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July 31, 2025

The Void of the Summer

In which I muse over summer entertainments before getting swept up in a reverie for the long, lost middle-class author.

Hi!

When I was younger (groan,) summer was the season of pop culture. All the catchiest pop songs tumbled out of the windows of passing cars, all the expensive blockbusters popped off in movie theaters like a months-long fireworks show, and all the grabbiest books by the biggest-name authors weighed down the new arrival tables at local bookstores.

Part of the reason I associate summer with the season of grand pop entertainments is because I was absolutely soaked in the culture of magazines when I was growing up, and all of my beloved magazines published thick summer preview issues full of breathless blurbicles describing all the confections coming our way. And I bought into that enthusiasm with every inch of my being. Every summer, it felt like the world was straining desperately to entertain me, and I was eager to be entertained.

The pop-culture schedules are still roughly the same. The structures of entertainment industries still favor summer for the release of the crowd-pleasingest cultural artifacts. Podcasters squabble over the songs of the summer and movie theaters still try to entice audiences with big names and bigger CGI spectacles. But something—some urgency, some wildness, some fun—is missing

Maybe now that I’m older, it’s just as simple as the fact that none of this is aimed at me. But based on my limited peer group, I don’t think people between the ages of 13 and 30 have the same enthusiasm for pop-culture summers that I did back then. Everything feels a little smaller and more fractured now than it did when the monoculture was drawing its last breaths at the end of the 20th century.

So in the spirit of the listicles in my beloved magazines of yore, I thought I would compile a little list of my favorite summer entertainments—the pop culture that has distracted me from the ongoing collapse of the United States of America.

First up, it will probably surprise no one to know that I absolutely loved Superman. I’m aware it’s not the best comic book movie, but it might be my favorite just because it nailed everything that makes me love Superman: David Corenswet was earnest and not at all corny, Rachel Brosnahan nailed the prickly brilliance of Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult understood that Lex Luthor is motivated by envy. Around the time the heroes in the movie were (minor spoiler alert) fighting their way through a rainbow river of negative protons or what the fuck ever that emptied out into a black hole in a pocket universe, I realized that James Gunn was trying to capture the joy of being a kid picking up a comic book from a drug store spinner rack. You don’t always have a clear idea of everything that’s going on in the comic you just bought, but you are desperate to learn everything about this weird and colorful universe in your lap. The Fantastic Four movie was one of the best Marvel movies since the pandemic began, but it doesn’t even feel like it’s playing in the same league as Superman. Superman felt like it had something important to say about goodness and kindness and living in a cynical world, and I appreciate that kind of investigation in a blockbuster.

The two songs I’ve enjoyed most this summer blend pop with a little bit of melancholy that suits the time. Miley Cyrus’s “End of the World,” which urges us to “pretend it’s not the end of the world,” is exactly what I’m thinking as I go for a long walk in the sunlight and try to momentarily stop thinking about the human rights violations that are probably happening within a couple of miles of me. Reneé Rapp’s sexy, snotty “Leave Me Alone,” with its chorus of “Can I tell you a secret?/I’m so sick of it all,” reminds us that there’s a very fine line between copping a bitchy attitude and falling into a deep depression. And the purest fun of all is Kesha’s “Boy Crazy,” whose video is decidedly NSFW. It’s so good to have Kesha back.

TV has not been particularly great this summer. The fourth season of The Bear recaptures most of the mojo that the disastrous third season squandered. It felt good to see these characters work together again after a weird season where everybody felt detached and mopey—in fact, I think I’d advise new Bear viewers to skip the third season entirely and instead jump from the superlative second season straight to the fourth. And probably the best single episode of TV I saw this summer was the final episode of the second season of Poker Face, which cleverly builds on previous episodes of the season and adds to the show’s mythology in a satisfying way.

Now we’re entering August, which is traditionally a little bit of a pop culture purgatory. Every so often a fun genre flick will break free from the sludge of misfit movie releases, and occasionally one final audacious pop song will escape containment, but for the most part the fireworks show is over, and Serious Autumn is about to begin. Based on how things in the news are going, I imagine I’ll be yearning for the distractions of summer by the time September 30th rolls around.

I’ve Been Writing

I wrote about July’s best paperback releases for the Seattle Times, and I also wrote about the excellent Long Bros. Books, a fine antiquarian bookstore and bar in Pioneer Square. This is a remarkable shop that every Seattle book-lover should frequent, owned and operated by a true character who knows more about Seattle than just about anyone.

I’ve Been Reading

I took a short trip to Maine earlier this month, and while walking around Portland I pulled a signed paperback of John McPhee’s book The Headmaster out of a Little Free Library. I never would have thought to pick this book up while browsing a bookstore, but I’m so glad kismet dropped it in my hands. It’s a profile of a longtime headmaster of a small New England boys’ school, and the whole time I read the book I was picturing it as directed by Wes Anderson—a whimsical, quirky, colorful sketch of one man who accidentally devoted his whole life to creating an institution that helped transform boys into good men.

A novel I brought on my trip to Maine, Grifter’s Game, was about the exact spiritual opposite of McPhee’s good-hearted character study. It’s the story of a con man who falls in love while pulling a scam, and the ending of this book is so dark, so mean-spirited, that I kind of had to just set the book down and let it wash over me in silence for a while. If you’re in the mood for a quick and dirty Jim Thompson-like crime thriller, this one’s for you.

The Last Bookstore on Earth is a fun genre story about a young woman who runs a bookstore in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey. It’s not world-changing, and I actually might have appreciated more bookselling in the plot. But this is a fun vacation distraction for bookish types.

The Anthropologists is an airy piece of literary fiction about a married couple trying to find an apartment in a foreign city. They develop a few friendships, and their relationships get more complicated as they learn more about their new friends. It’s one of those books where we never learn anything concrete about the characters—where they’re from, where they’re going—but this is one case where that literary vagueness actually pays off by evoking a very particular emotional journey at a certain kind of uncertain period of life. It’s a tone poem about feeling estranged from reality, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Ginseng Roots is a book-length graphic memoir by Craig Thompson, author of Blankets, about growing up in a small Wisconsin town that happens to have the world’s best land for growing ginseng. Much of the book is made up of Thompson investigating the global trade of ginseng from Wisconsin to Asia, and I wound up enjoying the non-fiction parts of the book more than the memoir itself—though it is interesting to see Thompson reinvestigating and atoning for the one-sided way he portrayed his family in Blankets.

John Scalzi’s latest, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, is a novel made up loosely linked chapters about what happens when one day the moon suddenly and for no reason turns into cheese. Scalzi seriously explores the physics of the situation—it turns out that a giant ball of cheese the size of the moon would almost immediately start collapsing in on itself—and then wrings every cheese pun imaginable out of the situation while featuring a huge cast of people whose lives are transformed by the situation, from astronauts to politicians to billionaires to ordinary folks. This one is pretty much just a thought experiment run wild, but I had a lot more fun with it than I did with Scalzi’s last couple of books.

The Disappearing Middle-Class Author

I’ve been thinking a lot about a post that local author Cherie Priest wrote on her blog. In theory it was supposed to be a post celebrating the release of her latest novel, a haunted house thriller called It Was Her House First.

But Priest, as she explains, is going through it right now and so her post is kind of an extended explanation of how hard it is to be a non-superstar author in the year 2025. It’s the first public airing of many complaints and observations that authors have shared with me off the record over the last few years, and I think anyone who cares about books should read it.

This one sentence is the thesis statement: “Publishers spent less and less on promotion (and there were fewer and fewer venues to spend it), and authors were expected to do more, and more, and more.”

Too many people still have the mistaken belief that publishing a book is shorthand for Making It Big—once that book comes out, you become a Published Author and your career has forever changed. But publishers do very little in terms of publicity these days, and very few media outlets devote any time to books. The reality is that most authors are lucky to sell a few hundred copies of their books, and they’re pretty much expected to sell those books by themselves.

I’m not going to pretend that the publishing industry ever treated writers fairly. It’s always been exploitative and exclusionary. But there used to be a few middle-class novelists out there who managed to make a modest living from writing, whereas now it feels like you have one Stephen King and you have ten thousand authors with day jobs trying to find the time to do promotional podcast interviews that they had to schedule themselves.

The middle has been cut out of the publishing industry. You’re either a blockbuster hit or you’re a nobody. It’s probably not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time that the economy is getting hollowed out, with fewer and fewer Americans landing comfortably in the middle class.

Call me crazy, but I would much rather live in a world in which hundreds of authors are able to make a decent living than live in a world where one billionaire author is able to launch a franchise and then spend a chunk of her fortune to try and wipe out the civil rights of a minority. And I’d rather live in a world where millions of Americans are able to afford homes, healthcare, and retirement than live in a world where one Nazi with an electric car company is in the headlines all the fucking time.

Anyway, it seems to me that the publishing industry isn’t a legitimate business plan anymore. It’s a pyramid scheme that bets everything on one big name breaking out per season while thousands of other suckers take the fall.

That’s a lot of complaining, so here’s what I want to do about it: I think for my part as a reader, I’m going to try to focus more on reading books from small presses and try as hard as I can to step away from the big five publishing conglomerates that have hollowed out the creative class. And if you have any ideas on how to establish a literary middle class, I’d love to hear them, too.

Enjoy your purgatorial August and I’ll see you next month, when the days become noticeably shorter.

Paul

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