My listening history, a magnetic roadside symbol of America’s “rot,” and a pie recipe that won’t make your fillings hurt.

1. I had a blast going on KUOW’s “Sound Politics” podcast, hosted by Scott Greenstone, with my “Seattle Nice” cohost Sandeep Kaushik, but we went on so long talking about Tammy Morales and Dow Constantine that a critical part of our conversation got cut for time.

The missing segment, as you’ve no doubt guessed, was the part where we talked about our Spotify Wrapped lists for this year—or, in Sandeep’s case, about listening to Ween. (Sandeep, there are so many better sad dad bands!) My Wrapped surprised me a bit, since it feels like my heavy-rotation albums this year were by Jason Isbell, the Flaming Lips, and Deeper; in reality, the AI tells me, my top songs were by Stars, Chvrches (No. 2 and 3!) Janelle Monae, and Charli xcx. (This is my non-algorithmically determined song of the year.)

My basic sense of self was restored once I saw Wilco in my most-listened artists (No. 3)—high enough that the AI sent me a (presumably not AI) video of Jeff Tweedy, looking about as uncomfortable as you’d expect Jeff Tweedy to look while recording a video for Spotify. I was confused to see Steve Earle in the mix until I remembered that I spent several days this year listening through many of the 21 studio albums he produced between 1986 and 2023, which are not all to my taste. You can’t deny “Galway Girl,” though—or, for that matter, “Telephone Road.”

Spotify’s marketing department has done a great job—case in point: Me, here, sharing their marketing tool with you—and I honestly can’t begrudge them too much. Say what you will about the brutal economics of streaming music (or read Stephen Witt’s great book, How Music Got Free), but they’re doing a good job making customers feel invested in their model. Now where are my fellow Goth Synthesizer Post Punk girlies at?

2. It’s the holidays, and in my household, that means forking over at least one hundred American dollars for a farm-grown fir and ladening it with ornaments that span the decades, from the Hallmark ornaments I collected when I worked there in high school to a heavy white disk bearing the image of the grinning, slightly demonic mascot of the Buc-ee’s convenience store chain.

Buc-ee’s, as I’ve mentioned in this column before, became ubiquitous in Texas after I left the state, so there’s no nostalgia there for me.  Nonetheless, whenever I’m back in Texas, I feel the siren call of its clean restrooms, mix-and-match soda fountains, and branded merch like my ceramic Buc-ee ornament.

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I write a lot about land use, and Buc-ee’s—with its acres of gas pumps and stores that are larger than a typical Seattle grocery store—is a prime symbol and symptom of Sun Belt sprawl. Jalopnik, one of my favorite non-political websites, had a fun little piece last month that captured the perverse experience of patronizing Buc-ee’s, a place that “almost certainly shouldn’t exist, and we are worse as a culture for having had it, but goddamn does it flip the right switches in our collective brain.” I’m overdue for a visit to Lafayette, where Axios reports the chain is building one of its biggest stores yet, bringing a “beach theme” to the decidedly landlocked corner of I-10 and Louisiana Ave.

3. Bookmark this one for next Thanksgiving: The New York Times’ pecan slab tart, which I adapted to fit a regular pie plate because I need a lot of “extra” pie dough to make most pie recipes work. (Rolling is hard, y’all.). I love regular pecan pie, but it tends to be cloyingly sweet, because the base is mostly Karo syrup; this recipe swaps out demerara sugar for the corn syrup and includes brown butter and toasted, finely ground pecans, creating a filling that holds together (and up) under a roof of toasted pecans but won’t make your teeth hurt.

Look, squirrel! A few of the distractions I’ve been relying on this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

I don’t know about you, but as someone who was disappointed but not surprised that US voters rejected a competent, capable Black woman in favor of a troglodyte who represents their worst instincts and darkest wishes, I am TIRED AS FUCK of listening to the Discourse about what happened on Tuesday. The outrage industrial complex requires constant fuel, but that doesn’t mean you have to engage, participate, or pay attention to every post-election explainer that comes off the hot-take production line.

As I write this, I’m sitting in SeaTac Airport, looking around and wondering who in this crowded terminal voted against my autonomy and humanity, along with those of every racial, gender, and religious minority in the country. To quiet these intrusive thoughts, I’m plugging in to some of my favorite podcasts that aren’t explicitly political, including Scam Goddess, The Constant, The Flop House, The Adventure Zone, and Revolutions, a show about historical revolutions that’s taking a brief sojourn this season into sci-fi with a series on an imagined future Martian Revolution —and who wouldn’t rather be on Mars right now? I may even go back and listen to My Dad Wrote a Porno again, for a reminder of simpler times.

If you’re looking for comfort food on television, I’m currently doing a rewatch of Parks and Recreation, a warm-hearted show about local government in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. (Its last season ended in 2015, just before Trump’s first election). As a city hall reporter and someone who follows celebrity news, the show hits differently on this watch for a lot of reasons, good and bad. (Ahem. And also.) If it’s been a while since you watched this show, or if you somehow missed it the first time around, I highly recommend it as an antidote to MSNBC, social media, or whatever else you might be outrage-scrolling in an open tab right now.

And if you want even more Aubrey Plaza, I highly recommend Agatha All Along, a queered-up sequel to WandaVision that—unlike that show, which crapped out in a typical Marvel CGI slopathon—is genuinely surprising and also gorgeous to look at, thanks to handmade sets that hearken back to ‘80s fantasy films like Labyrinth and Neverending Story.

You’ll know whether this show is for you from the first episode, which includes where the titular witch, Agatha Harkness (Katherine Hahn), is interrogating a mysterious young man she believes has broken into her home and yells, “TOTAL LOSER? OR TOTALLY LYING? LET’S FIND OOOOOOUUUUT” that sets the playing-to-the-back-seats tone for the entire series. (She’s trapped in a delusion where she’s the lead in a detective series. It’s Wanda Maximoff’s fault. It doesn’t matter). Agatha All Along also stars Patti LuPone (yes of COURSE there are songs) and Plaza, who plays Agatha’s nemesis/ex-lover, along with Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, and Joe Locke.

If you are braving social media these days, you’re probably aware that a ton of people are moving from X to Bluesky, where I’ve been posting since mid-2023. The good (and currently unique) thing about Bluesky is that your feed isn’t controlled by an algorithm that constantly shoves the hottest takes in your face; what you see is entirely dictated by who you follow, and there is (as of this writing, anyway) a strong culture of just blocking people who engage in harassment, attempt to bully, or otherwise start shit, so it was a much more pleasant place than TwiX even before November 5.

But you know what social media site is really an escape valve? Pinterest. If you haven’t looked at Pinterest since sometime in the Obama administration, it’s basically a visual bookmark site where people save and organize links to stuff they like and find interesting, which show up in a visually appealing grid.

So far, so useful. But the real magic of Pinterest is its algorithm. Click on one link about the top ten things to do in Zagreb, and you’ll instantly be served dozens of links to posts about travel in the Balkans; click on one of those, and you may end up in the land of recipes for traditional Bulgarian baked beans, or the role of the region in World War I. I’ve been going down a sneaker rabbit hole lately, so my current board is pretty shoe-centric, but yours will be literally whatever you’re into—meaning that yes, you can ruin the experience by clicking on national politics stories if you insist. For years, it’s been the place I go online when I need to turn my brain off for a few minutes, and maybe you’ll find a similar escape in its innocuous, endlessly updating grid.

Two Manifestos on Automation, a Life-Affirming Restaurant in the Central District, and a History Lesson on “Schmaltzy” Art

By Erica C. Barnett

1. “Yes, the Striking Dockworkers Were Luddites. And They Won.”

And “AI Will Never Solve This,” by Bryan Merchant

I’ve mentioned Blood In the Machine author Bryan Merchant’s excellent Substack in this column before, but damn, he was on fire this week, with two long posts about the myth that automation—whether by literal machines, like the threats that sparked the dockworkers’ strike earlier this month, or through AI—is inevitable and even desirable, no matter what the human cost.

I’m often struck, in conversations about AI and other technologies that supposedly remove humans from the equation (although see: Elon Musk’s creepily shuffling robots, Elon Musks’s “self-driving” Teslas, or the algorithm on Elon Musk’s sad little website), by how many people seem to think there’s no way to stop any of this stuff from happening. Especially in tech cities, it’s more or less embarrassing to argue that tech “advancements” do not result from forces of nature, or that replacing people with machines is not inevitable. No one needs a web-connected camera to tell them what’s inside their fridge, and no company needs to automate workers out of existence (or replace transit with silly-looking private buses). These are all choices, which is what the dockworkers, and those of us who push back when companies want to test potentially deadly automation on unwitting people just trying to cross the street, have been saying.

The longshoremen and other unions that have pushed back against AI and automation, like SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, “decided that automation was an existential threat to their jobs—and to fight back by rejecting the notion that bosses should hold the power to decide to use technology to replace their work. Outside the pundit class, these proved to be effective and popular positions, and each group won their fight, at least in the short term.”

*This* is modern Luddism. Rather than allowing executives to decide who and what will be automated, regardless of the cost—human or otherwise—workers are seeing that they can reject a technology that will be used to harm them rather than submit to it. That in doing so, they may not abolish its use altogether, but gain concessions and even power over how it’s ultimately used in their working lives.

Merchant also covers an AI debate so dumb I thought there had to be more to it, but nope: AI proponents, including the former CEO of Google, are arguing that it’s unethical, and essentially violent, to regulate AI companies’ astronomical production of planet-destroying fossil fuels, because eventually AI will solve climate change.

Merchant argues (and, again, I can’t believe this is a debate we’re having in 2024) that we don’t need a complex, all-knowing program to tell us how to address climate change—what we need is here-and-now political will, which AI has no power to create. Believing otherwise, Merchant writes, is “not merely foolish but dangerous—it’s another means of persuading otherwise smart people that immediate action isn’t necessary, that technological advancements are a trump card, that an all hands on deck effort to slash emissions and transition to proven renewable technologies isn’t necessary right now. It’s techno-utopianism of the worst kind; the kind that saps the will to act.”

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2. Communion, 2350 E Union St.

If you live in Seattle, chances are you’ve either been to Communion, the much-praised “Seattle soul” restaurant and love letter to Seattle’s Black past, present, and future—or you’ve tried to. Until this weekend, I was in the latter camp. I never managed to be at my computer when this Central District hot spot opened reservations for the upcoming month, and so I never managed to snag a table.

The hype may have died down a bit, but Communion remains astonishingly good. The juicy smoked chicken, generously brushed with a gently spicy berbere glaze, dares you not to pick it up with your hands; ditto the grilled pork chop, served alongside a tangle of bacon-studded fried cabbage. The menu changes twice a year (with a switch coming up next month), but the neckbone stew and Vietnamese po-boy—a mashup I’ve only had in New Orleans at Banh Mi Boys—are always available. I’m hoping that’s also the case for some version of the sweet potato hoecakes (buttery, honey drenched morsels the size of silver-dollar pancakes) and shrimp toast—a crackly, shatter-in-your mouth crust surrounding an almost dainty slice of white bread topped with juicy shrimp, like the best Monte Carlo sandwich you ever had.

3. “How the Impressionists Became the World’s Favorite Painters, and the Most Misunderstood”

Impressionist painters have become so synonymous with normie schlock— “Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience” continues its unstoppable worldwide tour as I write this—that it’s easy to forget that in their own time, the Impressionists were revolutionary. This New York Times piece takes a close look at a show at the National Gallery in D.C., which reconstructs two major Parisian exhibitions from 1874, demonstrating the radicalism of Impressionism in its own time, when the pinnacle of artistic success was an annual government-sanctioned annual exhibit called the Salon. Before Monet, Renoir, and Degas became “posters in your dentist’s waiting room,” critic James Farago writes, “impressionism was a critic’s sneer for the whole group, mocking Monet’s sunrise over the sea for lacking composition and finish.”

An appreciation of graffiti, an extremely silly musical comedy, and a novel about time.

1. Sasha Frere-Jones’ review of Monumental Graffiti (4Columns)

Maybe it’s my oppositional-defiant streak, but the longer I live in Seattle, the more I appreciate cities where graffiti—as distinct from state-sanctioned murals extolling the virtues of the local sports team as DIY punk is from the hold music on the city’s customer service line—is allowed to flourish. Our mayor, Bruce Harrell, has said repeatedly that he “hates” graffiti, and has appointed a team of “Graffiti Rangers” to ensure its eradication and replacement by “inspiring” murals suitable for display on the Downtown Seattle Association’s website.

In Four Columns this week, Sasha Frere-Jones writes a review of the new book Monumental Graffiti: Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City that articulates how modern cities’ relentless focus on graffiti as a signifier of vice and decay provides a distraction from the slow decomposition of our public spaces. Like other efforts to eliminate “disorder,” graffiti-eradication projects communicate what kind of public space (and which members of the public) is tolerable, acting in parallel with subtle cues—like the elimination of benches at bus stops and the removal of awnings—to subtly corporatize and homogenize the city.

I keep thinking about this paragraph from Frere-Jones’ piece which reads like a manifesto:

Aside from parks with high tourist pass-through (like Central Park), interstitial urban spaces that were once more hospitable to workers now have fewer trees and more anti-homeless benches. Government and corporations provide public space in name only when it is, materially, just a space for taxpayers to pass through on their way to point of consumption. The graffiti writer and public artist inverts this, registering to the state as “destruction,” while having absolutely no agenda other than the iteration of the artist’s individual spirit. The state, legion in its erasing agents, wants you to believe that graffiti is the tip of some spear coming to cleave your life, while the state goes ahead and upends your life with all of the latent malice it has isolated, split off, and projected onto the graffiti artist.

Seattle is full of public parks prowled by conspicuous security guards, “publicly-owned private spaces” that are functionally inaccessible (like elevated plazas that require boarding elevators inside bank buildings), and homeless-removal squads that, mid-sweep, can make parks feel like contested spaces. Hostile architecture abounds. Graffiti, including everything from tags to unsanctioned public art, can be seen as a response to these efforts to control cities—and a benign one at that. As Frere-Jones argues, “No graf artists have ever made it harder for you to find a place to eat your lunch.”

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2. Girls 5Eva (Netflix)

Girls5Eva—a three-season show about a ‘90s girl group that has a second chance at fame—is a joke-dense delight that showcases one of my favorite multi-hyphenate talents, Busy Phillips, along with singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, “Hamilton” star Renée Elise Goldsberry, and comedy writer/actor Paula Pell.

The foursome are the surviving members of a Spice Girls-esque group (a fifth member, played in flashbacks by Beef and Joy Ride’s Ashley Park, died when she swam off the edge of an infinity pool) who decide to stage a comeback on their own terms. The show, I must emphasize, is not a musical, but it does feature a ton of sharply satirical songs, and the overall vibe is 30 Rock meets Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, except that the characters (kind of) grow. Tina Fey is a producer and, perhaps more notably, plays Dolly Parton, in a hallucination sequence that inspires this song:

If that’s your jam (it is EXTREMELY mine), you’ll dig this show, which features jokes about learning to cook salads, a decades-long beef with Enrique Iglesias (“Daddy’s boy.” “Fake mole”) and a parade of songs parodying early-2000s faux girl-power pop. OK, just one more:

3. How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe, by Charles Yu

This 2011 book, about a time-machine repairman named Charles Yu who spends his free time searching of his lost father, takes place in a future world where time-travel is commonplace and people can choose to live in virtual universes designed to their own specifications.

Yu, the character, lives in a “minor universe” roughly the size of a coffin. His mother spends most of her time locked in a one-hour loop that allows her to experience the perfect family dinner she never enjoyed in the non-virtual world. And his father is stranded somewhere in space-time, still bitter about his failure to bring the first working time machine to market. Some unusual time-travel mechanics aside, How to Live is less a time-travel story than a meditation on what we do with the time we have.