Hi there!

Just a quick note up top to let you know that I’ll be interviewing Emil Wilson about his astounding new graphic novel The Nightingales at Elliott Bay Book Company on Thursday, August 6th. It’s totally free, and well worth your time. This book is beautiful, it finds ways to explore the friction between words and pictures in a way that I’ve never seen in comics before, and it’s a compelling blend of memoir and fiction and maybe some new literary form that doesn’t even have a name yet.

I’ve Been Writing

For my monthly Neighborhood Reads piece in the Seattle Times, I interviewed Ash Hoffman, the owner of Lost the Plot, a mobile bookstore that sells books all the way from Everett to Tacoma. It’s a gorgeous little bookstore, and Hoffman is building a devoted following of book-lovers across the Puget Sound region. Hoffman can adjust her store’s inventory to better match her audience’s tastes, and you’ll have to read the piece to find out which genres sell best in Tacoma, Edmonds, and Ballard. (And I love that she named the van Plotsy.)

On my blog, I also wrote about being apparently the last hardcore fan of the TV show The Bear.

And I wrote about the movie The Invite, which I liked quite a bit.

I’ve Been Reading

^{(I’m cramming for an upcoming author interview and abandoning lots of audiobooks for finicky reasons so we’re really light in the book department this month.)}

One of my all-time favorite audiobook experiences was the fall when I was listening to Jane Jacobs’s urbanist classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities while walking around Seattle. Very often, the audiobook would describe something I was looking directly at on my walk, and it began to feel like an audio tour of Seattle’s best and worst urban planning.

In his book 20 Minutes in Manhattan, Michael Sorkin brings up Jacobs’s book very often—to the point that it feels a little bit like meeting someone who also took a class taught by your favorite teacher. Sorkin is deeply informed by Jacobs and he applies her thoughts on urban planning and public spaces throughout this book.

I borrowed 20 Minutes in Manhattan from the Seattle Public Library as soon as I heard the premise: The book supposedly examines New York City’s urban design through the lens of Sorkin’s 20-minute walking commute through Manhattan from his home to his office. The premise of a blend of Jane Jacobs and Nicholson Baker’s miniaturist masterpiece The Mezzanine was instantly compelling to me.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t adhere to the premise as strictly as I would like. There are plenty of Baker-like digressions on elevator codes and other forces that shape city life, but the book is instead just organized in a series of essays, using the titular commute as a way to collect and shape the argument.

Sorkin has a lot to say, and he’s a fount of knowledge about the way cities are put together, but there was no narrative thread that pulled me through this one—instead, by the end, I was ready to be done with the book. Still, my biggest regret about 20 Minutes in Manhattan is that there doesn’t seem to be an audiobook version. I would have loved to take this book with me on my commute and engage with it in conversation about the similarities and differences we find in our two very different cities.

Before Michael Crichton was Michael Crichton, he wrote an entire shelf’s worth of thrillers under the pseudonym John Lange. Over a dozen years ago, the folks at Hard Case Crime resurrected the Lange library and republished it for the first time under Crichton’s own name.

For the weekend of July 4th, I brought one of those Lange thrillers, Binary, with me to an undisclosed quiet location where my dogs would not be terrified by nonstop fireworks. (The book is now published by Blackstone, though I prefer the sleazy Hard Case cover on the edition I read a lot more than the generic cover of the latest edition.)

I had hoped the book would be trashy fun to distract me on a noisy holiday weekend. Instead, Binary is maybe the most generic thriller I’ve ever read. It’s about a boring good guy trying to catch a boring criminal before he kills thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Aside from a compelling first chapter featuring a clever idea for a heist, it’s all so rote that it might as well have come in a black and white cover under the title Generic Crime Thriller.

Nothing was upsetting about this book, and I never felt compelled to abandon it. It’s a fast read and never boring. But I can’t really recommend it, unless you’re interested in writing thrillers and you want a very early and very flawed example of a thriller written by a master of the form before he knew what he was doing.

Motherfucker, You Are the Mainstream

Last week, I was on NPR’s website for an unimportant reason and I encountered this remarkable artifact of the media in the year 2026:

Bear with me, please, because I want to describe what is in this screenshot that I grabbed: First, it says “Popular on NPR.org.” Then, there’s a picture of an old white guy with a white beard looking like he’s mansplaining to a woman who we can barely see. He’s speaking into a microphone with the NPR logo on it. The photo is emblazoned with an “NPR Newsmakers” bug, again with the logo, in the lower right corner. Underneath the photo and directly under the bug, is a headline that says “NPR’S NEWSMAKERS,” followed by the actual title of the story: “The pastor who wants to repeal voting right for women is becoming more mainstream.”

That “is becoming” is doing an awful lot of work, because NPR is very clearly implicating itself, within the photo and in all the text surrounding the photo, as one of the major forces that are mainstreaming the pastor who wants to repeal voting rights.

One of the most important jobs in a major news organization is to decide what you don’t cover. Not every idea is worth coverage. And at the top of the list of ideas that are not worth coverage is the idea that any human being is unworthy of personhood. We do not debate people’s fundamental rights as human beings or question their humanity. Ever.

Why? Because that’s Nazi shit. Period.

Obviously, reporters do not endorse every idea they quote or report on in the course of their work. But when you are platforming a bigot in a photo with repeated instances of your logo and you’re billing him as one of your “newsmakers” and writing about him “becoming more mainstream,” you are complicit in that bigotry. You’re not just an objective observer. You are giving him a platform that he does not deserve.

You might say, “oh, but the story is marked as ‘Popular,’ so clearly there’s an audience for it.”

To that I respond, “Bullshit.” Just because people like to stare at awful shit doesn’t mean you’re required to post gruesome photographs of car accidents. There is no reason—zero—to platform this hateful man and his bigoted, ugly ideas. This is a disgrace that reflects poorly on every reporter at NPR.

Our news organizations have to get better at refusing to platform hatred and bigotry. But the fact that I’m writing this in the tenth year of Donald Trump’s domination of our mindspace indicates that the media’s moment for self-awareness and self-improvement has long since passed.

Anyway, Lindsey Graham is already fading into memory and if he’s really still alive Mitch McConnell probably wishes he was fading into memory, so it’s not all bad news. See you at the end of the month!

Paul