The first truly new blue pigment in ages comes on the paint market; ex-Evergreen profs turned ‘intellectual dark web’ celebs spread COVID lies, while right-wing militia people invade a Southwest Wash. hospital; activists for the homeless try to take over another hotel.

Sub Pop retail shop opens beneath a mostly-empty Amazon tower; WA records its lowest new-COVID-case count of the year; a Native-homeless advocate runs for mayor; no, Bill Gates doesn’t want to kill you on behalf of any lizard men from outer space.

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.

Painter Alfredo Arreguin at the state Supreme Court; fun with the Bernie-in-mittens picture meme; ‘Market entrance’ building gets historic status on third try; busting corporate windows doesn’t achieve anything.

The dawn of a new DC administration draws reactions from friends and foes (who aren’t all on the right); vaccine progress remains slow; UW men’s basketball finally wins a conference game; is Olympia Beer going away?

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.

Two Bells demolished three years after it closed; SPOG head Mike Solan refuses to quit; activists claim the FBI had a role in suppressing local summer protests; a post-COVID national recession could make homelessness a whole lot worse.

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.

Local reactions to the DC coup attempt (plus a smaller break-in at the Governor’s Mansion in Oly); UW expert on predicting the pandemic’s decline; Teresa Mosqueda won’t run for mayor; one of the last 747s is being sold as parts on eBay.

Remembering past women’s-rights leaders; WA’s got the nation’s 3rd lowest COVID rate (though WA GOP apparently wants to make it worse); regional cooperation on homelessness goes awry; can Seattle get real police oversight?

Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic leader quits, claims systemic racism at parent organization; a local singer becomes a social-media meme as ‘Bean Dad’; local Catholics want archbishop to speak up about abusive priests; some computer-animated New Year’s weirdness fictionally set at the Space Needle.

Our 35th (Yes!) annual list of trends that will soar and decline over the coming 365.

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.

Cal Anderson Park encampment swept, 21 protesters arrested; ‘J.P. Patches’ costar Bob Newman dies; some restaurant workers say they don’t necessarily want to go back to indoor-dining work yet; the ‘Twin Peaks’ connection to tonight’s planetary conjunction.