Quietly, tens of thousands of office workers, salespeople and their managers have been let go. A restaurant or construction supply company can't do much business with all the restaurants and sites shut down. We look at unemployment claims by occupation.

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.

The choke cherry’s beautiful bark is its claim to fame. Native people used strips buffed to a gorgeous copper to imbricate designs on baskets.

Biking around Seattle to re-engage a city that I had not lived in for 21 years, I was intrigued and positively impressed with the quality of speculative housing projects. They exhibit rich texture and articulation, with colors often vivid by historical standards.

Ultimately, the advocates ran out of time, the complicated house of cards toppled, and the first appearance of the coronavirus crisis distracted everybody.

As the sole resident of Protection Island, the two-mile long bird refuge at the entrance to Discovery Bay, west of Port Townsend, Marty Bluewater has to be one of the best-distanced souls in Puget Sound country.

A Snide Steven tries and fails to get Alexa clued in to the pandemic's costs. Alexa answers with crocodile tears and Amazon propaganda.

Post Alley writers and editors Barry Mitzman, Tom Corddry, David Brewster and Douglas McLennan talk about the ability of arts organizations to withstand the pandemic.

All of the Existentialists are philosophers of life who refuse to spin systems of ideals, insisting instead, like the American Pragmatists, that philosophies are only truly tested in lived experience.

I’ve been to weddings and wakes, birthday celebrations and baby showers, poetry readings and photography exhibitions and flamenco fandangos at Café Paloma. Without a doubt, the place is unique and special. It’s like no other place in the city. But now the pandemic has come to town and closed it down.

The key thing, for my purposes of understanding the Trump base, is that the narcissist and his circle of admirers are bound together in a state of “emotional fusion.”

With each new story, the SARS CoV-2 virus is revealed to be a more enigmatic and dangerous adversary.

It was a moment of emergence for the the region, though it may not have momentum. I count at least four areas where these new leaders have impressively stepped up, often leading the nation in pandemic responses.

“Drive in WiFi” is the stopgap solution of the day: using the powerful fiber connections at shuttered schools, libraries, and other agencies and business to provide the WiFi equivalent to the old drive-in movies, with signals directed out to open parking areas. The state is scrambling to provide WiFi service to the 200,000 Washington residents who live beyond connectivity.

One can sense a collective sigh of relief that we may have beaten this awful thing.

The inevitable Boeing reductions will hurt the regional economy, but not nearly as much as past Boeing job cuts. Boeing is still the region’s biggest employer, but accounts for a gradually diminishing share of all jobs.

Are cities now dangerous places due to their density? No, I believe, the face-to-face city will endure. It’s simply too productive, efficient, and advantageous. And compact cities address the existential crisis of our time -- climate change.

Looking for insights on our current circumstances from other times and writers? Here is a basket full of books that speak to our time from the past.

"It has been a great Spring. The Mariners are enjoying their best season in 20 years. All board retreats and planning sessions are cancelled. Week after week with no flip charts, no magic markers, no breakout groups, no facilitator praising blather as great ideas."

Vancouver is one of the densest cities in North America and yet it had remarkably few cases of coronavirus. So much for the density scapegoat.

Even with this new, detailed data on unemployment claims, we really do not know how many people are unemployed in the traditional sense. Epidemiologists are not the only ones laboring under a lack of good data.

The British briefings on the pandemic come across as disciplined and professional with punctual timing, good clarity, reasonable brevity, and no impassioned hostility or displays of temperament. Certainly none of the speakers – even those suitably professionally qualified- would ever recommend to the public speculative but un-researched cures for the virus.

Sweden’s percentage of confirmed cases leading to death is dramatically higher than its neighbors, with 12% of patients in Sweden succumbing to the virus, 2.6% in Norway, 4% in Finland, 4.7% in Denmark and 3.6% in Germany.

Disasters are “extraordinarily generative,” Solnit contends. From them emerge new ways of seeing the world and one another. Fruitless preoccupations suddenly fade away. Hitherto un-imagined possibilities emerge.

Start with realizing that the big bridge is going to be out of service for probably 5-10 more years, so West Seattle is effectively marooned. How about making the best of it by developing it as an independent city, with more jobs, affordable housing, lots of Capitol Hill-style shops and cafes and cultural vibe?

Particularly in the public sector, large and frequent and long meetings, and task forces, have become badges of pride. Enough, already!

This live discussion draws together four of the political writers and experts on the Post Alley team. The discussion lays out the extent of...

The coronavirus crisis should not make us reduce the density of our cities. It’s the dense mix of uses, the walkability and bike-ability, the public transit of cities that directly combat climate change by reducing energy consumption and the carbon footprint of urban residents.

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.

Fifty years later, we seem to be approaching another important transition, pushed by the dual threats of a second Trump term and fear of global pandemic. Democrats have been slow to mount an aggressive climate-change agenda, and the dominance of pandemic news and fears does not bode well for climate to influence the November election.