"What troubled me about the whole convention center business/financial model was its self-feeding locomotion. Once a city begins to compete in the big leagues (not unlike sports) it has to buy into a whole multi-decade commitment. And the bar keeps getting raised."

In an essay titled “Awakenings,” the novelist and essayist, Marilynne Robinson, spoke of the Calvinist and Reformed theological tradition, which informed Lincoln and his transcendent framing of the Civil War. Of that tradition, she writes, “I no longer see much trace of it in America today."

Vetting what was surely a small pool in 1984 did not uncover problems with the business connections of John Zaccaro, Geraldine Ferraro’s husband. In time, the couple were forced to reveal their tax records, producing yet more questions and allegations and preventing Ferraro from gaining a real footing on the campaign trail.

At REEL Grrls, all the hard drives we used to store our short films we made were named after female directors. By fate, I got “The Lynn Shelton” hard drive. I admired Lynn because she had the courage to take a leap of faith, shift gears, and begin a second life as a filmmaker.

“Today, Jared Kushner is the only comic on Dad’s level. Have you seen Jared’s Mideast peace plan?”

How we can tame this beast, and (if it comes to this) what might be a better use of the convention center 3, now one-third built and facing a serious financing problem?

Perhaps, they said, they might open again in the fall of 2021 in a new but still undetermined location. Either way, my heart is broken. Re-bar was like another home to me in a rapidly changing city that offers fewer and fewer places where it is possible to hold on to some of what once was.

Numerous reports indicate that Biden has wisely dropped the theme of restoring “normalcy” and has shifted to a New Deal-style expansion of federal programs. But up to a point.

Replacing human labor with machines can have a positive impact if it frees up people to use their human empathy and understanding to help the many who need help to survive and enjoy life. However, the money to allow them to assist the larger community needs to come “from the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there; some can come directly in some kind of robot tax.”

I have been taken by how everyone in the village seems to still be enjoying the public spaces. They are just doing this while being mindful of the safety of others. This attitude of collective responsibility is what we most noticed when we first arrived.

Urbanism is about choices, not inevitability, and the context of those choices has changed radically. Re-engineering cities to make them vibrant, productive and safe, in the face of a dominant atmosphere of fear, will not be easy.

Saul Bellow: “It is hard to see how modern man can survive on what he now gets from his conscious life — now that there is a kind of veto against impermissible thoughts, the most impermissible being the notion that man might have a spiritual life he is not conscious of which reaches out for transcendence.”

The big political question is whether the new progressive majority on the Seattle City Council can adjust to the new economic realities and find the coherence to actually get something done.

"I cannot see these works now, nor look south from a ferry crossing, without recalling the landscape-shaping power of a melting glacier – in the Vashon case a massive river of receding ice that gave us the islands and waters of the Sound. I see Julie’s striking works as marvelous catalysts calling attention to larger surroundings, to the colossal reach of time."

While the Moral Majority no longer exists, the religious right has seized control of the movement that definitely influenced the outcome in the 2016 presidential election. Evangelicals favored Trump over Clinton, 79-16%.

Old institutions in Seattle never die, they just fade and fade. So hats off to the Port for agreeing to "delay" its misbegotten plans for a giant new cruise ship terminal in south Downtown. And while we're at it...

I’m only 30 years old and I’m about to live through my second economic collapse. Oh, and this one is paired with a global pandemic. So all you Boomers out there who love to complain about my generation need to all calm yourselves down and chill because we’re a little busy right now.

There’s never been a human vaccine created in less than about 5 years, according to Bill Gates, yet he’s confident we’ll have one this time in less than two years, and as soon as 9 months! What’s that optimism based on?

“Lynx are good sentinel species for climate change,” says Dan Thornton, an assistant professor in Washington State University's School of the Environment.. “They are like an early warning system for what’s going to happen to other climate sensitive species.”

Recent findings strengthen my case. Neurologists have discovered a disorder called NASCAR cortex. “Watching cars circle a racetrack for 3-1/2 hours, while hoping in vain to witness a ghastly accident, severely degrades synaptic communication within the neocortex.

What is really happening is that we have been given a rare chance to experience – live, in person – a change that used to happen once in every generation or two – a massive shift in living patterns, in technology, in social life. When there is a sudden and unexpected shift in human life -- whether personal or cultural – some people choose to reflect; others choose to re-invent themselves or the institutions around them.

This is a subjective ranking by two women journalists with long careers in national politics and foreign policy. We invite our readers to comment with their own assessments as to who is up and who is down.

I was no Gael Green, the glamorous NYM food critic, but I’d been eating solid food for over 30 years, and I owned a set of escargot plates as well as a mortar and pestle, so I bellied up to the task of dining around town on an expense account.

Two marvelous leadership opportunities. Two chances to make a historic difference. Bad as the arts needs money right now, leadership is even more important.

Like newspapers everywhere, the Times has been decimated by plummeting circulation and ad revenue, by repeated layoffs and slashed budgets. The stately art deco office building and modern printing plant are long gone. But the paper continues to pursue gutsy journalism and national prizes.

My subversive thought is that large swaths of our society are not afflicted primarily by low expectations, so much as unrelenting, burdensomely high expectations.

With an alacrity I hadn’t anticipated, today’s “Mad Men” are daily pushing out new ads tied to life as we now know it. This pandemic pivot in sales pitches highlights that we still have a robust creative sector hard at work to persuade us to buy things (whether we need them is a separate question).

The park reflects our best urban dreams and harshest economic realities. During our extended coronavirus shutdown Occidental Park is strangely unoccupied, just like much of Seattle. It’s also unwatched and ungoverned.

And what would a city-state of Seattle look like? It would be a progressive bloc, quite unified in its politics, particularly over the environment, social justice (attention Amazon!), and climate issues. It would be diverse, welcoming to migrants, globally open.

As a result of last year’s elections, the new City Council is much less rich than the previous one — though there are still a couple of millionaires in the bunch.