Is Seattle Nice? Let Kinsley Give You His View

"Is Seattle friendly or not? I'm getting mixed signals . . . Please help me understand," asked Russ Holland, who's thinking of moving here, the center of the cyberspace world.

At age 37, he is single and with an employable skill. Holland is a technical writer with the Federal Reserve in Dallas, but he could pick which city to live in.

That's why this week Holland is visiting friends in our area, at the same time lining up some job interviews. In the age of computers, there will always be a need for someone who can translate technical jargon into something the rest of us can understand.

Of any city in the world, Seattle is the place for those with the skills wanted by cyberspace companies. Somebody has to write the 100-word blurbs that are called content in CD-ROMs, and somebody has to program those blurbs into digital language.

It's true that you could market such skills from 1,000 miles away; the promise of computers is that they'll do away with geographic boundaries. Right now, however, a face-to-face meeting, both parties physically in the same room, still gets a deal done.

If you've got the skills wanted in cyberspace, it's good to be within driving distance of what could pass for the affluent campus of a small college - the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond.

Nothing happens in cyberworld that doesn't include a Microsoft product. If a Microsoft manager, or somebody from one of many Puget Sound companies orbiting around Microsoft, calls, it's good to be within a 30-minute freeway drive of Redmond.

Still, especially if you're single and wouldn't know many people in a new town, you'd want to investigate other aspects. Friendliness would be high on the list.

"I read Newsweek's cover story on Seattle . . .," Holland wrote me, by e-mail, of course. "There seems to be some contradictions . . ."

Ahh, the Newsweek story. How many people thinking about moving here are still looking it up, and getting their main impressions of Seattle from that story? How many people who live in Seattle read that story, and had a hard time recognizing this was their city being profiled?

It ran May 20 of this year, and showed Michael Kinsley wearing rain gear, under the headline, "Swimming to Seattle." Most of you know Kinsley as the skinny guy wearing glasses who was the liberal on CNN's "Crossfire."

What got Russ Holland confused was that on the one hand, the story said Seattle was "kind, polite and friendly." On the other hand, the story quoted a woman about moving to Seattle, "If you come, you'd better bring your own friends, because otherwise you won't last long enough to make any."

I tried to explain.

"Ever read a magazine called The New Republic?" I asked. Holland didn't, but then so doesn't most of the country. Kinsley used to edit that weekly magazine. The New Republic's circulation is 97,000, about the same number of copies as The Flint Journal in Michigan prints each day.

But a lot of journalists read it, especially those who live in New York City and Washington, D.C., and who are particularly prone to believing the rest of the country is a separate planet.

Suddenly, Kinsley, editor of a small magazine, became in the Newsweek article "one of America's most influential commentators." You can understand what tremors it sent through those journalists when Kinsley moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft, where he's editing an online magazine called Slate.

For a long time, all kinds of people have moved to Seattle, but only until Kinsley moved here did it merit a Newsweek cover story. The East Coast journalists were quite befuddled why Kinsley would forsake their Sunday brunches debating the country's future.

That befuddlement showed up in the Newsweek article, which, if it was a typical Newsweek article, received its major editing in New York City. What theme to choose for Seattle?

Aloof? Friendly? Friendly but aloof? Caffeined-up? Laid back? Laid back on caffeine? Gloomy? Paradise? A gloomy paradise?

It's tough, when you're sitting in a Manhattan office, trying to figure a town somewhere out there beyond New Jersey. Is Seattle friendly or not?

Russ, I said, I've known people who've moved here and loved it, and others who hated it. Kind of like what happens when people move to other cities. Sometimes the chemistry is right for you, sometimes it's not.

I could tell that Russ hoped for a clearer answer.

OK, here it is. Latest issue of The New Republic. A guest essay from Michael Kinsley.

"The most disconcerting hallmark of Pacific Northwest culture, to someone from the other Washington, is a certain - what to call it? - niceness," Kinsley wrote.

There, I hope you're satisfied, Russ. That New Republic issue is already making its way through journalists' coffee tables on the East Coast. We're nice and friendly. It's now official.