Noah Hawley wrote a short, excellent, and chilling piece about attending Jeff Bezos' Campfire "ideas" retreat in 2018, and you can read it through Flipster at the library if you don't have an Atlantic subscription.
longreads.com/2026/04/21/j...
For those who are blissfully unaware of "Curby," I broke the story here: publicola.com/2023/11/17/c...
Also, hilarious that Rob Saka is STILL mad that people made fun of him for wanting to undo a safety project so drivers could turn left into the tiny parking lot of his kids' preschool. He's now saying it would have helped "immigrant and refugee communities... kids' daycares, [AND] working families."
The history of how transportation decisions get made in Seattle—more often than not, to the benefit of drivers over everybody else—suggests pretty strongly that "one more study" isn't the move. /1
www.theurbanist.org/seattle-stal...
Will Dialing Back Fees on Housing Fix Seattle’s Construction Crash?
Listen to this week's episode of Seattle Nice, featuring former city of Seattle chief operating officer Marco Lowe and land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick.
publicola.com/2026/04/21/w...
County Assessor, Charged With Stalking, Posts Taunting Pics as Council Again Demands His Resignation
Wilson said he can't wear the monitor, which a judge ordered to ensure he complies with a restraining order, because of a condition that requires him to soak his legs.
publicola.com/2026/04/20/c...
SPD Gives Medal to Officer Who Chased Man Into Traffic, Leaving Carful of Kids Behind
The department used 911 audio of a panicked domestic violence victim, without obtaining her consent, in its video promoting the officer's courage for apprehending her abuser.
publicola.com/2026/04/20/s...
Not even Trump Derangement Syndrome could save Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe. Love is dead: Jason Rantz Seattle Red, Apr 20, 2026 5:00 AM by Jason Rantz Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe have called it quits, and the entire anti-Trump resistance should be in mourning. If Trump Derangement Syndrome, the most powerful binding agent known to modern progressive relationships, cannot keep two retired far-left athletes together, then love is a lie, hope is dead, and the rest of us might as well stop trying.
people on the far right are so profoundly broken
The victims ranged in age from 1 to 14, according to Cpl. Chris Bordelon of the Shreveport Police Department, who spoke at a news conference. He said the shooting appeared to be domestic in nature.
God I wish we were rid of the "domestic" euphemism, which softens a brutal type of violence and makes it sound like a private affair. "Man shoots eight children, all family members, at three locations across Shreveport."
People "on drugs and alcohol" live in housing.
The vision is always one-time treatment under duress, too—never the actual process of repeated relapse that is the most common path for people who do end up in recovery.
I do think it's hilarious how an editorial board hand-waves away decades of research and population-level evidence that the addiction-to-jail pipeline doesn't work by citing unspecified "drug policy experts"
I always think their plan is "vaporize the homeless, with magic"
Highlighting this: The Seattle Times says homeless substance users must be "pressured" out of addiction through jail time if they use illegal substances—a profoundly stupid and counterproductive approach that, of course, they have never applied to housed people who use illegal drugs.
Oh, and "drug policy experts" do not actually say that "pressure" gets people to stop being addicted. People who are addicted know they should quit, and are almost always under intense pressure to do so. If guilt, shame, and consequences were enough, we wouldn't have an addiction problem!
If Wilson goes this route, her shelter plan will fail. You cannot jail someone out of addiction any more than you can beat them out of it. And "mandatory treatment" is a waste of time and money if a person is not ready to change their entire life in order to commit to recovery.
To have the greatest chance of success, the conversation must also include negative consequences for negative behaviors. As noted by drug policy experts, substance use disorder is different from cancer or depression, and people often need pressure to make difficult changes. The message must be simple: Flout the law and go to jail. Detention and what happens after release ought to be part of any comprehensive homelessness plan. More coordination with shelter and other services is needed to give people a realistic second chance after leaving jail.
This , for example, is a recipe for instant failure. Seattle's daily newspaper says that anyone who uses drugs at shelter should go to jail, and that this will be an incentive to stop using drugs. This is a profound misunderstanding of addiction and recovery.
Seattle Times is still talking about "mandating treatment" as a necessary condition of having a place to sleep out of the rain. You can't get furious about the persistence of tents and also say people in active addiction don't deserve shelter.
I think it's most likely that print will eventually be mostly replaced, in most places, by online outlets. This is fine! As fond as I am of some physical media (I bought a record yesterday!), it's a fool's errand to say the only way to save local news is to save a specific FORMAT of local news.
The column is about new publishers stepping in to buy rural papers. Interestingly, Dudley says it's better to preserve existing print outlets than to "start from scratch"—but printing one weekly paper is less efficient than daily online coverage. Nostalgia isn't going to save small-town media.
Weeklies generally depend on revenue from legal notices published by local governments. If they stop publishing, they lose those contracts for an extended period. It also handicaps new owners if relationships with advertisers and subscribers are interrupted.
Since the Seattle Times will likely oppose a local funding initiative for small media outlets when it goes on the ballot, it's noteworthy that their "save newspapers, but only newspapers" columnist is fine with an existing model where small papers' funding comes mostly from government ads.
This Week on PubliCola: April 18, 2026
Homelessness Authority Undergoes Forensic Audit, County Assessor Gets Out of Wearing Ankle Monitor in Stalking Case, and More News from this Week
publicola.com/2026/04/18/t...
As Seattle Goes It Alone on Shelter, Homelessness Authority Faces Forensic Financial Audit
The audit looms large as Mayor Katie Wilson opts to keep the city in charge of a top campaign priority—adding 1,000 new shelter beds this year, and 4,000 by the end of her term.
publicola.com/2026/04/17/a...
There are signs saying do not enter/climb, just as there are at water towers and many other places you can hurt yourself. By your logic, we should in fact modify much of the city at great expense—by placing nets under freeway overpasses where taggers trespass at their own peril, for instance.
not at all! was just explaining why they probably don't do that (perhaps, like me, they're on a bit of a high horse about officialdom's demands for self-important capitalizations)
That's a matter of house style. I don't capitalize City, State, etc., nor do I use a lot of the silly capitalizations bureaucracies insist on (like "Mayor" when not used as a title, as in "the Mayor")
For the precise reasons I lay out in the post you're responding to. You can make roads safer for their most vulnerable users. You can't shrink-wrap the entire built environment of a city.
Postal service hiring ad with the all-caps caption "MAKE AN IMPACT," showing the back of a burly, thick-necked man wearing a bulletproof vest that reads "US POSTAL INSPECTOR/POLICE/FEDERAL AGENT"
Postal service hiring ad showing two men in bulletproof vests reading "POLICE" with the all-caps caption 'ARE YOU READY FOR A CHALLENGE?"
Image from postal service hiring ad showing the backs of two burly, short-haired men wearing bulletproof vests that say "US. POSTAL INSPECTOR"
under Trump, even postal jobs are now ICE-coded
As long as we have a built environment, people are going to find unapproved ways to interact with it, whether it's climbing, parkour, or bridge jumps. It's simply disingenuous to compare a structure that can be climbed to a burnt-out, abandoned building.
www.seattletimes.com/opinion/edit...
