Say you're a parent who is having a hard time telling your child what the 4th of July is all about. How do you help a child feel proud of a country that's locking up other children? How do you show them what America stands for?

Seattle author Sarah Jane Marsh wrote a book for kids called Thomas Paine and the Dangerous Word. Capably illustrated by Edwin Frotheringham, it's a book that celebrates the best of America.

Obviously cresting the wave of Hamilton-mania, Marsh's book contextualizes Paine's pamphlets into the story of America's fight for liberty. She credits him for helping America find her voice, and she makes a compelling case that is easy enough for young readers to understand.

Perhaps the most admirable part of Thomas Paine is its celebration of clear and concise writing. "Pamphlets were usually written in fancy words the colonial elite," Marsh writes...

...Thomas used 'language as plain as the alphabet.' He wrote so common people could understand. Using wit, rage, and reason, the former General of the Headstrong Club attacked each of the deeply held beliefs that tied the colonists to Britain.

Marsh calls Paine's writing "literary dynamite," and she's not wrong. She lays out his influence on the revolutionaries and the impact of the revolution around the world by placing Paine's writing at the center of everything. I'm willing to bet that the book is a bit too Paine-centric for the tastes of some history teachers, but that's a common affliction with biographies, and there are no untruths here — just a bit of a prejudice in favor of the book's subject.

This is the kind of book that could inspire a child to write a pamphlet of her own. It explains the ideas that America was founded upon, and it correctly identifies those ideas and ideals as the foundation of the United States. It contextualizes for young audiences what Independence Day is all about.

I have started to suspect that Jonathan Franzen has one very niche superpower: he enjoys the ability to cloud the brains of magazine profile writers. That's the only excuse for moronic paragraphs like this one in the New York Times Magazine:

Even if you are not a natural lover of nature or of California, Santa Cruz just feels of another era. Or maybe it’s being with Franzen — how he leaves his phone in the other room, how he speaks in long sentences. I don’t know anyone who speaks in long sentences anymore.

He’d had an ambivalent relationship with TV all his life — his opinion on it formed while watching “Married ... With Children,” because of, he’s embarrassed to admit, a crush on Christina Applegate.

But here’s the thing: When he speaks, he enunciates down to the soul of every single letter. He takes this lingual habit and out of his mouth he erects complete cities — rigorously formed ones, with firehouses and railroad stations and schools and coffee joints and community centers.

During a series of interviews, Franzen expressed ambivalence about Oprah’s endorsement — that it might alienate male readers, whom he very much was hoping would read his book; that the “logo of corporate ownership” made him uneasy; that he had found a few of her choices in the past “schmaltzy” and “one-dimensional.” Oprah disinvited him from her show in response, and Franzen was rebuked on all sides for his ingratitude and his luck and his privilege. He quickly became as famous for dissing Oprah as he was for writing a great book. The world will forgive you for a lot if you write a great book, but it will not forgive you for dissing Oprah.

Also in the article, Jonathan Franzen takes credit for warning us about the rise of Donald Trump. I would like to send the author, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a sympathy card. I trust she will regain access to her critical faculties again soon, once she is out of the range of Franzen's remarkable mutant power for a while.

It didn't take more than a sentence — "There wasn't enough blood" — to hook us on Rosemary Reeve's All Good Things. Jack Hart is a young associate at a high-powered Seattle law firm. When his friend and mentor Harmony goes missing after a late night at work, Jack goes looking for her — but the search reveals more than he bargained for.

All Good Things is the first in a series of mystery novels based around the likeable Jack Hart character. Set in 1990s Seattle, the series is not just great reading, it's a chance to revisit a city that's still visible in our rearview mirror but receding fast. Check out this sample from All Good Things for a taste.

Sponsors like Rosemary Reeve make the Seattle Review of Books possible. It's thanks to our sponsors that we publish great writing about books every day. And we're humbled and thrilled that the site was sponsor-supported for every week so far in 2018. If you have a book, event, or opportunity you’d like to get in front of our readers, email us at sponsor@seattlereviewofbooks.com! We'd be delighted to help you find a date in August or beyond.

Monday, June 25: Hiking Washington's Fire Lookouts Reading

Mountaineers Books explains Amber Casali's book this way: "[Washington's] fire lookouts not only have played an important role in forest fire management, but have also been temporary homes for the interesting people who spend summers isolated from civilization to watch over the forests below." Casali's book details 44 such lookouts and describes the hikes. Tonight, she'll talk about her favorite hikes. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/, 7 pm, free.

Tuesday, June 26: Clarion West Presents: Ken Macleod

The Scottish author of science fiction comes to Seattle as part of sci-fi writing group Clarion West's famous summer reading series. MacLeod writes novels about unions in the future and the ultimate fusion of computer and human consciousness. This ought to be a fascinating evening. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/, 7 pm, free.

Wednesday, June 27: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin Reading

Terrance Hayes is one of America's best poets. His latest book collects 70 sonnets written to the assassin who will one day kill Hayes. Hayes will likely also discuss the work he's doing to revive and recontextualize the work of the deceased poet Etheridge Knight. Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, 104 17th Ave S. https://www.langstonseattle.org/, 7 pm, free.

Thursday, June 28: Side Life Reading

See our Event of the Week column for more details.

Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, 17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3333, http://thirdplacebooks.com, 7 pm, free.

Friday, June 29: A Storytelling Event

At the time of this writing, the only information that I have about this event is that it's hosted by Jane Wong and it involves poets from Cave Canem, Kundiman, and CantoMundo Poets. That's enough to earn my vote for the best event of the night. CantoMundo is an organization that supports and elevates the work of Latinx poets. Kundiman self-describes as "a national organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American creative writing." And Cave Canem is an organization that has long represented and inspired Black poets. Open Books, 2414 N. 45th St, 633-0811, http://openpoetrybooks.com, 7 pm, free.

Saturday, June 30: Shades and Shadows

Tim Long writes novels about zombies and war. Crystal Connor writes books about witchcraft and horror. Tyrell Johnson's "The Wolves of Winter is a post-apocalyptic novel set in a wintry world. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/, 4 pm, free.*

Sunday, July 1: Yoon Ha Lee

Sci-fi author Yoon Ha Lee, who also creates video games, will appear in conversation with local sci-fi author (and Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award winner) E Lily Yu. Wing Luke Museum, 719 S. King St 623-5124, http//wingluke.org, 2 pm, free.

Recently, I've been thinking about the formula for the only two plots in existence: someone comes to town, someone leaves town. Cory Doctorow has made hay of these two story structures, of course — it's the title of one of his books — but that framework also applies to a hell of a lot more than just fiction.

Take, for instance, the internet. When I first came online — I was a late bloomer, this was 2000 or so — you had to go hunt for stuff online. You were a stranger, wandering the internet, going from site to site. Now, of course, the strangers on the internet come to us in our little enclaves: Facebook, Twitter.

Two recent science fiction books have been swallowing my brain and jockeying for attention recently: Bandwidth by Eliot Peper and Side Life by Seattle author Steve Toutonghi. And I think part of the reason I've been thinking so much about these books is that they address this duality of storytelling. In one novel, everything comes to you. In the other, you reach out to everything else.

Here's Bandwidth's description of the feed, a central conceit of the book:

The feed was your personal lens through which to gaze into the digital abyss, the algorithmic curator that delivered what you needed when you needed it from the surfeit. It was the permeable membrane through which you experienced and participated in culture, the arbiter of what you found when you searched and what you discovered when you dipped into the rolling, throbbing cosmos of global conversation. Any individual voice or channel or vector was necessarily partisan. But the feed itself...The feed was infrastructure. Plumbing didn't know or care about a resident's sexual preferences any more than sidewalks pondered the daydreams of pedestrians. The feed was neutral. It was inviolable. It was sacred.

If this model — the future delivered to you via feed — is sacred, Side Life's technology is decidedly profane. Vin, a tech entrepreneur on the skids, accidentally discovers a new technology that moves him out into the universe in new and unexpected ways.

Vin has no memory between blacking out in the crèche and finding himself here. This must be a lucid dream. It pulls at his awareness, requiring attention the way that driving tired does. He's confused and trying to remember who he is. He says to himself, "My name is Vin Walsh." His dream responds with mysterious certainty: "I am Winston Churchill.

When Vin enters these podlike crèches, he finds himself in someone else's body in another time and another place. At first it feels like virtual reality, a game of some sort. But then he discovers he can alter reality in the worlds he's accessing. He's not passive. He's active.

I'm inclined to want to be the someone leaving town, the person walking out into the world, and maybe for that reason the story of Side Life appeals to me more than the one in Bandwidth. But this seems to be the duality we're facing as we move into the future. Are we going to be passive citizens, receiving the information that some algorithm has picked out for us? Or are we going to move about in the universe (or universes,) breaking things and figuring out our role?

Steve Toutonghi reads this Thursday at Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, 17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3333, http://thirdplacebooks.com, 7 pm, free.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles we enjoyed this week, good for consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

Not Caring is a Political Art Form

Rebecca Solnit is going to save our souls by holding up a mirror until we can’t look away. There is nothing the internet does better than provide stories to attract our eyes from the mirror, sometimes such a maze of stories that you can follow it anywhere, land anywhere you want to go. Here, Solnit examines the story of not caring, and where it really leads.

Empathy enlarges us by connecting us to the lives of others, and in that is a terrible vulnerability, one that parents know intimately, terrifyingly. If something happens to someone or something you love, it hurts you too, potentially devastates you forever. The prevention of feeling is an old strategy with many tactics. There are so many ways to really not care, and we’ve seen most of them exercised energetically these last couple of years and really throughout American history. They are narrative strategies and most of them are also fundamentally dishonest.

Dealing With a Book Thief

You know those optical illusions where it flips from a rabbit to an old lady between one blink and the next? This story’s kind of like that: it’s about a man who systematically and comprehensively robbed Little Free Libraries in North Chicago over the course of four months, and depending on where you start, you may end up thinking about how petty and screwed up it is to steal from a library, especially a community-tended Little Free Library. Or you might end up reflecting on how that practice might look rich and indulgent, and thus exploitable, to someone without the resources to imagine painting pretty little boxes and filling them with books.

Still. “Avid reader.” Somebody oughtta clock this guy.

The second time, Richard happened to be home when he saw a van pull up to his Little Free Library book-sharing box. He watched as a man jumped out, took every book out of the Library, and put the books in his car. Richard went out and spoke with him. Richard explained the purpose of a Little Free Library, but the man insisted that he was just an "avid reader," and drove off.

Books Where the Dog Dies, Rewritten So the Dog Doesn't Die

Bonus round! All the stories that made child-you weep uncontrollably (Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows), plus a few that made you weep much later in life, rewritten so the dog lives. Thank you, co-founder Martin McClellan, for knowing our hearts so well.

"Who is this dog?" Odysseus asked at last, smiling through tears

As though he did not know his own pup.

"Who is this good boy?

Who is this good boy?

Who is this good boy?"

Every week we ask an interesting figure what they're digging into. Have ideas who we should reach out to? Let it fly: info@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Want to read more? Check out the archives.

Karen Maeda Allman is the author events co-ordinator at the Elliott Bay Book Company. A former nurse and punk rocker, she has served on numerous jury and awards panels, including the Washington State Book Awards, the DSC Prize, NEA Big Read Book Review Comittee, and the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Karen was recognized by Seattle Arts and Lectures in 2017 by being named as a Prowda Literary Champion.

What are you reading now?

One of the great pleasures of bookselling is talking about books with customers, sales reps, publicists, and all sorts of people I meet while working on author events out in the community. Recently, I attended Book Expo, which is an annual trade show and publishing event, and during a meeting with one of the publicists from Simon and Schuster, I for a book recommendation. She told me about one of their fall books, a memoir by Sarah Smarsh called Heartland: a Daughter of the Working Class Reconciles an American Divide. I was immediately struck by the fact that this book is set just outside of Wichita. I was actually born in Wichita and I know nothing about the city or about the farming communities that surround it. I didn’t ever think about this place and as I read this book, I began to wonder why.

Sarah Smarsh’s family has farmed for 5 generations, but her family and her community’s relationship with the land is unraveling. The reasons are part economic and part political, but the crushing inequality and unfairness that members of her community face is intensifying. Life was always hard, but not this hard. She also lays out some of the ways in which her political views and alliances have changed. Any notion of a one-size-fits-all rural point of view crumbles pretty quickly.

Our country is clearly polarized and this book is one that can help us understand some people in a part of the our country that urban blue staters might not think twice about or maybe think about with rancor. I’m hoping it’s a conversation starter.

What did you read last?

Like many people, I’ve been captivated by Lauren Groff’s storytelling, both in her novel, Fates and Furies, and now in her short story collection, Florida. Her stories have an element of spookiness rarely seen in the literary novels I’ve read.

I’ve also been enchanted by Anne Youngson’s novel, Meet Me at the Museum (Flatiron), in which an English farm wife begins a conversation through her correspondence with a Danish professor. Initially the letters are about the Tollund Man, the perfectly preserved body of an Iron Age man that is the subject of the professor’s expertise, but the emotional intimacy between the two grows as they begin to share the details of their lives. I’m not always a fan of epistolary novels, but this one pulled me right into their lives. Tollund Man also fascinated Seamus Heaney, who wrote a poem about him, and, having seen a similarly well preserved Iron Age woman elsewhere, I understand his eerie appeal.

What are you reading next?

I have a huge to-be-read pile next to my bed, one by my desk at home, another under a pew in the living room and let’s not even talk about what’s waiting by my desk at work. At the top of my pile is: Nicole Chung’s memoir, All You Can Ever Know (Catapult), the story of a Korean American adoptee’s relationship with her white, adoptive family in Oregon and her search for her birth family. Next, I think it’s Tim Mohr’s Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Algonquin Books). I’m fascinated by Berlin and want to learn more about the role of punks in the political resistance of the time.

A friend from one of the organizations I’ve worked with for years stopped in yesterday and told me that I must read I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness (Convergent) by Austin Channing Brown. "Read this and then I want to talk about it,” he told me. I’m Still Here, written by a Black, Christian writer, promises to help us analyze our failures at achieving racial justice (and examines the connection she makes between white Evangelicalism and rising racial hostility in our country). Perhaps she is trying to give us some hope as well as some tough love, which I think is much needed. Is it a coincidence that Austin Channing Brown will appear in Seattle on August 2 at 7 pm at Quest Church, 1401 NW Leary Way? Yes, actually.

But that’s not all. On my way out of the store tonight, I checked my mailbox and there was an advance copy of Instruments of the True Measure by Laura Da’ and that went straight into my book bag. She’s one of my favorite poets and I’m sure that’s exactly what I’ll need to read on the bus to Bellingham tomorrow.

Every Friday, Cienna Madrid offers solutions to life’s most vexing literary problems. Do you need a book recommendation to send your worst cousin on her birthday? Is it okay to read erotica on public transit? Cienna can help. Send your questions to advice@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Cienna is on vacation this week; this column was originally published in November of 2015.

Dear Cienna,

In the military I was taught to keep it high and tight — that's my hair, of course, but also a good attitude towards life. Efficient, controlled, prepared, and to the point. But, it turns out, I have a certain softness for rich Victorian fiction that curls in on itself and never leaves any aside unsaid. Middlemarch has stolen my heart. Jane Austen makes me giggle. Cienna, I'm a man's man. I should be reading spy novels and hard stuff. What is it about those books? What the hell is wrong with me?

Burt in Burien

Dear Burt,

No one is asking you to make your own beef jerky out of old cow parts, ejaculate on a pile of fawning virgins, or any other questionable chores ascribed to the elusive “man’s man.” There’s no conflict with loving military precision and efficiency, and enjoying romance novels. In fact, the two are very complementary.

A good romance novel allows you to suspend logic and control for a few hours and be swept up in an emotional story that manages to be dramatic through its inevitable happy ending. We all want happy endings; that’s the allure of the genre. And massage.

In fact, last month, after a particularly bad date that took place at a supermarket cheese counter – where I ingested an hour’s worth of free cubes while chanting, “My God, Cienna, which vindictive crone did you offend to deserve this romantic hellscape?” – I curled up with a Tillamook baby loaf and a feminist romance novel and read until I believed in the concept of romance again (the lurid sex scenes that somehow never include the word “penis” helped).

There is nothing wrong with you. I suspect your military buddies could say that you have shitty taste in books but it would be a pity to deny them that – one of life’s sweetest pleasures is judging other people’s reading lists. Plus, it’s not like you’re carrying around a signed copy of Left Behind.

I suggest you join a book club filled with people (most likely women) who will be thrilled to discuss Victorian bodice rippers with you and very impressed by how poetically you can describe a penis and breasts without ever using the word “penis” and “breasts.” Or, if you’re not quite ready to be out-and-proud about your taste in books, at least consider these feminist historical romance writers: Courtney Milan, Cecelia Grant and Sarah MacLean. I bet you’ll enjoy them.

KISSES,

Cienna

• This Saturday, all three Third Place Books locations will be donating 20 percent of all sales "to help reunite families separated at the US-Mexico border." Their charity of choice is the RAICES Family Reunification and Bond Fund, and of course you could donate to the organization directly. But if there are any books you've been meaning to pick up lately, this is a great opportunity to help a good cause while you do so.

• Amazon employees have circulated a letter to Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon stop providing facial-recognition software to law enforcement agencies.

Our company should not be in the surveillance business; we should not be in the policing business; we should not be in the business of supporting those who monitor and oppress marginalized populations.

• Congratulations to SRoB columnist Nisi Shawl! We can't wait to read the sequel to Everfair.

Signed the contract! Tor is buying a sequel to Everfair. The sequel is called Kinning. I've got maybe a year to write it.

— Nisi Shawl (@NisiShawl) June 21, 2018

• Former Seattle poet Eric McHenry is searching newspaper archives for mentions of poets and posting the results on Instagram:

The juxtapositions in these old newspapers are just amazing. From 1899: On the left, someone's opinion that only Paul Laurence Dunbar was writing good poetry about the African-American experience. On the right, a society-page item about the woman who would give birth to Langston Hughes in a few years.

A post shared by Eric McHenry (@ehmchenry) on Jun 21, 2018 at 1:37pm PDT

Back in January, the MyBallard blog reported that developers had purchased the property housing Ballard's Twice Sold Tales. No timeline was announced, but the shoe has finally dropped: yesterday, owner John MacBeath Watkins announced that he has until March 31, 2019, to find a new home for the store.

The sale is no surprise: The lot's in prime residential territory (a 173-unit apartment building is planned for the space). But it is a shame. The opening of the new Nordic Museum is bringing a flood of foot traffic up Market Street, and Twice Sold Tales fits in with other shops that are making that stretch a great walk from downtown Ballard. Ballardites talk big about preserving the character of the neighborhood; that's not going to happen unless we protect small businesses as well as large.

Watkins is looking for a new place to land and, eventually, hands to help with the move. Sounds look a chance for Seattle's book community to pitch in for one of its own.

Each week, Christine Marie Larsen creates a new portrait of an author or event for us. Have any favorites you’d love to see immortalized? Let us know

Thursday, June 21: Roxane Gay
Last week, we reviewed a timely reissue of Roxane Gay's debut short story collection. Tonight, Gay is in town with Not That Bad, an anthology of women’s stories in these #MeToo-y times. No matter what book you leave this reading with, you’ll be satisfied. Gay is one of our most important writers.
University Temple United Methodist Church, 1415 NE 43rd St, 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/, 7 pm, $16.99 - $26.99.

So some of the pissed-off white dudes who hated The Last Jedi have started a new Twitter handle. They're claiming to have a "team of producers...offering to cover the budget for a remake of The Last Jedi in order to save Star Wars." They claim, "This isn't a joke, we're ready to have the convo now!" (Note: if you have to launch out of the gate by announcing that you're not a joke, people are probably right to assume you're a joke.)

What does this have to do with the Seattle Review of Books? Gaze upon this tweet, ye mighty, and despair:

Iron sharpens iron and the best writing comes from a group of people who have differing opinions but can constructively work together for the best story possible. Not just one writer sitting in a room thinking whatever pops into their head is the best idea ever.

— Remake The Last Jedi (@RMTheLastJedi) June 20, 2018

Holy Christ this is dumb. This is entitled fan thinking at its worst. I have long been an advocate for editors and the editing process, but I have to say that "the best writing comes from a group of people" is the single wrongest creative thought I've seen in a good long while. Pretty much every novel you've ever read started as "one writer sitting in a room." And while those novels are of course edited and revised, they remain the product of a singular vision.

I really liked The Last Jedi. In fact, it's the first Star Wars film I've really liked since I saw The Return of the Jedi in theaters when I was 7. I loved what writer/director Rian Johnston did to open up the universe of Star Wars: he removed the series's constricting ties to the Skywalker family bloodline, and he added nuance to the battle lines.

In retrospect, those two decisions were bound to anger the middle-aged white men who love Star Wars. Mediocre white men love the plodding and predictable stories in which a white man is destined for greatness. It validates the way they think the world ought to be. And those same men hate nuance; they want easy-to-understand stories of good and evil, because it mirrors their uncomplicated worldview, in which anything they disagree with is needlessly "partisan" and therefore bad.

These people are fools and they don't deserve a real argument. And anyway, the best response to this Twitter handle has already been written, by Last Jedi writer director Rian Johnson:

please please please please pleeeeeeeaaaase please actually happen please please please please please 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 https://t.co/mNpSjgovax

— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) June 21, 2018

Why isn't Roger Langridge one of the most popular cartoonists in the world? His cartoons are so lushly rendered that they demand repeated inspection, his stories are clear and funny and thoughtful. He can draw both a pratfall and an existential crisis — and even more impressively, he can make the pratfall incredibly sad and the existential crisis laugh-out-loud funny.

Langridge's best work, in my estimation, is Fred the Clown, a lovely little collection of short comic strips about a lonely clown, from Fantagraphics Books. It's full of poetry and music and tears and laughter. Everyone who loves comics should own a copy. And somehow, Langridge is still working in relative obscurity.

Last week Langridge published an entire comic book for free on his website. Even better, it's an adaptation of a public domain story titled "Leave It to Jeeves" by P.G. Wodehouse. (The original story is available here.)

"I've always wanted to do a P. G. Wodehouse graphic novel adaptation," Langridge writes in the post, "and the only way I know of of making that happen is to actually do a few pages and see whether I can get anyone interested in publishing some more." We should all lament the fact that we live in a universe in which publishers aren't tossing Langridge money to do whatever he wants to do, but we should be grateful, at least, that we get to read new work by Langridge for free.

And it turns out, obviously, that Wodehouse and Langridge are a delightful combination. The Wooster and Jeeves relationship works remarkably well in comics form, and Langridge gets some great comics history references across in a non-obtrusive way. And the reveal of Corky's painting in the story is a hilarious payoff that perfectly demonstrates why this story deserves to be adapted into a visual medium.

Look, I could go on, but the point is simple: Roger Langridge wants to do comics adaptations of Wodehouse novels. Someone needs to make sure this happens, please.

After a false start back in the winter, I finally toured the Amazon Spheres over the weekend. From the outside, the balls look enormous. From the inside, they strike you as much smaller — though it must be said that architects successfully built a lot of surprising nooks and crannies into the building's layout.

When you walk into the Spheres, you see an enormous wall of ferns and ivies and other plants, with nozzles spraying mist intermittently around the building. Follow the stairs up and you'll find a number of places for Amazon employees to sit and work: some couches, a crow's nest, a conference room, some café-style seating around a General Porpoise outlet selling doughnuts for just over four bucks a pop. On the very top of the center ball, you'll find a lounge with deck chairs, on which employees can lounge in the sun and peck away on their laptops.

I'm not very conversant in plants, but I know an expensive specimen when I see it. The lush greenery in the Spheres is gorgeous, and you could very well lose a few hours walking around, breathing in the richly oxegynated air and gazing at all the greens and pinks and yellows. These plants are well cared for.

As I walked around the Spheres with the general public on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I just kept thinking about how expensive everything was — how much it must have cost to build the damn things in the first place, how much all the plants cost, and how high the monthly bill must be to maintain them in such an unnatural environment. I thought about how inflated the costs at the employee snack bars were, and what percentage of those high prices floated back to Amazon.

And then I thought about how hard Amazon fought against the employee head tax, which would have raised funds to house Seattle's rapidly growing homeless population. While it's true that Amazon has contributed to Mary's Place, an amazing local charity that does good work in a city wracked with a housing crisis, it's also true that charitable giving alone isn't enough.

A problem like Seattle's housing crisis, with so many moving parts and so many difficult decisions to make, demands solutions that come from outside both the market and charity sectors. Amazon didn't just say no to that tax — it actively fought against it, a remarkable statement from a company that has traditionally refrained from making controversial public statements of almost any kind.

Look around the Spheres and you'll see what Amazon would rather spend its money on. Something beautiful, for sure, but something incredibly exclusive. Something flashy, something that everyone desires. A status symbol. A place in the middle of a booming city, built on some of the most expensive land on the west coast. A large building in which nobody lives.