Eric Scigliano

Eric Scigliano has written on varied environmental, cultural and political subjects for many local and national publications. His books include Puget Sound: Sea Between the Mountains, Love War and Circuses (Seeing the Elephant), Michelangelo’s Mountain, Flotsametrics and the Floating World (with Curtis Ebbesmeyer), The Wild Edge, and, newly published, The Big Thaw: Ancient Carbon and a Race to Save the Planet.

Goodbye, Walker Rock Garden. Another Treasure We Failed to Save

Various schemes were proposed to save the rock garden that the Walkers built, a mosaic landscape of river rock, lava rock, agates, thunder eggs, petrified wood, quartz, beach glass, and whatever else caught their eyes. The Walkers’ vision was at once exuberant and serene, outsider art without the dark side. But now it is mostly demolished.

Trump Echo: Myanmar’s Power-Sharing Government is Toppled by a Military Coup

On Monday, the Myanmar generals did what Trump and the mob that stormed the Capitol failed to do. They overturned the elected government and arrested its leadership and many civil-society leaders.

Jumping the Line: Insidious Effects of Vaccine Favoritism

Allocating vaccine according to professional, social or economic status only deepens the grievous race and class disparities we’ve already seen in deaths and other pandemic impacts.

Impeachment Sand Trap: What Are They Thinking?

Is there something here I’m not getting? Yes, Trump merits impeachment for trying to overturn a legitimate election and the constitutional system underlying it and stoking the attack on the Capitol through two-plus months of false and inciteful claims. Still, why? This impeachment was a mug’s game from the start, and it looks even worse now.

The Opiate Epidemic, Writ Small

In the first 12 months that the doctor oversaw her treatment, he prescribed her 4,070 30mg pills of Oxycodone, 2,450 8mg pills of Hydromorphone, along with a slew of muscle relaxants, antidepressants, sedatives, anxiety and anti-inflammatory pills.

Fox News’ Awkward, Twisting Evolution in talking About the Insurrection

As reality bit and the terminology changed over the coming days, you could track the emerging acknowledgment at the network (and the Right generally) as to just what happened at the Capitol, and who instigated it.

Stadiums, Sure. Bars, of Course. But Why Close Museums?

Of course some restrictions would be needed to keep them open, starting with the usual 25 percent capacity, six-foot distance, and masking requirements. But the fact that some institutions can’t operate safely in a pandemic shouldn’t doom those that can.

Blowing their Hamilton Moment: Republicans Fail a Historic Test

The harms, as widely noted, are multiple: Jamming the complex transition process and handicapping the new administration. Exposing the country to adversaries while it’s frozen in molt. Discrediting even further the liberal democracy America once exemplified.

Dirty Donald Needs to Discover His Inner Tricky Dick. (Fat Chance.)

Trump's tactics might be better suited to Uzbekistan or Uganda—except that they’re more brazen and desperate than the tricks dictators in such countries have to fix their elections.

Reassurance from THIS debate?

Nobody on the right seems to be claiming that the president “won.” Instead, from most of Fox News’s stable to the Wall Street Journal and conservative commentators on the mainstream networks, they’ve taken refuge in false equivalency, branding the evening "a brawl,” “a shitshow,” “two children fighting,” “a messy debate with multiple attacks.”

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