Zadie Smith Cancels the Apocalypse

Is it sacrilege to admit that I prefer Zadie Smith’s essays to her fiction? If you asked me to identify Smith’s most admirable qualities, the clear and precise thinking of her non-fiction work would be at the top of the list. Given her trademark thoughtfulness, it shouldn’t have surprised me that Intimations, the short book […]

Voting by mail is the safest, easiest way to vote. Why are Republicans lying about it?

Last weekend, we passed a milestone moment in the 2020 election cycle: We are now less than 100 days away from Tuesday, November 3 — Election Day. In normal years, this would be the time when the general public really starts tuning in to the messages both parties are running with, familiarizing themselves with the […]

Outsider arts hub Push/Pull is building community online

The coronavirus pandemic has made it almost impossible to operate the arts venues where people tend to gather and linger: galleries, arts education spaces and bookstores were all closed for months. For Ballard’s Push/Pull — a combination of outsider art gallery, small-press bookstore and education space — COVID-19 could hardly have been more devastating. Director Maxx Follis-Goodkind says 2020 […]

A Face in the Crowd

A couple times an hour, a tiny swatch of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting flashes across my Twitter feed, courtesy of an automated account called @Bruegelbot. Bruegel’s paintings—and here we’ll just refer to him as “Bruegel,” setting aside the other painters with the same surname—are notoriously busy, packed with tiny figures going about their […]

The “subversive” idea that breaks economics: What if people are largely decent?

Even if you don’t know Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s name, you’ve likely heard him speak. In January of last year, you probably saw a viral video on social media of Bregman speaking truth to power in front of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. […]

Bailey/Coy’s Legacy: Why We Need LGBTQ+ Literary Spaces

In the late 1970s and very early 1980s, Capitol Hill was one of the few neighborhoods in the country where LGBTQ+ people could largely live out of the closet. To the young people moving to Seattle from more regressive parts of the country, the area around Broadway — with its openly queer arts organizations and […]

The Free Market Doesn’t Care if You Live or Die

I’m old enough to remember that, when Democrats were passing the Affordable Care Act through Congress, Republicans argued that they were tampering with the greatest healthcare system in the world. The argument I saw most often in comment threads and on cable news, if I recall correctly, went that a free market healthcare system made […]

We can’t keep slashing state budgets.

When unemployment numbers exceeded expectations last Friday, the Trump administration wasted no time in rolling out the metaphorical mission accomplished banner. President Trump himself declared the addition of two million jobs to be “the greatest comeback in American history.” While it is undeniably good news that two million Americans went back to work in April, […]

On Rush Limbaugh, white privilege, and coronavirus

Early this week, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh visited popular progressive radio show The Breakfast Club to discuss the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis. “I don’t buy into the notion of white privilege,” Limbaugh said. After a second of stunned silence, Breakfast Club co-host Charlamagne tha God told Limbaugh […]

A Nobel Prize-winning economist says coronavirus shows ‘that markets don’t work’

There’s no feeling quite like the stomach-clenching dread that hits when you hear a Nobel laureate in economics label the coronavirus recession as “a textbook example of showing that markets don’t work.” The concept of markets — defined simply as the system that allows buyers and sellers to interact — is a cornerstone of mainstream […]