Hi!

Please, please, please vote. If you have voted, thank you. If you’re able to vote and you choose not to vote, please know that I think less of you as a human.

I didn’t send out a mid-month email because I didn’t have anything to say. And I kind of still don’t. I used to cover elections for a living. I would talk endlessly about every facet of every election. I would lose sleep over this stuff.

But ever since Donald Trump entered our political conversation over a decade ago, I find that I have very little desire to enter the discourse in my free time. I’m sick of talking about the man, I’m sick of hearing about the man, and I’m sick of thinking about the man. I hate what he’s done to (or, more accurately, revealed about) the country, and I hate what algorithmic social media has done to the rest of the conversation. There’s no safe place to talk about policies in a fun and constructive way.

People have asked me what I expect from the midterms, and the honest answer is I have no idea. The media, unfortunately, now equates “political coverage” exclusively with “polling chatter,” and I’ve heard so much dumb opining about polls in the last three months that my brain is numb. No scenario seems unlikely.

I still do my part as an American citizen: I keep track of what’s going on, and I try to help where I can. But I don’t have much desire to talk about it, except to remind people to do their civic duty by voting, volunteering where they can, and punching Nazis. I guess when you get down to it, that’s really all you need to know about politics in the year 2026.

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Edge of the Circle Books, Seattle’s self-described “resource for Paganism & the Occult.” I also wrote about 13 new paperbacks released this month.

On my blog, I wrote about my limited interest in horror this Halloween season—for reasons detailed in the opening of this newsletter, I didn’t want to wallow in gore or nihilism this year. With that in mind, I discussed the two best scary stories I experienced this month: the movie It Ends, and the novel Come Knocking.

And I guest-co-hosted on an episode of Pitchfork Economics. We interviewed Angela Hanks of the Century Foundation about an amazing economic report she published that found that for every dollar the American people have earned in raises since 2022, fifty cents has gone to repaying debt. Most frustratingly of all, debt isn’t typically measured by many of the metrics that are supposed to gauge the economic health of American workers.

I’ve Been Reading

Rebecca Novack’s novel Murder Bimbo is a story of assassination told by a very unreliable narrator. I enjoyed the first third of the book, but the premise, in which the assassination is told in three very different ways, got very repetitive.

I haven’t read a true crime book in a while, and Anand Giridharadas’s latest book, Man in the Mirror, only barely qualifies for the genre. It’s really a story that uses a murder—the choking death of a Michael Jackson impersonator by an ex-Marine on a New York City subway car—to talk about some of the most difficult topics in American politics today.

Rachel Cusk’s Life of M is such a wretched reading experience that it retroactively makes me dislike some of Cusk’s other books.

If you haven’t read Harlan Ellison’s story about artificial intelligence, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” there’s a deluxe new edition that publishes the story with contextualizing essays. I encourage you to read the story, but you should skip J. Michael Straczynski’s moronic essay in the collection, in which he asks ChatGPT what it “thinks” of Ellison’s story.

Switzy, Emma Cline’s novel about a wealthy man with dementia trying to make it to Switzerland to commit suicide in a death-with-dignity clinic, is probably the best novel I’ve read this month...

...but Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Partita, was also an engrossing story, and it’s only grown in my estimation as I keep thinking about the book weeks after I finished it.

Dark Days

In case you couldn’t tell from the introduction, this fall has done a number on me. It’s dark out, the news is bad and getting worse, and between all the internet security breaches and AI panic spreading on Wall Street, it feels like something really bad is lurking around the corner. I could really use some good news—like, say, a convincing win for progressive forces on Election Day next week—to cheer me up.

So there you go: One more reason to cast your ballot.

See you next month,
Paul