writing about culture stuff. Writing has always been my way of processing the world, and I feel as though too much of my experience has been unprocessed lately.

As a result, this newsletter might shift in format. I want to keep including all the writing I’ve done and all the books I’ve read here, because that’s kind of the point of this newsletter. But what that looks like might change over time.

Anyway, here we go:

I’ve Been Writing

I’ve been to a lot of movies in theaters lately, like some sort of old-fashioned pervert. I wrote about The Furious, which is a martial-arts movie in theaters right now. I also wrote about Obesssion, though most of what I wrote was about the cultural obsession around the movie Obsession. And I thought Spielberg’s latest movie, Disclosure Day, was kind of a dud.

On the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Nick and I interviewed Kathryn Anne Edwards, who is the economist behind the excellent Optimist Economy podcast, about artificial intelligence and the future of jobs. And last week, we re-ran a conversation Nick and I had with Professor Robert Reich about regulations. The episode just so happened to come out the day before Professor Reich’s 80th birthday. He’s become a real force for good in the world, and I hope he had a great birthday.

I’ve Been Reading

The thing that drew me to M. Darusha Wehm’s novel The Department of What It (Really) Means to Be Human was the promise on the dust jacket that the book was “a thoughtful, optimistic sci-fi novel set in a near-future Aotearoa New Zealand where an investigator navigates a newly post-capitalist world in their search for a missing artist.”

It’s really that simple: All you have to do to get me to read your sci-fi novel is set it in a future that doesn’t suck. And I loved living in the world of this novel—Wehm has clearly thought about what a climate-friendly, post-capitalist society might look like, and they establish a very lived-in world for the characters to move around in. Even better, none of the ideas in the book are presented as outrageous or groundbreaking. The future just is the way it is. The casual, no-big-deal air around the setting is luxurious, like slipping into a warm bath. Unfortunately, the central mystery of the book didn’t really pull me through the story. Every time something happened to advance the plot, I found myself wanting to squint at something Wehm gestured toward in the background, instead. I’m glad I read it, but it’s very much a journey-not-the-destination kind of reading experience—and oh, what a journey! I wish I could live inside this novel.

I was born in 1976, so I obviously don’t recall America’s big bicentennial birthday bash. But the celebration of America’s 200th birthday was a big enough cultural event that artifacts from the bicentennial celebration were kicking around throughout my youth. I’d occasionally encounter the special 200th birthday quarters, which featured a minuteman playing a drum on the back, for instance. Jack Kirby wrote and drew a giant Captain America comic for the bicentennial that was one of my favorite comics growing up. And so on and so forth.

When I was a kid, I did the math and determined that I’d be 50 years old when America celebrated its 250th birthday. Even though I couldn’t fathom being 50 years old at the time, I recall that I did wonder what America’s quarter-millennium celebrations might be like. I was envisioning a future full of robots and American flags on Mars and all the other sci-fi trappings we were promised back then.

And now that I’m 50 and America’s 250th birthday is here, I imagine trying to explain to my four-year-old self that the celebration is shaping up to be a dud. The president, you see, is the worst person in the country, and he’s ancient and clearly losing his mind and he’s been making everything in the world about him for the last decade or so. The economy is so bad and America has been embarrassed so solidly on the global stage that even Republicans don’t seem to be in a mood to go full star-spangled bananas right now.

All that is to say that the one and only thing I’ve done to acknowledge America’s big 2-5-0 is read Meg Elison’s brand-new sci-fi novel, Foundling Fathers. It’s a story about teenaged clones of America’s Founding Fathers figuring out that they’re not in the 18th century anymore.

The book has a stellar first line:

“It took Benjamin Franklin twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds to discover there was pornography on the internet.”

That pretty much sets the tone: The clones of Adams and Washington and all the rest maintain their essential character traits, and they slowly begin to realize that the world around them isn’t as it seems. I don’t want to spoil anything, so that’s all the plot you’ll get out of me.

Foundling Fathers is a short and funny book, and it doesn’t exhaustively explore its concept. Instead, it makes a point and then ends well before it wears out its welcome. It’s thoughtful enough and well-researched enough that it inspired me to consider the men who started the American experiment and what they might think of where we are now.

I enjoyed it a great deal, and now I’m officially done thinking about America’s 250th birthday—except to hope that things might be better for kids born this year when, or if, the 300th birthday rolls around.

I’ll admit it: I was suckered into reading Simon Paré-Poupart’s memoir about life as a garbage man, Trash!, because Dwight Garner compared the book to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. I love well-written books about workers who provide services that most people don’t ever think about.

But Trash! is bad. It’s a macho, cliched, annoying (but mercifully short) book written by an incurious know-it-all. I don’t know what Dwight Garner was thinking when he reviewed this book, but I can tell you that if you do want to read a great tell-all about life on a garbage truck, you should skip Trash! and read Derf Backderf’s excellent graphic memoir Trashed, instead.

I was at a bar with booksellers a couple of months ago when someone used me as an experiment: “Have you read The Correspondent?” she asked me. I said I hadn’t. She asked the bookseller next to me the same question and she quickly and enthusiastically replied that she had.

Our interrogator turned to her friend as though she had just settled a bet. “You see?” she huffed. “Every woman in this room has read The Correspondent, and every man in the room hasn’t even heard of it.”

Reader, I took that personally. That night, I fired up my Libby app and queued up the audiobook version of The Correspondent. A couple months later, it finally arrived in my inbox and then I spent two days squeezing in as much listening time as is humanly possible.

Virginia Evans’s runaway bestseller of an epistolary novel is literary fiction in the style of Richard Russo and Ann Patchett, big-hearted and broad and accessible. It tells the story of Sybil Van Antwerp, a fiercely independent elderly woman who maintains correspondence with a number of people while also writing too-friendly letters to authors of books she admires. It’s got a lot to say about aging and forgiveness and regrets.

If you prefer your literary fiction to be ambiguous and subtle, this isn’t for you. This is a book of BIG SWINGS, the kind of on-the-nose sweeping storytelling that used to reliably win the Pulitzer Prize in the early 2000s. I’m a sucker for that kind of storytelling, especially in the summer, and so it spoke right to me—despite its somewhat fat-fingered handling of race and gender and class. (If your main character is a rich old straight white lady and you spend most of the book inside her perspective, you’re not gonna get the most enlightened observations about the world.)

And I definitely want to recommend the audiobook, if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s read by a full cast, and the collage of those voices working together to fill out Sybil’s life lends a nice resonance to the epistolary format. I can’t recommend this enough if you’re the sort of person who likes to bring a populist literary novel with you on vacation—especially if you’re one of the millions of men who, according to at least one Seattle bookseller, has never heard of the damn book.

Happy 4th or Whatever

At the time that I’m writing this, it seems that the Trump administration’s big attempt to celebrate America’s 250th birthday has been a huge bust. Unsurprisingly, news has broken that several different government organizations, including the Smithsonian, had long been working on plans for 250th celebrations that would have included lots of cool things like free big-name concerts on the Washington Mall and a festival of festivals that would allow Americans to visit dozens of America’s festivals all at once. But as soon as Trump got into office, he pulled the plug on those festivals and started from scratch with his own thing.

Politically, this makes no sense. Why wouldn’t Trump just take the credit for all the hard work and planning that went into the festivals that were already set up to happen?

But thinking about it politically is a mistake. The truth is that every Trump administration action makes sense when you think about it as a white supremacist organization. Think of the southern communities that shut down public pools rather than desegregate them. White racists would rather make their own lives much more miserable than share their joy with everyone.

That’s what’s happening here. Time and time again, we’ve watched Trump and his staff choose complete failure and abject humiliation over shared success. That’s not a mistake. It’s literally how they operate. And it’s something that their opponents have got to get better at leveraging against them.

And as a counterexample: Sports don’t interest me at all, but it’s been a blast watching the World Cup happen here in Seattle. It’s been a raucous, peaceful celebration of civic spaces and public transportation and shared joy. We should be planning right now to make sure that civic spirit of togetherness and excitement continues after the World Cup is gone. Because that’s how we win: By showing the world that togetherness and diversity and common civic spirit isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s way more fun than whatever miserable bullshit the Nazis in the White House are selling.

Take care,

Paul