Tech tycoons hype a buzzword from a dystopian (local) novel; an unnamed live-music gig was a ‘superspreader event’; Sound Transit salvages its rail-building plan; incumbent city attorney Pete Holmes drops to #3 in the latest vote count.

Local theater group’s Lego animation disses JK Rowling’s anti-trans Tweets; re-reading news stories from COVID’s beginning; WA reaches 2 million vaccine shots; Seattle schools might try to partly reopen even without a teachers’ contract.

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.

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

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.

Author Ted Chiang on how sci-fi doesn’t always mirror science and vice versa; how this cultural era can end (and why it must); a fatal police shooting in Woodinville; the city starts a real-estate entity to save and nurture art spaces.

Wildfires bring still more destruction and foul air; Tim Eyman sends out phony ‘recall Durkan’ petitions; Pullman cites WSU b-ball coach for a ‘mini block party’; Ijeoma Oluo on raising kids to survive a racist nation.

Sending WWII-era Japanese souvenirs back to Japan; Cal Anderson Park ‘swept’ again; police-oversight cases skyrocket; making a ‘City of Literature’ that tells more people’s stories.

Temporary ‘Black Lives Matter’ art/slogans adorn a UW statue’s base; a virtual community meeting about SPD gets testy; the same city councilmembers issue differing statements about police chief Best’s departure; a very hot weekend’s coming.

Tri-Cities composer honors atomic bombings’ 75th anniversary; Cliff Mass goes anti-anti-fascist, loses radio gig; UW researchers’ ‘protein scaffolding’ could help make better vaccines; SPD responds to critics with a new web site.

Meet one of the Black photographers of Black Lives Matter; Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda proposes a ‘payroll tax lite’; CHOP protest site gets a little more official; there’s no Comic-Con or PAX this year.

T-shirts to remember what’s not in your life; we’re apparently making great progress but can’t let up; Amazon fires workers who dissed its warehouse safety practices; Matt Shea claims the pandemic’s just a sham Marxist plot.

An anonymous street artist’s words from role-model women; a three-state pact (we’re by far the hardest-hit) will coordinate COVID responses; Inslee’s early releases may not make prisoners safer; a legal settlement ends the ‘Uber union’ push for now.

Speculation on the stay-home regime’s next stages and eventual end; Boeing’s small-scale restart; what it’ll take to revive live-music spaces; a local author’s tale of tattooed pigs gets the LeVar Burton treatment.