For many of us, the forced downtime at home during the pandemic has heightened our need for books. Bookstores are here to stay, maybe.

The hero of Hugo’s one and only mystery is Al “Mush Heart” Barnes, a 40-year-old former Seattle cop who quits the SPD after three near-fatal gunshot wounds and lights out for the Rocky Mountains.

The Adjectival School, favored by the career diplomats, advocate strengthening Biden’s message by placing a triple adjective before every warning, for example, “further aggression against Ukraine will have massive, massive, massive, massive, massive, massive consequences and will carry a very, very, very high price.” 

Republicans are a danger to democracy and the Constitution, yet Democrats seem unable or unwilling to unite behind a centrist agenda to stop them.

In his director's role, Fuller hired local artists to hang pictures and do odd jobs. He was an early patron for Northwest artists including Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, Helmi Juvonen, William Cummings, and Mark Tobey.

Were these violent protests in Kazakhstan’s capitol and Almaty, its largest city, out of a Trump-like playbook to overthrow the government, or were they a reformist movement to confront that government’s authoritarian rule?

One of my personal goals has been to write more. But more than once, my wife gently asked me “Um, why are you down in your office, replying to yourself on Facebook?”

Non-Italian food in Italy? Pretty damn hard to find.

It is, in retrospect, as if we came to a crossroads in our nation’s life. One way leads to life as we had known it. Another way is marked “Here be Dragons.”

Things are a-changing in the City...

Setting ambitious goals is not only legal, they’re essential for visionary leadership.

The Lincoln Project could charter an independent party and get it on the ballot in key states, but the obvious question is who would be on the ticket. 

If airplanes are complex, so are human relationships.  The 787 program outsourced chunks of the 787 to “partners,” thereby rupturing much of the web of relationships central to the culture of safety.

What Putin proposes to ease escalating tensions he instigated by massing Russian forces on Ukraine’s border is for the U.S. government to pledge that Ukraine will never be allowed to join the defense alliance.

Such deals are rarely spelled out in public. But Trump is bluntly bent on party domination, insisting on the fealty of Republican officeholders and candidates. And he despises Sen. Murkowski.

An internal purge of Republicans in Congress is one national question being fought out in this Washington. So is the battle for control of Congress.

so let's take stock of how we all have wound up here and what we may expect next year.

Libertarians tend to emphasize the role of “mediating institutions” as a bulwark against the state. But I think they also serve, and perhaps are even more needed, as a bulwark against very large, concentrated, global corporations.

Your buddy Norm Rice lunched each month with a different councilmember at a neighborhood restaurant of his/her choosing. By all accounts, it worked to cement relations.

With 721 stories this year, Post Alley has explored local, national and international issues.

Trump acts as a revolutionary in tearing down our government. But rather than leading a violent overthrow (which lingers in the background as a possibility), he is astutely attacking democracy’s governing norms. The most critical norm is that our democracy works.

A Conservative columnist gloats: "It turns out that Jayapal’s master plan, which endeared her to progressives at the time, was a disaster of epic proportions for the Democrats."

Not surprisingly, our hunger to believe in Omicron’s possible mildness is blooming faster than scientists can support, even though the science is trending in encouraging directions. Here’s a status report.

“He was  the one who really enabled the trade and commerce between the U.S. and China, and especially the Pacific Northwest,” ex-U.S. Ambassador to China (and Gov.) Gary Locke said in a UW Law School tribute to Barer. The connection stuck.

Civic organizations once grew in clusters as Seattle aspired to be a modern, pace-setting city. Can that happen again?

What's next? Will I suddenly discover that the city's resident Marxist has a taste for Dutch Babies and Fran's chocolates? That she's bought a copy of Hillary Clinton's best seller?

Local advantages of our forests include the facts that "we do not have significant land conversion to agriculture" and that Northwest "forests are growing well."

The 30th anniversary of the Soviet demise on Saturday has, at least in part, inspired Putin’s provocative buildup of troops and tanks on Ukraine’s border as he threatens once again to retake parts of Russia’s lost empire by armed force.

“We have a very fragile health-care-worker work force right now. People are so tired. All of us had a ‘Here we go again’ feeling. It is really challenging looking down the line at what could happen."

Reviewing a later book, the journalist Michael Kinsley (a Morris-like sensibility), noted Morris's neoconservative aspects "but with generosity and good will." There are always lots of "saints and sinners" in his histories.