The Lies That Rich People Tell
Hi!
First of all, thanks so much to those of you who sent sympathetic get-well-soon notes after last issue’s account of my first bout with Covid. You were so generous with your good wishes that I retroactively feel as though I somehow overplayed my sickness, but it was much appreciated at a time when I felt very bad.
And for an update on that front: I finally got my full sense of taste back about a week ago, which is a relief because it was honestly driving me a little batty. For weeks, my sense of taste was popping in and out, sputtering like a blown speaker.
So with that, I think I have fully bounced back from Covid, though it really did knock the strength out of me. I had to ramp up my big walks over a period of weeks—10 miles one Saturday, 12 miles the next Saturday, 16 miles the next Saturday, and so on—but I should be fully back up to my usual long-distance urban hikes soon.
I’ve Been Writing
For the Seattle Times, I wrote about two new bookstores this month. First, I attended the opening celebration of Mam’s Books, a new bookstore in Seattle’s Chinatown/ID neighborhood. The ID has had a front-row seat to some of Seattle’s biggest problems for the last few years, including housing inequality, rampant drug addiction, and increased hate crimes, and Mam’s is intended to be a positive community resource—a bright, cheerful place for people to go and hang out and make plans for the future and buy a book from a curated collection of Asian and Asian-American authors.
I also visited Paper Portal, a tiny little new bookshop in Madrona with a mighty collection that specializes in the weird and wonderful. In addition to a truly excellent intense book club that meets multiple times to dig deeply into classics of science fiction, the store also sells a selection of VCR tapes!
And I interviewed the most adorable married couple ever—a pair of New Yorkers who decided to write a book together about their love of Costco. They traveled the world and got behind-the-scenes tours of the astounding operations systems that keep Costcos stocked with an unholy amount of merchandise. Did you know that Costco sells over half the world’s cashews every year? Did that little piece of trivia break your brain the way it did mine? I don’t know what to do with that piece of information, but it’s embedded deep in my brain now and I will never forget it.
Finally, I celebrated the 50th anniversary of Gas Works Park by talking to musicians, event promoters, and yoga practitioners about what Seattle’s unofficial back yard means to them.
I Worked on This
I didn’t write this book, but I did do a couple of copy edit passes on it and its release has dominated a lot of my time at my day job for the past couple of months so I wanted to mention it here: My boss, Nick Hanauer, co-authored a book with Nation journalist Joan Walsh and In the Public Interest Executive Director Donald Cohen. It’s called Corporate Bullsh*t, and it’s officially published today. The book is an immensely readable little encyclopedia of the lies that politicians and corporate interests tell working Americans in order to thwart the passage of progressive policies. It tracks 200 years of corporate malfeasance, from Alexander Hamilton (yes, the one in the musical) extolling the character-enhancing qualities of child labor to Lee Iaccoca dismissing seat belts as “a complete waste of money" to wealthy Seattle restaurant owners arguing that raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour would force at least a quarter of the restaurants in town to close. The book is a lot of fun, and it’s funny, and I’m thrilled with how it turned out.
I’ve Been Reading
Back in June, I read and loved R.F. Kuang’s brutal publishing satire Yellowface. It’s probably one of my favorite reading experiences of the year so far, and it was so good that I was inspired to go back and read Kuang’s previous novel Babel, a fantasy story about a conflict at Oxford University in the early 19th century. I’m a tough audience when it comes to fantasy, but I loved this book: The magic is subtle, ingeniously described, and very well considered, and the story had a lot to say about colonization, translation, labor, and education. It would be reductive to call Babel an anti-Harry-Potter—but if it takes a reductive phrasing to get you to read the book I’m not too proud to stoop to that level. Babel has almost nothing in common with Yellowface, which is a contemporary literary novel/thriller with a vicious sense of humor, and this left me wondering if any other young author has recently demonstrated this kind of range—the ability to hop between very distinct styles and genres seemingly without effort. Iain (M.) Banks is perhaps the closest analogy I can conjure at the moment.
You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger is a brilliant look at the post-2016 hellscape that is the world as it teeters on the edge of fascism. Obviously, the hook of the narrative is that Klein has been driven to the edge of reason by people continually confusing her with Naomi Wolf. And Klein’s obsession with the way Wolf descends into the bottomless right-wing conspiracy grift-hole does provide the narrative structure of the book. But it’s really just an excuse for Klein to turn her incredible eye for detail on the world as it is right now. If I have a criticism, it’s that a lot of this stuff has shifted already in the time it took Klein to publish this book—a closing chapter about Israel and Palestine, for instance, suddenly feels like it was written ten years ago. But I guess that’s just what happens when you try to draw a still-life of a mudslide: the dang thing gets away from you.
I enjoyed Amy Stewart’s Girl Waits with Gun, a mystery based on a real-life family of crime-fighting sisters from the early 20th century. While this novel didn’t leave me clamoring for the second book in the series, I might pick up the next couple of titles to serve as distraction during future plane trips and three-day-weekends.
Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe is a novel about a young woman working at a Silicon Valley startup. And there’s a lot to recommend here: The faux-warrior tone of the young CEO in this book felt painfully accurate, and Etter is an excellent stylist. But something about this book felt a little formulaic to me—take a disaffected young protagonist, put her in a job that’s packed full of easily satirized targets, and then include some lofty symbolism about black holes that never really gels with the rest of the plot and you’ve got yourself a very sturdy (but ultimately forgettable) piece of modern literary fiction.
Glossy is Marisa Meltzer’s gossipy biography of how a brilliant young woman named Emily Weiss transformed a style blog into the wildly popular Glossier chain of stores. I enjoyed the details that Meltzer would casually toss into the narrative—her aside about how Teen Vogue interns were always hungry and wouldn’t know what to do with a Chipotle burrito bowl if it tried to jump into their mouths will stick with me. Even if you’re not familiar with makeup brand names, I’d enthusiastically recommend Glossy over either of the two Big Silicon Valley Genius Bro biographies that are on bestseller lists this fall.
Swedish Cults is a collection of Lovecraftian short fiction by Swedish author Anders Fager. I enjoyed this book a lot, but it’s very, very similar to Lovecraft—by which I mean, some of these stories are basically a note-for-note cover song. If you’re hankering for a story collection about people falling prey to a madness older than time itself, you’ll find a lot to love here.
Unearned Male Confidence Is Reaching Apocalyptic Levels
Throughout human history, unearned male confidence has never been in short supply. But the past year, to me, feels like some kind of an apex (or nadir) in unearned male confidence—men who are so high on their own supply that they honestly believe they stand apart from and above every human who has ever lived.
One year ago this month, Elon Musk announced that he was smarter than one of the two greatest strategy games ever invented. When one of his boot-lickers asked him if he played chess, Musk replied, “I did as a child, but found it to be too simple to be useful in real life: a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces, etc.”
This is the kind of thing a moron says when he wants to sound intelligent. The dead giveaway is the mention of “spawn position,” a video game term and which suggests that he thinks Call of Duty has more to say about the vagaries of human conflict than an elegantly devised game which completely removes the element of chance and strips both players of any ability to hide or bluff their opponent.
Earlier this month, the internet enjoyed dunking on a white supremacist who is currently trying to rebrand as a right-wing provocateur. I’m not going to share his name or link to his profile, because a quick glance of his timeline demonstrates that it’s obvious this man isn’t repentant of his white supremacist beliefs. But he tweeted: “Pretty sure if you gave me a year I could write Shakespeare quality work. Like if someone hadn't read all of Shakespeare and you randomly gave them me or him, on average they couldn't tell the difference. Of course without the blind test people would pretend it wasn't as good.”
Again: You have to be profoundly stupid to believe that the only thing separating your writing and the works of William Shakespeare is a surfeit of free time. And along those lines a staffer at the Tax Foundation argued that the Scarlet Letter was total garbage based on its first sentence: “Look at this first sentence. 136 words. And all the sentences are like that.” How does a friend not gently pull you aside and firmly suggest that you swear off posting on the internet when you think to publish something like that?
It’s not original or interesting to claim that the classics are overrated—teenagers have been doing this for centuries. But the pride in being so profoundly uninterested in history and literature and tradition feels a little more brazen than your standard 13-year-old class clown. There’s a whiff of nihilism in the obvious, gaseous pride that these grown men feel in giving rank dismissals of topics that they clearly don’t understand.
Granted, all three of those examples have a few telling elements in common: They’re all modern Republican white men, and they’re all posting on the same dying social media service, which has clearly demonstrated that the quality of engagement doesn’t matter so much as the quantity of engagement. All of which is to say, these are self-selecting grandiose idiots.
But then I think about the fact that six percent of Americans believe they could win in a fight with a grizzly bear. Six out of every hundred people! Maybe even worse than that, 17 percent of Americans—nearly two out of every ten—believe they could beat a chimpanzee in unarmed combat! Do you know what a chimpanzee could do to a human being’s face in less than a second?
And in the middle of October, Marc Andreeson published what he calls “The Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto,” which he no doubt envisions as a call to arms to solve humanity’s problems faster and more efficiently with technology, but which is really just a poorly written screed about why this immorally rich man thinks he shouldn’t have to deal with petty mortal concerns like regulations, taxes, or criticism.
I hate to invoke his name twice in this newsletter, but it really feels like Musk broke something in America’s tech sector, much the same way Trump broke something in the Republican Party. The myth of the citizen-CEO of the 20th Century, the business leader who used to talk grandly about the importance of community and citizenship, has been well and truly debunked. No more do Silicon Valley tech bros pretend that they’re just ordinary people working together to build a better future—now, they’re a superior kind of human with a vision that mere mortals cannot understand, and anyone who tries to question or constrain them is a villain who needs to be silenced—or, if need be, destroyed. They see themselves as Ayn Randian supermen—The Captains of Industry!—but they behave more like the venal, self-aggrandizing villainous masterminds their comic book heroes used to fight in every issue.
The problem with this kind of grandiose self-confidence is that it continually reproduces. People who get high on their own supply never taper off of their own volition—they keep going faster and faster until they pancake into a concrete wall. And while these schmucks are not one-one millionth of the ubermensch they believe themselves to be, they still have more than enough power and money to take a giant chunk of society down with them when they crash and burn.
Wheeee! Sorry for the downer ending. Anyway, I hope you’re having a nice fall.
—Paul