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Clark Remember when we wrote about 26 ways to store your bike?  Well, here’s a 27th. Alan My old friend Jewel James, master carver of the Lummi Nation, continues his inspired art and activism, accompanying a new totem pole along the route of the coal trains. He was in Olympia earlier this week, and the Olympian did a good job of writing it up.

My teenage nephew came to visit last summer, and I asked him if there was anything he needed from the drug store. “Uh, condoms?” he said. It was easier to ask liberal Aunt Val than Grandma, who is raising him. We hopped in the car. At the local Walgreens, we found the display and we lingered, picking packages up and putting them back. “Wow, there’s a lot of choices,” he...

Drought devastated vast swaths of the continent this year. Wildfires raged. More recently, Colorado got more rain in one work week than it often gets in entire years, causing flooding that washed away homes, roads, and bridges in Boulder, Colorado, and the surrounding area. The flood killed at least eight people and left hundreds unaccounted for. The rainfall has been called Biblical—and that’s by the National Weather Service which typically...

Last week saw a profusion of head-scratching news stories about July’s catastrophic oil train explosion in Quebec after the Transportation Safety Board of Canada announced that the tanker cars had been mislabeled. It turns out that although the rail cars were correctly classified as containing a “dangerous good,” a label that applies to all types of crude oil, they were incorrectly designated as PG III, the least dangerous sub-category, when...

A week ago, I took my youngest son Peter, who is 19, on a cross-country trip. He was leaving the nest to start college in Ohio. We decided we would take the week, just the two of us, and go east across this magnificent continent together. We would mark his transition to the next phase of life with a physical journey of epic scale. It was a proud and bittersweet...

In Peggy Clifford’s neighborhood, out back of the State Capitol in Olympia, Washington, a black market thrives. Early each year during the state’s legislative session, lobbyists go there—just a hop, skip, and a jump from the capitol dome—to buy what they crave: parking spaces. Peggy says, “This is a neighborhood, not a parking lot.” Tell that to regular Capitol visitors. The neighborhood may be nationally registered as historic and staunchly...

Last summer the Taylor Bridge Fire outside Cle Elum, Washington, raged across 36 square miles of parched, crispy pine forest. It destroyed more than 60 homes and hundreds of families were evacuated. In the fire’s path was the 1890s homestead where my grandparents lived when I was a kid—a place where I made some of my fondest childhood memories. Even though our family no longer owns the place, it broke...

Eric On the occasion of his death, it’s worth recalling Elmore Leonard’s ten rules for writing. Speaking of posterity, Warren Buffet seems hellbent on going down in history as a villain with his purchase of a $500 million stake in a major tar sands oil company. (Buffett already has a serious problem with investing in the destructive carbon economy.) Alan Will wolves reach Belgium before they reach the Olympic Peninsula?...

Editor’s Note 8/19/2015: We are bringing this popular and relevant post back to explain how parking rules raise your rent. Two years later, Sightline’s executive director Alan Durning is still exposing the hidden reason behind skyrocketing housing costs in this recent Stranger article. Read below to learn how ending parking quotas can bring down rent costs. Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then,...

Eric In the depths of our hearts, each of us harbors secret desires. Some are so formless that we may not recognize them until someone else names them and we see them for what they are. In that vein, this week I learned that I have subconsciously longed to never hear the words “waffle taco” used to describe a menu item. It’s just one more dream of mine punctured by...