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...
From bike paths to highways (and notes on the future)
Thanks to everyone who took me up on my request for you to just email me about how you feel this project is going. Sometimes, because I don’t post these...
Confusion wins
I left the election season and didn’t send this newsletter for a few weeks. Mostly because I was fiddling with the tool to send it with, was traveling and...
Why Olympia is the way it is (Eastside Street edition)
I have spent the last few weeks with Daniel Garcia of the Heal Olympia project, producing a series of candidate and issue episodes for the Olympia Standard....
What makes a good (Civic) apology
As I predicted last week, I wrote about apologies this week. In the communications world, this is one of the hardest moves to pull off. Not only how to do...
Smith Troy, Trump and Telling the Truth
If I ever run out of ideas for blog posts, I will usually start thinking about Smith Troy. UW student body president, Thurston County Prosecutor (in the...
Reviewing a podcast that dives deeper and rounding out the OSD campaign episodes
Just a couple of notes before we start. The tool I have been using to send these emails every Sunday finally stopped working a week or so ago. It was a tool...
