Hi!

This fall, you will be able to find no less than four movies in theaters about the rotten people behind the biggest tech companies of our time.

First up is the Elon Musk documentary that thankfully has an intermission baked into its four-hour runtime. That one will be followed almost immediately by You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary made by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim that has one of the most mesmerizing and unsettling trailers that I’ve ever seen.

Tumbling along after those two non-fiction forays will be The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s unofficial sequel to David Fincher’s The Social Network starring Jeremy Strong doing an uncanny Mark Zuckerberg impersonation, and Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI movie that Amazon refused to touch.

I’m excited to watch three of these movies on opening weekend. (I don’t know if I can give another four hours of my life to Elon Musk, no matter how well-formed an argument the documentary manages to present.) But I’d wager that none of these movies will tell the most important story about how Silicon Valley has come unglued from polite society.

In order to truly understand how fucked up the tech world has become, I’d urge you to read Gil Duran’s non-fiction book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.

This is a book that is unafraid to point fingers at the freaks who are running the biggest and most powerful companies of our time and blame them for the biggest problems of our time. It lays out the absolutely unhinged philosophies that drive some of the most sheltered man-babies ever produced by the planet Earth, and it explains how those philosophies are leading people like Peter Thiel to try to bring about the end of the world.

This is, in other words, not light reading. In fact, it’s downright apocalyptic. But I think that no matter what happens in the next decade, we will be able to look back at The Nerd Reich and identify it as the one piece of human-created journalism that recognized how bizarre and dangerous the fascist Silicon Valley overlords have become.

I understand if this sounds like too much to swallow. These dirtbags are in the news all the time, and it’s exhausting. But there’s always something new to learn about them. For instance, this book taught me how much of Peter Thiel’s creation J.D. Vance really is. Within a few years of working for Thiel, Vance had realigned his worldview, changed his name, and adopted a new religion that aligned with his political benefactor.

But if you don’t read The Nerd Reich, I just want you to understand one thing: These men do not have your best interests at heart. In fact, they seek to do you and yours harm. Don’t believe a word they say, and fight them as hard as you can.

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I wrote about September’s best paperbacks. I also profiled Pine Books, a new bookstore in Pike Place Market in a storefront that has been a home to independent bookstores for the past 65 years and counting.

I also wrote a note of appreciation for Aaron Pierre, who is one of the most exciting new actors to burst on the scene in recent years.

I’ve Been Reading

Zoe Dubno’s debut novel Happiness & Love is a story narrated by an insufferable young writer trying to make her way in New York City. Her most relatable personality trait is that she absolutely loathes all of her friends, who are also aspiring artists trying to survive in New York City. I appreciated this book as a kind of exorcism—and, ultimately, appreciation—of the bratty 20-something artist that I once was.

I did not expect to enjoy John August and Simon Estrada’s young-adult graphic novel Wolf’s Belly as much as I did. I thought nobody would be able to find a way into a retelling of a fairy tale that would interest me, but they pulled it off. (But the book’s bland and soulless lettering is a reminder to aspiring cartoonists of the importance of the art of lettering.)

If you’re panicking about AI’s effects on your life, I urge you to read Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, which is a level-headed look at what will probably come after the AI hype dies down.

That Yesteryear novel that’s topping bestseller lists? The one about trad wives and time travel? It’s pretty good! But I do have some notes about the book’s central conceit.

John Lanchester’s latest novel, Look What You Made Me Do, starts as a clever meditation on what happens when a wife discovers that her recently deceased husband had been keeping secrets. But it goes astray when it tries to chase some truly unbelievable plot twists.

Amy Bloom is having fun with her new mystery, Blunt Instrument. I mostly went along for the ride.

I read an old corporate biography of McDonald’s from the 1970s that my friend Clinton gave me. It was a reminder of how much corporate bullshit we now tolerate—and how weird this stuff used to seem to ordinary folks.

Aspire to Love Anything as Much as Greyhounds Love the Beach

And One More Book Recommendation

This one is special.

I effortlessly fell into Chloe Benjamin’s novel Under Story. There’s not much of a plot to begin with—a woman arrives at an Antarctic research base. She is a scientist but she’s just there to basically wash dishes and try to be a non-person for a while.

The first 200 pages of the book breeze by in that way, but then the sci-fi premise officially kicks in and it becomes a full-on page turner.

I don’t want to give too much away. I will say that I could see the premise failing to draw in, or even totally repulsing, certain readers. It’s the kind of high-concept sci-fi—soft sci-fi, they used to call it, as opposed to the detail-oriented hard sci-fi that obsesses over reason and realism—that is better received as a metaphor than a worldbuilding premise. In other words, if you’re the kind of reader who picks nits with sci-fi, you will probably find this narrative too nit-stuffed to enjoy.

But if it works for you, this book will really work. It’s been ages since I found a premise that inspired me to reflect on my own life in a new way. If you’re someone who enjoyed The Time Traveler’s Wife, for instance, you’ll probably fall in love with this one.

I usually try to avoid being vague when I’m talking about a book, but trust me when I say that the less you know about Under Story, the more you’ll enjoy it. It has a lot of interesting points to make about destiny, commitment, grief, and love, and I’m fairly confident in saying that it is almost certainly going to be my favorite reading experience of 2026.

That’s all for this issue. I’ll see you again at the end of September. Sorry for getting that Green Day song stuck in your head.

Take care,

Paul