Inside another dying Sears; Sherman Alexie’s apology and counter-claims; making the ‘green’ cannabis trade less white; Seattle’s past attempts at an NHL team.

Renowned local author accused of harassment; Inslee drives his point in DC; ICE retaliation evidence; Scoop Jackson’s widow dies.

Office art gets artier at local corporate HQs; Jenny Durkan’s ‘State of the City’ speech avoids easy answers; an Ijeoma Oluo essay didn’t take down Al Franken (despite recent claims that it did).

Amazon Spheres open on a rainforest-esque day; T-Mobile vows to go all “renewable”; oil-by-train port trashed; whatever happened to hemp?

Relics found in the Rainier Square demolition; different notions of who’s attracted to move to the NW; State House votes to punish Sound Transit; #MeToo in science.

Color-coded photo-illustrations of Seattle’s massive growth; one of the NW’s finest authors passes; grim homeless stats; we miss the ‘Big One’ quake again; an ‘odd threesome’ promotes worker-benefits reform.

Inside Amazon’s latest physical-store concept; women lacking on NW corporate boards; using ‘mindfulness’ for racial healing; Pearl Jam’s ‘homecoming’ benefit shows.

The year’s final MISCmedia MAIL explores a city getting ever younger; an addition to the Charleena Lyles lawsuit; the end of Seattle’s crooked-est alley; and Sherman Alexie exhorting against hate.

For your Thursday edification: Sung and unsung heroines of history; local sports legend sued for harassment; original 13 Coins’ last day; new Viaduct demolition schedule.

We start a new month, and with it one year to save America from its ‘saviors’. Other topics today: making local history less white; Olympia’s ‘old boys’ club’ and its discontents; big kudos for the local lit scene.

The Seattle Public Library, in conjunction with my ex-Stranger colleague Charles Mudede, recently held a public workshop on the topic of “What Every American Needs to Know.”
Attendees were asked to make their own lists of subjects they want everybody to learn. With Mudede’s presence/influence, the topics nominated veered toward racial justice/awareness issues, past and present.

The event was inspired by, and named for the subtitle of, E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s 1987 book Cultural Literacy. Hirsch listed some 5,000 terms, people, historic events, popular movements, and concepts that ought to be familiar to citizens young, old, and new.

UW instructor Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University and author of the political-activism book You’re More Powerful Than You Think, recently revived Hirsch’s concept, as something to be “crowdsourced” from citizen contributions.

Since the library event, Anika Anand at TheEvergrey.com asked that site’s readers to nominate similar topics that every Seattleite needs to know.

Here are my own nominations, in 10 overgeneralized, inter-related categories:

1. Our history and heritage.

Why the Northwest is more “north” than “west”. The early explorers, missionaries, and fur trappers. The Nordic homesteaders arriving on the land-grant railroads. The Gold Rush and boosterism. How Seattle was “bourgeois from the start” (Roger Sale).

2. Our racial/cultural mosaic, past to present.

The rich indigenous heritage, and the people who fight to keep it alive. The Anti-Chinese Riots; the WWII Japanese-American internments. FIlipino cannery workers. Vietnamese refugees. The black struggle, from redlining to gentrification. Hispanic/Latinx immigrants, and their fight to stay.

3. Our homegrown pop culture.

Seattle black music/art (not just Hendrix). Seattle pop/rock music (not just Hendrix and Cobain). Seattle visual art and artists (not just Chihuly). Self-aware, self-deprecating humor, from The Egg and I to Almost Live. Twin Peaks and the “Northwest Noir” genre. Kids’ TV; drag clowning; neo-circus; performance art. Sports, from the Hawks to the Huskies to the hydros. Gone-but-not-forgotten restaurants, stores, and dive bars. Allegedly “Seattle” things we had nothing to do with (“designer grunge,” Fifty Shades of Grey).

4. Our boomin’ n’ bustin’ economy.

Timber and the original “Skid Road.” Railroads and steamships. The Alaska connection, from fishing to oil. Boeing. The Depression; hydro power as a “public works” project. WWII; “Rosie the Riveter;” Hanford. The Jet Age; the ’70s Boeing Bust. The baby-boomer entrepreneurs behind Starbucks, Costco, and the first microbrews. The early dotcoms’ rise and fall. Washington Mutual’s rise and fall.

5. Techie Seattle and its Boeing roots (really).

How a City of Engineers morphed into a City of Coders. The UW’s heritage in medical technologies. Bill Gates and Paul Allen’s “old Seattle” backgrounds. Why Jeff Bezos and Nintendo set up shop here. Video games as an art form. The “tech bro” stereotype and tech-biz sexism.

6. Our bio-region, its ecology, and threats to same.

The “natural Northwest” relentlessly reshaped, regraded, dredged, dammed, and filled in. Hanford. Trident. Clearcut forests. Depleted fish runs. Volcanoes, earthquakes, and wildfires. Climate change and weird weather.

7. Politics past and present.

Prohibition rum-runners; brothels and speakeasies. Labor radicals, and anti-radical “massacres.” ”The 47 states and the Soviet of Washington.” “Progressive Seattle” as an historically white-dominated movement. “Feel-good liberalism” vs. making the hard choices and doing the real work. Why gay marriage and legal pot were easier to achieve than economic or racial justice. The high-end housing boom; single-family neighborhoods; “Livability” vs. “affordability.”

8. “Seattle Nice” and its limits.

Why, personality-wise, we’re more like Canada than California. Nordic stoicism; passive-aggressive distancing. Why you MUST develop and use an “inside voice,” and stop screaming in public all the time.

9. Words and phrases and pronunciations.

It’s “I-5,” not “the 5.” It’s the Department of Licensing, not the DMV. There’s no “S” in “Pike Place Market.” How to pronounce “Puyallup” and spell “Weyerhaeuser.”

10. The (Real) World of Century 21

The future promised at the World’s Fair vs. what we really got. Making a better future, not just a profitable one. Saving our nation from social/political disaster. Saving our planet from ecological disaster. Saving our own corner of the planet from the side effects of its own “success.”

In Monday’s MISCmedia MAIL: What Michael Bennett DIDN’T do; ICE targets ‘sanctuary cities’; today’s Amazon compared to yesterday’s Sears; Seattle’s ‘Poetic Grid’ makes the PBS NewsHour.

Twin Peaks is back. Or rather, something mostly new under that title and with several of the old show’s characters has arrived, and it’s a beaut.  Today’s MISCmedia MAIL also looks at more Chris Cornell reactions; the death of a major local lit n’ history figure; one person named Grant dissing another; and a major Belltown arts-creation space going away.

It’s a post-Monday-holiday day but we’ve still got a full e-missive, with stuff about a local author’s dystopia novel rediscovered; the least-“Made in USA” plane Boeing’s ever made; employers who really didn’t like “A Day Without Immigrants”; and the Seattle rock roots of a late jazz legend.

Mayor Murray (and Sheriff Urquhart) proclaim they, and we, will not be bowed by the DC dictatorship’s anti-immigrant scare tactics. In lighter topics, we comment upon the latest fashion in space suits; how dense Seattle’s really gotten; a perky protest song name-dropping scientists and free thinkers; and the end of the deli-mart with the plastic cow on its roof (the cow’s staying).