Douglas McLennan

You can see this as nothing but loss. Or perhaps some of our most intractable debates are now suddenly shaken free of their old moorings.

Been noticing that the TV ads you see are all starting to look and sound the same? Mournful piano music, poignant images, nostalgic voice-overs and hopeful messages telling us to "stay strong"? America's Big Brands are here to help. Here's a video that parodies the new form - watch and you'll never look at these ads the same way again.

In this first Post Alley video, Carol Williams and Douglas McLennan talk about Russia's sudden shut down to deal with the COVID virus after claiming for weeks it wasn't spreading there.

The Seattle Downtown Association produces this video of a city emptied out.

It's jarring to see these late night hosts, stripped of their tech armor and studio wizardry trying to tell jokes for a camera in their living rooms, basements and closets.

It's not too much of a stretch to think that the movie theatre business - when it returns - will be considerably scaled down and that distribution will have been rethought.

It's hard to get more local than One Reel, its artistic and creative pedigree is unsurpassed here, and even the company slogan "Our stage is Seattle" is encouraging.

This focus on mixing as many uses as possible within the same space challenges much of the planning orthodoxy of the past century or so, which has studiously attempted to separate residential areas from retail, entertainment, manufacturing, and office districts.

Seattle, which has declared its desire to cut carbon emissions in the region, has instead fallen behind, coming up well shy of its reduction goals. One of the big culprits? Phenomenal growth in air traffic in and out of Sea-Tac, where passenger traffic increased from 34.8 million in 2013 to 49.8 million in 2018, an annual growth of about 8 percent.

King County Library System is the third-busiest e-book lender in the country (after the Los Angeles Public Library and the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium) and fourth-largest in the world (Toronto is No.1 with more than 6 million checkouts). But the Seattle region tops all libraries in digital checkouts when you add in Seattle Public Libraries, which posted more than 3 million digital checkouts in 2019.