Following Politics Is a Good Way to Get Trampled
Hello!
I used to be obsessed with following presidential campaigns. Even in 1996, probably the most boring campaign in my lifetime, I kept close track of Bob Dole’s movements and dutifully listened to the debates. My obsession with presidential politics culminated in 2012, when I attended the Iowa caucuses and both the RNC and the DNC as a member of the press.
But if you were to make a list of all the things Donald Trump has destroyed forever, my obsession with presidential politics would definitely be on there. (Probably somewhere between “spray tans” and “normalized rules of capitalization.”) In the darkness of last month, it occurred to me that I was actively dreading 2024 because it’s a presidential election year.
And now, because I’m already seeing friends and family suffering through the same awful cases of Trump Brain that they barely survived in 2016 and 2020, I thought I’d share my coping mechanism for surviving through election years. Here it is: The secret is that you don’t have to pay attention to this stuff.
Please don’t interpret this as me saying you don’t need to vote, or that politics isn't important. I have a virtually perfect voting record for the last twenty years, and I research every single race on the ballot and make an informed decision every time I vote. I donate to candidates and I try to be civically involved whenever possible. But 95% of presidential politics is bullshit, and the odds are good that you already know exactly how you’re going to vote on the top of the ballot in November.
So if you don't want this to be a lost year of social-media noise and breathless gossip disguised as political commentary, here’s what you do: Don’t click on any news story repeating any of the outrageous things Trump says. If a headline includes the words “polls” or “battleground states,” leave it unread. Skip any legal analysis of Trump’s many trials. Don’t go to Fivethirtyeight or 270towin or any of the other horse-race websites. They’re not saying anything of value, they’re just meant to infect you with anxiety, causing you to share them with peers and infect them with anxiety, too. They're not news stories, they're diseases.
The truth is that there are only a handful of events that could tangibly change the course of the race between now and Election Day. The race would change dramatically if Biden or Trump gets sick or hurt, if Trump goes to jail, if a new pandemic erupts, if terrorists attack, or if other huge and rare events occur. And if any of those events occur, you will learn about them very quickly. You don’t have to keep refreshing social media or checking in with your newspaper of choice multiple times a day in order to keep on top of the news. You’ll know.
What should you do with the minutes, hours, and days that you would otherwise have spent on pointless media rabbit holes? Volunteer for and donate to campaigns you believe in. Make art. Read books. Talk to people about the values and policies that you hold dear, rather than simply waving around shitty Trump memes and jokes you found on Facebook.
In short: be a political person, not a person who follows politics.
I’ve Been Writing
A couple of preview columns have gone out since last I wrote: I wrote about some interesting paperbacks that are being published in January and I also previewed a few of the biggest books that I’m looking forward to this year.
For the Comics Journal, I wrote about my favorite comics reading experiences of 2023.
Goldy and I talked about what could be the three biggest economics stories of 2024 on the Pitchfork Economics podcast.
I’ve published two editions of my Neighborhood Reads bookstore profiles since the last newsletter. First, I wrote about Couth Buzzard’s quest for a new owner to help bring the Greenwood bookstore and community space into the future. And I wrote about a brand-new beautiful used bookstore in Ballard called Ballard Books.
Seattle was in the throes of Boys in the Boat-mania last month when the George Clooney-directed film adaptation of the book about the UW men’s rowing team was released. My contribution to the craze was a piece offering a couple of walking tours you can take around Seattle to follow in the footsteps of history.
I’ve Been Reading
Martha Wells’s Murderbot series is very popular in the sci-fi community, and I finally had time over holiday break to read the first four books in the series. I must admit, these books didn’t really work for me. Based solely on the name, I guess I was hoping for something nasty and darkly fun, like a Talented Mr. Ripley in space. Instead, I got a space adventure series about a robot who is struggling with its own sentience. This is not a failure on Wells’s part—as a reader, I kept comparing the book against what I wanted the book to be, which leaves everyone unhappy in the end.
Dolki Min’s Walking Practice is a novel about an alien disguised as a woman who travels around Earth eating people. It scratched the itch that Murderbot left unscratched—a dark mirror image through which to safely view humanity’s worst impulses.
I really enjoyed Shoji Morimoto’s Rental Person Who Does Nothing, a non-fiction account of a man who decides to rent himself out to strangers, with the caveat that he can’t do anything useful like cook, clean, or build. Instead, lonely people mostly hire the author to witness their lives. Sometimes his jobs have profound results, and sometimes they’re just tedious, but they’re all fascinating, in their own way.
Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind is a memoir about Leland’s lifelong descent into blindness. As a teenager, he’s told that he’ll gradually lose his sight, and he spends the next few decades living out that diagnosis. I learned a lot about blindness and how society treats blind people from this book.
McKay Coppins’ Romney: A Reckoning is a biography of the former presidential candidate and soon-to-be former Senator from Utah. I guess I grudgingly have more respect for Romney after reading this book, but I’m still amazed how someone so smart can be so incredibly stupid. Romney seems to have spent the last eight years in a continual state of astonishment. He’s unsure how his beloved Republican Party could have possibly turned so cruel so quickly, and it never occurs to him the party was always cruel, and that Romney was just the mask of respectability that his party wore in 2012 before Trump ripped the mask off in the next election cycle.
Laura Sims’s novel How Can I Help You is a dark little thriller about a librarian who has a shady past. One thing I appreciated about this book was that it didn’t portray the murderer as a hyperintelligent chess-player who is always five steps ahead of law enforcement. I’m so sick of the brilliant serial killer cliche that has pervaded popular culture since at least Silence of the Lambs.
Keeping It To Myself
Over holiday break, once I packed away my deadlines and had no pressing work to do, I updated all the operating systems of my devices. With the latest iPhone update came a new icon on my screen: Apple’s Journal app. It’s the best new app I’ve used in years.
Though I’ve tried dozens of times, I’ve never been able to keep a journal. I never know exactly who I’m writing to, and I’ve also never been comfortable writing longhand. The Journal app solves the longhand problem and makes the process of writing on a regular basis very easy by reminding me to write, and by offering suggestions for what to write about.
The idea behind Journal is very simple: It nudges you once or twice a day to record your thoughts and feelings. Some of the nudges are typical journal prompts—“What’s the best or most awe-inspiring thing that happened to you recently?”—but others are based on personal activities, like “Write about your recent afternoon walk to Columbia City.” It also urges you to write about photos and videos that you’ve taken, places you’ve been, and old photos from months or years ago pulled from your Photos app.
My entries are usually just a sentence or two long, and they probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me. But I’ve been at it for a month which makes it far and away the most successful attempt I’ve ever made at journaling. It feels good to have a record of my thoughts so that I can track my emotions over time, and I think that if I keep this process up for a year or more, I’ll be able to start to see patterns in my behavior that will probably result in real self-improvement.
One unexpected benefit of the Journal app is that it’s also significantly cut my use of social media. When I think about posting to Bluesky these days, I wonder to myself, “couldn’t I just write this in my Journal instead?” Writing the idea out basically scratches the same itch that posting on Twitter, Tumblr, or Mastodon used to, and I’m not adding to the noise of the world with my meaningless observations.
I still have my Bluesky account and I still post over there. But now when I have a random thought or observation, my first thought isn’t “what will folks at Bluesky think about this?” It’s “what do I think about this?” And, friends, I’m happy to report that keeping my ideas to myself feels a hell of a lot healthier than posting every damn thing that crosses my mind.
With that last sentence in mind, I’ll end this month’s newsletter here. I hope this email finds you well and ready to take on the rest of the year.
Paul