Kelsey If crafty tank escapes, high intelligence, and coconut shell armor aren’t enough to make you love octopuses: scientists have identified a second octopus community off the coast of Australia. I had the pleasure of seeing one of my favorite bands, Fleet Foxes, perform last week at The Paramount in Seattle. Riding the post-concert-high of … Read more
Kristin Even Americans in the top 1 percent want to call themselves middle class because Americans have a strange, unspoken tension around wealth and inequality: we think anyone should be able to be as rich as possible, but then we are uncomfortable with the resulting inequality, but instead of talking about how to fix the … Read more
Tarika If you like podcasts, history, and trivia, check out the most recent episode of NPR’s Planet Money, “This Ad’s for You.” The episode is about Tom Burrell, the first African-American man to break into Chicago advertising. Burrell entered advertising in the 1960s, when ads were one-size fits all and were designed almost exclusively for … Read more
Aven Trying to find the silver linings of some very dark clouds this week, as Harvey leaves an entire region devastated while toxins from Houston’s two dozen Superfund sites leach out to sea. Perhaps rising gas prices from the loss of one third of US oil refining capacity will spur more people to ditch their … Read more
Kristin When I was in law school, I was shocked to learn that many of my classmates felt that Americans couldn’t be Nazis or terrorists because we are different. Clearly, Americans can be white supremacists but, it appears that they are psychologically different. What makes them different is dehumanizing others. A recent study suggests that, … Read more
Alan Mass incarceration, and criminal justice reform, are not really national but local trends. So national politics matter much less than you might think. A poignant insider view on how the digital age is grinding down the remaining bastions of old-school journalism. Thanh Tan, a talented journalist who grew up in Olympia, Washington, recounts the … Read more
Aven This week, I found this story about a community successfully living without fossil fuels to be both heartening and inspiring, especially as my own family embarks on the process of acquiring our own little plot to try our hand at urban homesteading. Also inspiring but less heartening is this story about the large carnivore … Read more
Eric One of the oddities on my bucket list is a longstanding desire to drive east to west across the length of Australia, so I was fascinated by this interactive New York Times feature on the realities of the outback today. Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett (aka Black Santa) is easily one of the most fun … Read more
Aven Just one recommendation this week, because I had too much thinking to do after reading it to read anything else. Brian Calvert of High County News wrote an essay on confronting despair in the age of ecocide and it should be required reading for anyone who works in the environmental field. Or cares about the … Read more
Eric Cliff Mass makes the case that we should ban personal fireworks. I was a skeptic going into the piece, but he convinced me. Among other things, check out the air quality chart documenting the almost unbelievable spike—most especially in Tacoma—of harmful air contaminants that presumably arise from fireworks. It’s wonderful to see Lindy West … Read more
