Going Closer to Home
One of the dark secrets of Washington State politics is that in the 1960s and 70s it took a court to force the state legislature to redistrict. The state...
Turning the corner at Block 46
I want to, first off, acknowledge a lot of people who are reading this email this morning because they found me through the post I wrote last week about the...
The Timberland Regional Library doesn't face a stand-off, it faces some sort of evolution
These are not happy times. The Timberland Regional Library has fallen on hard leadership times. Not a full complement of trustees, lacking an executive...
We Fought Iron Giants. And Won. We Fought Hardwood Oligarchs.
This is a post that comes with age. I’ve been writing my blog for well over 20 years, and when I looked back at the Sonics tag for posts around the time Clay...
The Carlton and the Choices We Made to Get Here
Parking lots are our civic negative space. We create empty space for car storage so we can more easily access the places that remain after we build parking...
Mist and Filter: Reclaim Your Discernment
There are two groups that are opening this email today: those of you who don’t need the advice in the main post and those who recently took it. The primary...
HB 2554 and the Long Shadow of Initiative 456
I will admit, sometimes I don’t get the legislative process. This week, I’m writing about the third bill (that I know about) that would erase the impact of...
Bush, Billings and the Peace That Forces Out
This is the last essay I wrote specifically for Black History Month. Looking at the origin story of Tumwater and how George Washington Bush moved north to...
Racism in Housing in Olympia and the Importance of the Local Grind
I’ve told this story before, about how Olympia downzoned its way into a housing crisis over 40 years and rode the wave of emotion to pass an open housing...
Move fast, break things: The life and times of Washington's first black, female prosecutor
I’m running out of time before I head off to play soccer this morning, so no links to other things you should read this week! Just yesterday’s blog essay!...
The Small Power of Photos, the Large Power of Enforcement
Elections matter. Elections matter most because of all the small rules that you don’t really see that shape justice. This is how I think about the Olympia...
Power of Nightmares and Dream of Something Better
I wrote about a historical counterfactual this week because I was inspired by the box that Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez found herself in after voting to fund...
Vote for Schools and One Way Isn't the Only Way
This week, the podcast is going up top. Because if you live in Olympia, you likely have a ballot sitting where you keep the mail. Listen to the podcast and...
Marcus Whitman is our Robert E. Lee Statue
I had planned to write this week about the history and nature of our downtown—how something that feels so normal to us, almost innate to the layout of...
How a the 1926 Rose Bowl Game Defined Two Eras of Exclusion
I am attracted to historical, along the lines of how the University of Washington was the launching pad for Southern redemption through college football. So,...
Brier Dudley is wrong about the news
There are a lot of people thinking a lot of things about “how to save journalism” or “how to save democracy.” For me, they are largely the same discussion....
Seattle Doesn't Play Itself
One of my favorite documentaries of all time is Los Angeles Plays Itself, which is a deep exploration of civic identity and narrative through the lens of the...
Unpacking the Cascadian Calm
Thank you to everyone who reads this stuff here, over email. I’ve gotten into a (maybe a bad) habit of posting my main blog post on Facebook. There has been...
Olympia as Ghost Town
I did something different with my blog post last weekend. After getting back onto Facebook a month or so back, I’ve been wondering what the best way to...
Tono, actually
I spent a lot of time this week putting words out about history and its preservation. The first was a piece I’d written for the Washington Standard on what...
