A local angle on the ‘Welfare Queen’ myth/meme; Seattle Pride will be online-only again in 2021; Boeing loses almost $12 billion; are the City Council’s proposed new rules on SPD crowd control too lax?

The Duwamish fear getting left out of a bill mandating native history in schools; Amazon’s global workforce tops 1 million; Alaska Air’s pivot-to-cargo plan flops; the rich and connected try to cut in vaccine lines.

Inaugural poem set to a local funk-rock track; waiting lists for vaccine-clinic helpers are getting as long as those for the vaccines themselves; Tacoma police SUV runs over street-race spectators; Microsoft’s developing chatbots based on dead people.

Sanity (or something like it) comes to America; past inauguration memories; vaccines still in short supply; state GOP cracks down on its own ‘moderates.’

City asks artists and others to ponder their communities’ future; remembering one year of COVID in WA (and in the US); state makes a new vaccine distribution plan; man arrested at DC riot had tried to join Seattle protest groups, but was suspected of being a right-wing infiltrator.

‘Mario’ games you’ve probably never seen; state tries to speed up vaccination pace; ‘Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse might close for good; Nikkita Oliver to teach Seattle U law students about ‘abolition.’

Yakima’s local caste system as an example of the ‘American Gentry;’ Tuesday storm’s lingering damage; state starts next vaccination phase as COVID cases still increase; Hope Solo describes USWNT soccer as a ‘mean girls’ club.’

Canadian artists depict Seattle’s CHOP protests; still more local fallout from the DC coup attempt; a quiet but ‘weird’ opening to WA’s legislative session; how the Storm’s Sue Bird helped get Raphael Warnock into the US Senate.

Mukilteo’s new longhouse-inspired ferry terminal opens; the state’s COVID restrictions are re-renewed; homeless advocates kicked out of Fife motel; how to move forward from an awful year (not just ‘back to normal’).

Alternative (and distanced) New Year’s ideas; homeless advocates stage an occupation at a Fife motel; probable arson totals a Lake City strip mall; Seattle home prices just keep rising.

On the day after the Seven Gables Theater burned, we look back on some recent local arts and culture stories, trends, and tales of survival.

Where poetry, programming, and Amazon intersect; train cars with crude oil catch fire; homeless-services group refutes KOMO’s depiction of it; a few of the big COVID relief bill’s various pieces and their various effects.

Local home sports ‘Schitt’s Creek’ tribute Xmas decor; WA’s COVID curve may be ‘flattening’ again; Cal Anderson Park encampment hasn’t been swept (yet); Inslee issues new school-reopening guidelines.

A quiet, (very) socially distanced holiday time; COVID cases cancel a UW football game (and maybe the rest of the season); 45 percent of state’s restaurants could fold within a year; new push for NW light rail.

A live Santa greets kids from inside a plastic ‘snow globe;’ ‘several’ COVID positives among the UW football squad; a bomb scare at the Spokane County Democrats’ office; imaging ‘a future where Amazon rules the world.’