The Stranger

Our Favorite Bowls of Hot Soup in Seattle

Julianne Bell — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:20:00 -0800

Don’t worry, we’ll start yelling at politicians again soon. by Julianne Bell

It’s cold. Earlier this week we saw a few tiny flurries of snow, even! And while some weather reports suggest we might soon break out of this chilly, mid-40s prison we’ve been locked in, it’ll be by just a few degrees. And probably rainy. It’s the perfect weather for soup. So we took a break from screaming about Trump and City Hall, and switched gears for a minute to appreciate some of our favorite warm and comforting bowls of soup. Don’t worry, we’ll start yelling at politicians again soon.

Isarn’s Chiang Mai

Look, this whole soup is fucked up. The curry noodle soup from Northern Thailand comes out looking like a sculpture, with a nest of fried noodles perched on top of perfectly poached chicken and surrounded by a thick curry broth—creamy and spiced so it feels like it warms you from the inside out. When it’s served, you’ll get three things on the side: raw red onion, chopped pickled veg, and a deep red chili oil. After your first bite, you’ll be tempted to roll up your sleeves and forget about these little treats. Do not be that fool. These bits and bobs are what turn each bite into its own experience. Is your palate feeling a little tired of the richness of the broth? Add a little pickle on top of that spoonful of noodles. Repeat until you see the bottom of the bowl. HANNAH MURPHY WINTER

Situ Tacos’ Soup of the Day

Yes, the Ballard oasis Situ Tacos is primarily known for its fried Lebanese Mexican tacos, but soups are one of owner Lupe Flores’s favorite things to make, and it shows. As the shop’s resident animatronic parrot, Armando, occasionally squawks: “Don’t sleep on the soups…uh, don’t sleep in the soup. Uh, the soup is super!” They rotate weekly, and there’s a meat and veggie option each day, so you might encounter molokhia (Lebanese seven-spice chicken and rice stew), chorizo potato kale, Lebanese veggie stew, fideo con bistec, vegan pozole rojo, zuppa toscana, pumpkin curry, broccoli cheddar, chicken tortilla, or something else altogether. Whatever it is, it’s sure to be soul-soothing and seasoned to perfection—you really can’t go wrong. Get a combo with tangy, crunchy slaw and/or a couple of tacos for dunking. JULIANNE BELL

Halcyon Brewing's Vegan Butternut Bisque

I first happened upon Halcyon Brewing’s vegan butternut bisque by chance. Well, sort of. I was attending Ravenna Brewing Company’s annual “Soup Battle,” where local bars and breweries go head-to-head with their best soups, mostly because my good friend runs the event. Saddled with four delicious soups, I didn’t know where to begin. But Halcyon’s yellow-y orange soup with a swoop of coconut milk and a crack of black pepper on the top beckoned. I finished my bowl. It was sweet, it was savory, and it had a nice kick of spice—the brewery’s homemade chili crisp— that warmed my insides. Something vegan had no right to be so good and so creamy. Everyone at my table agreed that it should take the top prize.The rest of the Soup Battle patrons thought so, too—Halcyon’s vegan butternut bisque won the coveted Golden Ladle. NATHALIE GRAHAM

Pho Than Bros’ Veggie Pho with No Mushrooms and No Cilantro and Extra Broccoli

I’m not about to tell you how to order pho. And I’m not going to try to convince you that Pho Than Bros is the best pho in Seattle, even though every bowl comes with a sweet little custard-stuffed pastry puff. Pho is personal, pho is sacred. How I pho and how you pho can be—and should be!—very different experiences, each one custom-tailored after years of slurping and experimenting and learning the hard way that your sriracha threshold isn’t nearly as high as you thought it’d be. And, at Than Bros, I have perfected my order. I get a small veggie pho with no mushrooms, no cilantro, and extra broccoli, then I load it up with black pepper, a fat ring of hoisin sauce, a delicate squeeze of sriracha, and as many of the bean sprouts that I can manage before my husband says, “Stop taking all the bean sprouts.” I finish it off with a squeeze of lime and dig in.

This isn’t an invitation for you to try what I think is the best pho in Seattle; this is an invitation for you to find your own. But if you’re looking for a place to start, or a change up from your usual, to me, Than Bros is perfect. It’s my happy place. And it comes with a cream puff. MEGAN SELING

Metropolitan Market’s Cioppino

Metropolitan Market’s cioppino has been there for me since I was a child, when my parents would bring home a pint of the hot seafood stew on chilly winter nights when they didn’t feel like cooking. The rich, tomato broth, seasoned with white wine, and filled with a potpourri of shrimp, mussels, salmon, and white fish, will always feel like a luxurious treat, despite coming from a grocery store’s hot food buffet. Considering that cioppino was created as a way for fishermen to use up unsold seafood at the end of the day, I would advise not making it yourself. Not because it’s difficult, but because it will cost you approximately $5 million to buy four types of fresh seafood. Instead, buy a 16-ounce cup from your nearest Metropolitan Market store for a mere $7.39, and buy yourself a nice warm cookie while you're at it. AUDREY VANN

Biang Biang Noodles’ Curry Tofu Dry Mix

Massive Chinese hand-pulled noodles boiled to a perfect chewiness texture, doused in a delectable yellow curry sauce and flavorful broth with chunks of tofu and cabbage, in a bowl so massive you might need two people to finish it. It’s the hearty Asian noodle dish you dream of on a frigid evening. It’s Biang Biang Noodles’ Curry Tofu Dry Mix.

If you’ve been to Biang Biang, you might be thinking, Seriously? This isn’t soup, it’s a quart of hot oil. Well, to that I say: 1) oil is a liquid, and Managing Editor Megan Seling said we could write about “anything served in a bowl that is at least 50 percent liquid,” and (2) this oil is delicious.

Call it soup, call it hot oil, call it a bowl of molten comfort—the Curry Tofu Dry Mix does exactly what the best soups are supposed to. It satisfies your savory tooth and warms you up when the weather’s unforgiving. So if you’re asking me to grab a casual dinner with you on a dreary winter day, gimme those chopsticks and a Chinese soup spoon and find me at Biang Biang. MICAH YIP

Gorditos’ Vegan Pozole

The biggest mistake I’ve made in my life was going to Gorditos for years and only ordering one thing from the menu: A veggie burrito, wet, with a side of chips and salsa. It’s no Veggie Nolasco from Mama’s, but I love it, and I have probably eaten hundreds of them in my 45 years on the planet with zero regrets. Well, zero regrets until one fated day in December. On that day, I was finally turned on to other parts of Gordito’s menu. Did you know they have tacos! And enchiladas! They even serve breakfast! What have I been doing all my life!? And, most importantly on a cold winter’s day such as the ones we’ve been experiencing this week, they have soup. Their current soup is a vegan pozole that is an explosion of flavor in your mouth. A savory red base that tastes not unlike a brothier version of the red sauce they ladle over my beloved burrito is loaded with onions, zucchini, corn, mushrooms, and hominy, which gives each spoonful a toothsome, meaty bite. The broth is salty and rich, in a craveable way, and while eight-ounces with a side of chips is definitely enough to be its own meal, I recommend opting for the four-ounce cup, adding a taco to your order, and then proceeding to use every curved chip in the bag as your spoon. MEGAN SELING

Ooink’s Spicy Vegetarian Miso Ramen

If I am going to pay to eat soup outside of my home, it’s going to be ramen. And the best ramen I’ve found, for a vegetarian such as myself, is from Ooink. There’s a Fremont location, but I can only speak for the Capitol Hill spot—the one in the strip-mall above the lit QFC on Broadway and Pike.

My order is the Spicy Vegetarian Miso Ramen (it can be made vegan, and there’s a version without “spicy” in the title). Not to worry: it has a warm kick, but is not the kind of spice that will make you cough or harsh your tastebuds.

The sturdy buckwheat noodles have just the right amount of tooth, and the miso broth has depth without being too salty or greasy—common traps that many vegetarian broths fall into when trying to overcompensate for something they do not need to overcompensate for. The toppings are correct: a springy pile of kikurage, little heaps of corn and green onions, a few sheets of seaweed, and a handful of happy baby bok choy that are blessedly not soggy and therefore retain a hint of peppery mustard flavor. This ramen also features a pat of melting corn butter, and a subtle sesame dressing drizzled onto the greens. I get mine without the tofu skin, but that’s just a personal preference (or aversion, maybe, that has something to do with its resemblance to, um, the second word there).

The star of the bowl is the house-made chili crisp. I sometimes wait until I absolutely have to stir it in because it’s such a banger taste all on its own; it’s crunchy and a little smoky and a little sweet, and the sesame seeds and spicy peanuts keep it interesting as you make your way to the bottom. Vegetarian ramens can get weird, and feel half-assed, but Ooink’s well-balanced version is the way to do it. EMILY NOKES

I Saw U: Reading the Paper on the 1 Line, Wearing Glasses at the Steve Forbert Show, and Drinking Absinthe at the Bohemia Cabaret

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 13:00:00 -0800

Did you see someone? Say something! by Anonymous

Red Coat & Rainbow Cap + Pigtails – 1 Line

Mon Feb 16 – Bearded in a red coat reading a paper. You got off at Capitol Hill 10:25pm. Multicolor cap, 2 pigtails. We kept locking eyes.

Erika at Wuthering Heights

You introduced me to your Mikey, I introduced you to mine. I mentioned literary role play. Shall we roam the wily, windy moors?

Valentine's Sunday Bear Social

U stood around for moment. Starstruck didn't know what to say asked if this was yr beer so stupid walked away. U are still handsome like back in 2010

Elevator Mishap at Trader Joe's

You: cutie in a black hoodie. Me: blue coat & grocery anxiety. You asked to talk to me as the elevator door closed. I felt immediate regret. Do over?

Redhead with an Office Crush

We work on the same floor in our downtown office building. I smile at you whenever I see you in the hallways. Come talk to me if you’re single too!

V Day Pool side chat at Streamline

You - cute smile, me - cute dress. We people watched until your friends took you to Ozzie's. Wish I asked you stay a little longer.

Absinthe Angel Eyes

You: cutie with the green eyes enjoying a Green Fairy at the Bohemia cabaret. Me: someone you locked eyes with, wishing I was said Green Fairy.

Attractive woman with brunette hair

Wearing glasses at the Steve Forbert show at the Tractor Tavern. You were kind and bought me a beer at the shown on Valentines day. I'd welcome an opportunity to gt to know you more.

Is it a match? Leave a comment here or on our Instagram post to connect!

Did you see someone? Say something! Submit your own I Saw U message here and maybe we'll include it in the next roundup!

The Best Bang for Your Buck Events in Seattle This Weekend: Feb 20–22, 2026

EverOut Staff — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0800

Black & Brew Festival, Lunar New Year Family Festival, and More Cheap & Easy Events Under $20

by EverOut Staff

Your plans are in good hands with weekend picks from the Seattle Asian Art Museum's Lunar New Year Family Festival to a Pioneer Square Scavenger Hunt and from the 12th Annual Black & Brew Imperial Stout Festival to the 2026 Seattle Home & Garden Show. For more ideas, check out our top picks of the week.

FRIDAY FOOD & DRINK

Seattle Cider Taproom Farewell Party
It’s the end of an era, folks. After Seattle Cider announced its sale to 2 Towns, news traveled quickly that although the brand will live on under new ownership, February would be the last month for the cidery's beloved SoDo taproom. Whether you're a fan of the spot or just a casual cider sipper, come on out and raise a glass and celebrate the people, pours, and moments that made the space special. Plus, throwback pricing is on tap all evening, so head down to throw back $3 tall boys of the award-winning flagship Dry, $4 core ciders, and $5 for everything else. LANGSTON THOMAS
(Seattle Cider Taproom, Industrial District, free)

Slog AM: The Supreme Court Stomps on Trump's Tariffs, New Voter ID Bill Is Bad News, and Seattle Women's Hockey Captain Breaks Olympic Record

Hannah Murphy Winter — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 08:43:00 -0800

The Stranger's Morning News Roundup. by Hannah Murphy Winter

Good Morning! Did you see a little snow yesterday? It was spotty, and fleeting, and it might be the only snow we get this year, so I hope you got a taste of it. Today promises to be cold (low 40s), but probably dry, so get outside for a bit. Tomorrow, the rain starts again.

MAHA Moms Revolt: On Wednesday, Trump invoked a Korean-war era law that allows the government to force the manufacture of supplies “in the interest of national defense.” What’re we manufacturing? Glyphosate—a probably-carcinogenic pesticide that’s sold in the hardware store aisles as Roundup. And the anti-vax, raw milk chugging, horse dewormer-obsessed MAHA crowd is pissed. The founder of Moms Across America (named Zen Honeycutt, of course), which has led the anti-glyphosate campaign, called it “an egregious offense to what he promised,” and Republicans are worried that it could impact how many women vote red in the midterms. To be clear, MAHA is off base on a lot, but they’re right to hate this pesticide. Studies have shown that it very likely causes cancer. But it’s a Monsanto favorite, and every decision is for sale in Trump’s America.

UN Who? On Thursday morning, President Trump emceed the inaugural meeting of his knock-off United Nations, aka the Board of Peace, which he created and oversees. (Any nation can get a permanent seat, as long as they’re willing to pay $1 billion to get it.) In the meeting, Trump announced that the US was committing $10 billion in aid to Gaza, but Congress doesn’t appear to have appropriated that money, so who knows where he’s getting it. “Beyond that, there were few clear objectives from the meeting. It was like the United Nations General Assembly, if everything about the United Nations revolved around Donald Trump,” the New York Times wrote.

Speaking of Peace: Trump is sending the largest force of American warships and aircraft to the Middle East in decades, and said that Iran needs to strike a meaningful deal with the US about their nuclear program, “otherwise, bad things happen.” He’s given the country “10-15 days” to strike a deal that’s been deadlocked for years.

Israeli Settlers Kill Palestinian American: His name was Nasrallah Abu Siyam, and he was 19 years old. According to residents, settlers marched into the town of Mukhmas and attacked a farmer. When villagers intervened, Israeli forces joined the settlers and, according to residents, that empowered the settlers to start firing into the crowd. Settlers in the West Bank killed 240 Palestinians last year, a campaign that the UN says could be considered ethnic cleansing. Nasrallah Abu Siyam is the first Palestinian killed by settlers in 2026.

Tariff Tumble: On Friday morning, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump does not actually have the authority to impose his insane tariffs. So far the Treasury Department has collected about $240 billion in tariff revenue since Trump’s “Liberation Day” last April, and they could be forced to issue massive refunds, which, in Brett Kavanaugh’s wise words, would be a “mess.”

New Neon: Pike Place Market got its first new neon sign in almost 100 years. It’s mounted on the elevator shaft attached to the Waterfront Park. I think it classes up the place.

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Pike Place Market (@pikeplacepublicmarket)

Vote ID Law Would Do Its Job: Sen. Maria Cantwell and Washington election officials warned that the Trump-backed SAVE America Act (which requires proof of citizenship to vote) would turn our midterm elections into chaos. Fortunately, even Republicans in the Senate think it’s harmful bullshit, so it’s got slim chances.

Mom and Dad Are Fighting Again: Governor Bob Ferguson has some big feelings about the Millionaire Tax—namely, who should benefit from it, and who gets a tax break alongside it. But rather than working directly with lawmakers on it, state legislatures are complaining that at every stage, he’s simply taking to the microphone to bah-humbug their work. In this comically short session, they have just three weeks to land this plane.

The Latest from NWDC: Nurses at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma told KUOW that since the beginning of Trump’s second term, they’ve seen a spike in ICE detainees coming to the hospital as patients. They say that agents have repeatedly ignored standard practices to safeguard patients’ privacy, health, and safety, including “refusing to leave detainees’ rooms during catheter changes, shackling a detainee so tightly to a bed they caused nerve damage to the person’s hand, and refusing to wear required masks and gowns in rooms where patients had communicable diseases,” KUOW reported. “I feel like [ICE agents] treat [detainees] like they’re animals,” one nurse told them.

Are you a renter? Probably. And if you are, you have until midnight to fill out the mayor’s renter survey. This is an opportunity to tell the City how much your rent has spiked, what kinds of bullshit charges you deal with every month (wtf is a valet garbage fee, really), and any other challenges you deal with as a renter just trying to keep a roof over your head.

Coming Home With the Gold: After a perfect Olympic season, the US Women’s hockey team won the gold in overtime against Canada. Hilary Knight, the captain of Team USA (and the Seattle Torrent), scored the shot that tied up the game, and at the same time, broke the record for most career Olympic goals (15 of them, if you were wondering). The players are coming home next week, and the Torrent will play their first post-Olympics game against the Toronto Sceptres on Friday the 27th.

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A post shared by Hilary Knight (@hilaryknight)

More Olympics Shine: US figure skater Alysa Liu won the gold on Thursday, breaking a 24-year drought for women’s figure skating. For reference, the last time the US won a gold in women’s figure skating, Liu hadn’t even been born. And to make it even more badass, she claimed the win after a two-year break from the sport. The US women’s curling team also made it to the semi-finals for the first time in 24 years.

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A post shared by NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@nbcolympics)

Have you played Routle today? It’s like Wordle, but for the King County Metro system. You get the shape of the route on a blank background, and five guesses. Are you King of the Bus?

A Song for Your Friday: A perfect track to make your commute feel like a little adventure, or to keep you company while you take a walk for your stupid mental health before the rain comes.

The 2 Line in Seattle Is Just a Simulation, for Now

Charles Mudede — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:38:00 -0800

Have you been on the 1 Line this week? If so, you might have seen a little Easter egg on the schedule board: the 2 Line.

On February 14, Sound Transit started running the 2 Line in Seattle, but only between Lynnwood and Chinatown-International District. Its cross-lake connection will commence on March 28. Nevertheless the "practice run" to Chinatown-International District is causing some confusion and, in some cases, consternation. But what's the fuss all about? It's a transitional moment to what might be the biggest public transportation event since the Capitol Hill Station opened nearly a decade ago. And to be honest, all of the busiest stations on L1 are located between Northgate and Westlake. But, yes, it's not really the 2 Line, but the train says it is (I’m what I’m)—so, when riding it, as I did on February 16 and 18, you’re feeling the near future by way of the simulated mood of the 2.

There’s a real benefit for riders with this “practice run”: it really adds an extra train to key stations on the line. Look for yourself: If, say, you leave U District Station (after grabbing a gyro at Cedars of Lebanon) and want to get to Capitol Hill Station (where you will down a quick drink at Post Pike and Cafe), there is now a train running every 3 to 4 minutes. This is the kind of frequency that the riders of Vancouver BC’s automated SkyTrain enjoy.

So, now it goes like this: You enter the station, and as you approach the platform, you see the train is already there and about to close its doors and depart. You think about running–but it’s too late. Its doors close. It begins moving. Before February 14, feeling the whole world was against you when this happened made total sense, because every train on 1 Line had 10 minutes or more on it. But now with 2 Line you can sing to yourself these words, which are popular in African countries like Botswana and in some movie about lions that don’t eat their subjects: “hakuna matata.”

There will be another train in a couple of minutes. So, chill and think about some idea in a book that impressed you. Before that the thought is completed, “whoomp! There it is.” The train to take you to where you want to be.

Guest Rant: The Millionaires’ Tax Gives Corporations a (Tax) Break

Fatema Boxwala — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:30:00 -0800

If you live in the 37th (Southeast Seattle), the 36th (Northwest Seattle), or the 43rd (Central Seattle) Legislative Districts, it’s more important than ever to show up this Saturday and make your legislators explain why they’re giving big business a break while our social programs wither. by Fatema Boxwala

On Monday, the millionaires’ tax bill passed the Washington state Senate and headed to the House. Great, more revenue! But there’s more to it than a 9.9 percent income tax on annual earnings above $1 million—including tax breaks for big, wealthy corporations

This week’s unexpectedly strong revenue forecast ($827 million more than projected over the next two years) coincides with town halls across the state. If you live in the 37th (Southeast Seattle), the 36th (Northwest Seattle), or the 43rd (Central Seattle) Legislative Districts, it’s more important than ever to show up this Saturday and make your legislators explain why they’re giving big business a break while our social programs wither.

For example, the millionaires’ tax includes a tax break of over $550 million to big businesses making over $250 million. Not a single senator proposed an amendment to address this tax break and Gov. Bob Ferguson has supported it, even while decrying the absence of meaningful tax cuts for working people.

And then, right after the millionaires’ tax passed, the Senate passed SB 6347, repealing a recent increase to the estate tax. This passed with a 27-member bipartisan majority, with eleven Democrats casting a dissenting vote. Our state Senate appears to be attempting to play both sides: cutting backroom deals with big business to hand them huge giveaways while attempting to appease the majority of us who support taxing the rich.

While we will not know specific details about the proposed budget from legislators until Sunday, backlash against existing cuts to social services have painted an ugly picture of what’s at stake. In the Governor’s budget, there are roughly $800 million in cuts, including to education and healthcare.

Up to 14,000 children will lose childcare coverage thanks to cuts to our childcare subsidy program. Also on the table is a $569 million reallocation of Climate Commitment Act funding, steeply reducing state resources for climate resiliency and environmental protection. This follows the billions of dollars in cuts the state legislature approved last year, including devastating cuts to higher education and “the largest cut to abortion access in Washington history.” Still reeling from last year’s funding cuts to everything from food vouchers for working families, to subsidized child care eligibility for parents, to health care access for seniors and immigrants, we need to hear from our lawmakers what their plan is to keep that from happening again.

Fortunately, there’s still time for the House to amend the bill. House lawmakers can also reconsider HB 2100, Rep. Scott’s tax bill that mimics Seattle’s own Jumpstart tax on big corporations. As The Stranger reported last week, Rep. Scott’s payroll tax could bring in revenue by 2027, while revenue from the millionaires’ tax wouldn’t be available until 2029. (HB 2100 is currently stalled in the House Finance Committee—but as it’s a bill concerning the budget, House Democrats can choose to act on it at any point during this short session.)

So show up this Saturday and let your representatives know working Washingtonians want to tax the rich, ditch the corporate carveouts, and fully fund the social safety net.

Fatema Boxwala (she/they) is an activist, artist and computer scientist living in Seattle. She is the founder and coalition leader of Tech4Taxes, a group of tech workers advocating for progressive revenue in Washington state. Oliver Miska (any pronouns) is a political consultant with Solidarity Policy and currently under contract with Lavender Rights Project. Hannah Sabio-Howell (she/her) is the communications director of a labor rights organization in Washington, organizing with workers across sectors to raise wages, enforce labor standards, and challenge corporate influence.

Ticket Alert: Tame Impala, J. Cole, and More Seattle Events Going On Sale This Week

EverOut Staff — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0800

Plus, Hilary Duff and More Event Updates for Thursday, February 19

by EverOut Staff

Hey now, hey now, these tix are what dreams are made of! Psych pop-rock project Tame Impala brings special guest Dominic Fike along on a North American trek. Heavyweight MC J. Cole launches his first headlining tour in six years to support his reported final album. Plus, former Disney Channel star Hilary Duff makes her comeback with a new album and supporting world tour. Read on for details on those and other newly announced events, plus some news you can use.

ON SALE FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20

MUSIC

Aaron Hibell
The Showbox (Fri July 10)

The Cab
The Showbox (Thurs June 4)

Chapterhouse: Whirlpool 35
The Crocodile (Mon May 25)

Pop Loser #17: Opera Singer J’Nai Bridges Shares Her Go-To Karaoke Songs

Audrey Vann — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:00:00 -0800

Your weekly music news. by Audrey Vann

Welcome back to Pop Loser! This week, the Queer/Pride Festival lineup dropped, the Cass Elliot biopic was cast, and I have one special request from God (spoiler alert: it involves The Traitors). I’ll also share two new songs that I’m currently obsessed with, and in a new segment, Questions from the Cutting Room Floor, Grammy-winning opera singer J’Nai Bridges shares her go-to karaoke songs.

This Week in Music

The lineup for Queer/Bar’s Queer/Pride Festival has dropped with highlights like It-Girl Keke Palmer, Southern hip-hop queen JT (of City Girls), house music heavy Honey Dijon, TV personality/pop diva Erika Jayne, NYC rapper Junglepussy, and (oh my god!) reality TV legend/DJ Tiffany Pollard.

Kurt Cobain’s death continues to be investigated, 32 years later. After spending three days looking “exhaustively” at crime scene materials, an unofficial private sector team of forensic scientists claims to have found contradicting evidence to the official autopsy verdict, which ruled Cobain’s death a self-inflicted gunshot. The team claims that there was organ damage that “doesn’t happen in a shotgun death,” along with questions about the location of the shotgun shell and the unsullied nature of his hands. Following these claims, a spokesperson for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office responded, saying that they are standing by the initial autopsy ruling.

Mama has been Cas(s)t. A Cass Elliot biopic is officially in the works, starring Baby Reindeer breakout actress Jessica Gunning, who will portray the Queen of Laurel Canyon and Mamas & the Papas vocalist. The film will be adapted from the memoir My Mama, Cass, written by the singer’s only child, Owen Elliot-Kugell.

RIP Billy Steinberg. On Tuesday morning, the songwriter behind pop hits like Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” and countless others died at the age of 75. It was also announced that founding member/drummer of Irish punk band the Pogues Andrew “the Clobberer” Ranken died last Tuesday at the age of 72. On Sunday, Georgia indie rock band Manchester Orchestra shared that their drummer, Tim Very, had died at just 42. “We’ve all been dreading sharing this news as we are all still in absolute disbelief,” writes the band. No cause of death has been reported.

God, if you’re real, prove it to me by making this happen. Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher shared on X/Twitter last week that he’s “been asked” to compete on the next season of The Traitors. This is bananas, and I am so here for it. Actually, can we get both Liam and Noel in the castle, please!?

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Questions from the Cutting Room Floor with J’Nai Bridges

Last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Grammy-winning opera singer J’Nai Bridges about her technique, inspirations, and upcoming performance in Carmen for The Stranger’s forthcoming print edition. Since there were so many fun questions that didn’t make it into the final edit, enjoy the newest segment, Questions from the Cutting Room Floor, for a sneak peek of the interview. The Seattle Opera’s Carmen plays at McCaw Hall, May 2–17.

What is your favorite song to sing in Carmen?

Oh, my gosh. Honestly, I love singing her first aria, the Habanera (“L'amour est un oiseau rebelle"). I have to admit, though, it's always a little bit frightening, because it's the first thing I sing and it's so well known. There is so much pressure, but I just try to make it my own thing. I love singing it because everybody knows it.

Who is your favorite singer, opera or otherwise?

I mean, I have to say Whitney Houston for non-opera. She could never do any wrong with that voice—she could have been an opera singer, as far as I'm concerned. Her range was just so large and seamless. Also, she puts feeling and passion into every single word. I listen to her for inspiration almost every day.

For opera, it’s Leontyne Price. For me, she is voice—the color, the ease, the power, and the agility.

Do you ever sing karaoke? What is your go-to song?

I actually love karaoke. I never sing opera, obviously. I like to sing Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart.” It's low, and it goes high, and it's really in my range. I also like to sing fun things like TLC’s “No Scrubs” and Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”

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Music Events Worth Your Hard-Earned Money This Week: 2/11–17

Benefit for the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network with Tres Leches, Coral Grief, Black Ends, Flesh Produce, Clutz Feb 19, Baba Yaga, 7 pm, 21+

Cat Power: The Greatest Tour 20th Anniversary Feb 20, Paramount Theatre, 8 pm, all ages

King Sheim, Buddy Wynkoop, Russian Blue Feb 20, Barboza, 6:30 pm, 21+

Whitney Ballen, Small Paul, Don Piano Feb 20, Sunset Tavern, 8 pm, 21+

Lola Kirke, Sabine McCalla Feb 21, Fremont Abbey, 8 pm, all ages

The Seattle Opera: Fellow Travellers Feb 21–Mar 1, McCaw Hall, times vary, all ages

Bitchin Bajas, Geologist Feb 22, Sunset Tavern, 8 pm, 21+

Joan Shelley, Nathan Salsburg Feb 22, Ballard Homestead, 7:30 pm, all ages

Suzanne Vega: Flying with Angels Tour Feb 22, Neptune Theatre, 7:30 pm, all ages

Glitterer, Graham Hunt, Prize Horse Feb 23, Black Lodge, 7 pm, all ages

Want to see these recs a day earlier? Subscribe to Pop Loser here!

The Songs That Keep Me Up at Night

“While Feather Hawk Deer Hunter” by Lana Del Rey

Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, I love this song. We all thought Lana’s highly anticipated tenth album, Stove, would be a full-on country album, but if this first single gives any insight, it’s looking like it’ll be orchestral, cinematic, and witchy (one YouTube commenter called the track “There’s a Coven Under Ocean Blvd”). I heard it for the first time only two hours ago and have already listened to it 10 times. It’s catchy, intriguing, and features Lana-isms like “I got a nicotine patch for the summer / Yeah, I'm a ghost, doesn't mean I feel nothin' / Put it on my ass, no tan lines, summer / I love my daddy, of course we're still together.” Listen to it. Then listen to it again.

“Keepsake” by Ana Roxanne

Experimental ambient artist and singer Ana Roxanne has announced her first album in six years, Poem 1, out May 1. The album’s first single, “Keepsake,” is a dreamy piano ballad that showcases her vocals with angelic clarity, a big shift from her sound collage/instrumental style on her previous album, Because of a Flower. I can’t wait to see the rest of the album reveal itself.

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Slog AM: Woman Killed by Driver in Capitol Hill Identified, Dog Enters Olympic Skiing, We’re Suing Trump Again

Micah Yip — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:58:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Micah Yip

Woman Killed By Driver in Capitol Hill Identified: Her name was Lilliana Moreno. On Monday night, the 27-year-old was crossing East Pike Street when she was hit by a car making a right turn from Bellevue Avenue. She was trapped under the car for 20 minutes and died at the scene.

ICE Arrests: According to the Deportation Data Project, ICE arrested 2,000 people in Washington between late-January and mid-October of last year, a 140 percent increase from the same period in 2024. Roughly 47 percent of those arrested had no criminal history.

Seahawks for Sale: Paul G. Allen’s estate has begun the sale process, the team announced on Instagram. Allen’s will directed his sister/estate chair to sell all his sports holdings and donate the proceeds to “philanthropic efforts.” But don’t worry, the team is unlikely to leave the city.

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8 Skiers Dead, 1 Missing: On Tuesday, a deadly avalanche in California overtook a group of 15 skiers and guides in the Sierra Nevadas near Lake Tahoe. Eight are dead and one is missing. Six were rescued and one was still in the hospital last night. An avalanche warning was issued Tuesday morning. Authorities are investigating the decision to proceed anyway.

College (Re)Bound: After a pandemic-era decline, community college enrollment in Washington has rebounded. New data from the Washington Student Achievement Council shows a 7.5 percent increase in community college enrollment between 2024 and 2025. Four-year universities aren’t so lucky—undergrad enrollment only rose 1 percent last year, and actually declined 7.5 percent among first-term freshmen.

We’re Suing Trump Again: Attorney General Nick Brown and 14 other state attorneys general are suing the federal government for decimating clean energy programs created and funded by Congress. Trump is not supposed to do that!

Weather: It’s COLD! It’ll be mostly cloudy with a high near 40 and there’s a slight chance of rain and snow before 1 p.m. Tonight will also be cloudy with a low of 27.

Underdog: I have very little interest in the Winter Olympics. The only real clip I’ve watched is of this dog crashing a cross-country skiing course to join two skiers crossing the finish line. And really, it’s the only clip I need.

Ex-Prince Arrested: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested today on suspicion of misconduct in public office for allegedly sharing confidential documents with Jeffrey Epstein. The former prince was stripped of his titles in October for his association with the convicted sex offender.

Put it On My Card: Actually, don’t—I don’t want to pay extra. Starting March 1, you’ll be charged a 3 percent fee when you use a credit or debit card to pay for a Washington State Ferry fare. Added in the 2025-26 state transportation budget, the new fee is meant to offset the cost of processing card payments. Officials estimate it’ll bring in $7.4 million over the next two years.

Lunar New Year Began Tuesday: Looking to celebrate? Here’s EverOuts’ list of Lunar New Year events around the city.

Ramadan Also Began Tuesday: WBUR’s Here & Now put out this segment yesterday on the importance of the date fruit when breaking the fast, and follows reporter Hana Baba as she shops for Ramadan and talks with other Muslims about the date.

Loser Behavior, tbh

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:52:00 -0800

Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we'll illustrate it! by Anonymous

The coffee shop was busy and full, and you were sitting on the couch while your friend was sitting at the armchair. There was room on the couch and another unoccupied armchair next to your friend. Both of you were on your phones. My husband and I asked if we could sit in the empty spaces. You looked at us and then went back to your phone. We sat down for a minute, but then a bench freed up nearby and we moved there.

Five minutes later, your friends showed up and you started talking about us because we just sat down randomly. Dude, if you didn't want us to sit next to you, you could have said you were waiting on people. Saying nothing and then shit-talking about us is sad and lame.

Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we'll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty.

Jesse Jackson Helped Me Unlearn the Church

Marcus Harrison Green — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:59:00 -0800

This week, as we mark Jackson’s passing, the tributes have rightly talked about the “Rainbow Coalition,” about how he stretched the imagination of what a Black candidate could do and be in national politics, about how his run helped clear a path that others later walked. All true. Still, grief has a way of pulling the personal to the surface. For me, the most enduring legacy of that speech isn’t only what it meant for the Democratic Party. It’s what it meant for a seven-year-old Black boy sitting in his parents’ basement, watching the 1988 Democratic National Convention unfold on a flickering television, absorbing the world the way children do, through what adults do and don’t say. by Marcus Harrison Green

Most people file it away as a political artifact: the “Keep Hope Alive” speech, a concession with a crescendo that closed out Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign. But I remember it less as a footnote to an election and more as a key, one that cracked open a door inside me before certain kinds of cruelty could fully settle in.

Still, grief has a way of pulling the personal to the surface. For me, the most enduring legacy of that speech isn’t only what it meant for the Democratic Party. It’s what it meant for a seven-year-old Black boy sitting in his parents’ basement, watching the 1988 Democratic National Convention unfold on a flickering television, absorbing the world the way children do, through what adults do and don’t say.

My parents watched Jackson like you watch the sky after you’ve lived through storms: with hope, yes, but also with the disciplined flinch of those who know the weather can quickly change without warning. To them, his rise carried the ache of “almost.” A Black man on that stage, in that era, closer than any other had been to the center of a major party’s power, and still not quite permitted to sit at the head of the table.

I didn’t have the vocabulary for it then, but I felt the emotion: the nation’s talent for inviting us in its home just so long as we don’t rearrange the furniture. “Be grateful,” America says, “but don’t get comfortable.”

That was the late ’80s bargain. The Cosby Show reigned on Thursday nights, offering a version of Black success that was polished, upper-middle-class, and politically quiet, an American bedtime story where bootstraps were always enough and structural racism was mostly implied, never indicted. A ceiling disguised as a dream. The message wasn’t simply “look, we made it.” It was: this is the acceptable shape of Black life, this is what you can be if you stop complaining about what’s been done to you.

And then there was church, the other classroom.

Every Sunday, I sat under theology that didn’t just preach salvation; it sorted humanity. At our megachurch, Christian Faith Center, the world arrived pre-labeled: righteous and sinful, clean and contaminated. And woven through it all, like a thread that tugged at boys especially, was a narrow definition of manhood: tough, dominant, heterosexual, and unquestioning. The pastor would say there is only one choice for relationships: a man with a woman.

As a kid, you don’t call it indoctrination. You call it normal.

So when Jesse Jackson stood at that convention and spoke about gay and lesbian people as people, not as a problem or a cautionary tale, something in me shifted. The moment wasn’t loud in the way politics is loud. It was loud in the way truth is loud.

“Gays and lesbians, when you fight against discrimination and a cure for AIDS, you are right—but your patch is not big enough.”

I didn’t understand everything he meant. But I understood the part that mattered. On national television, in the bright machinery of American politics, without flinching, he placed gay and lesbian people inside the circle of concern and dignity, and he did it in 1988, when the country was still trying to treat AIDS like divine punishment instead of a public emergency.

So much of the “common sense” of that era was soaked in cruelty. Thousands had already died from AIDS, and treatment was not the world it is now. Ronald Reagan infamously delayed even acknowledging the epidemic in public. And in many churches, the disease was framed as consequence: a karmic pox for sinners, a story about them, safely distant from us.

But Jackson spoke as if the people dying mattered.

He didn’t talk about AIDS like it was happening on another planet. He talked about it like it was happening in America because it was. He talked about hospice, about rejection, about the isolation of being sick and shamed at once. He said those living with AIDS deserved compassion. Not disgust or distance, but compassion.

And in my basement, in my little body, I felt something break: not my faith exactly, but my certainty. The certainty that the adults who sounded sure must be right. The certainty that “righteousness” meant excluding people, and that dehumanization could be holy.

Homophobia often comes handed as inheritance, an “us vs. them” story wrapped in scripture, welded to gender roles, reinforced by jokes, threats, and silence. For Black boys raised in church, it can also arrive as armor. A performance of hardness meant to protect you from a world eager to hypersexualize, degrade, or erase you. The cruel logic of patriarchy: to be seen as a man, you must loudly reject anything the world codes as soft.

At seven, I didn’t have that analysis. What I had was a gut sense that something I’d been taught was not as sacred as it claimed. Jackson’s speech did not make me instantly wise. It didn’t turn me into a miniature ally with perfect language. What it did, more practically and miraculously, was interrupt the formation of a prejudice before it could harden into identity.

It kept me asking questions. And bigotry hates questions.

Jackson also modeled something rare, especially for a Black male leader navigating a country that punishes us for stepping out of line: courage that didn’t audition itself for acceptability. It would have been politically easy to ignore LGBTQ people, especially when the constituency was treated as controversial, expendable, or too risky to acknowledge. Plenty of Democrats did. Even later, under President Clinton, the country got “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, a policy that translated cowardice into law and asked queer people to make themselves smaller for the comfort of the state.

Jackson, by contrast, widened the frame.

Now, we should tell the truth about Jackson too, because it is not the enemy of gratitude. He used an antisemitic slur during his 1984 campaign and damaged a Black-Jewish alliance already under strain. Years later, he fathered a child outside his marriage, private harm that became public in a way that rippled beyond him. The man was not spotless. No one is.

But it is possible to hold the whole human and still name the consequential work they did in a particular hour.

I think about that now, older, long gone from the church I was raised me, especially knowing what later came to light about Christian Faith Center: allegations of sexual harassment, exploitation, and the familiar architecture of power protecting itself. It’s hard not to look back and see how often institutions preach purity while practicing predation, and demand moral submission from congregants while laundering their own sin in the language of “leadership.”

Jackson’s speech helped me separate faith from fear. It helped me understand that dehumanization can wear a cross, recognize that “righteousness” can be a costume, and that compassion is often the truer proof of belief than any shouted doctrine.

Near the end of that 1988 speech, Jackson offered a line that still guides me: “If an issue is morally right, it will eventually be political.”

At seven, I didn’t know I was being handed a compass. I just knew I’d seen a Black man on a national stage widen the definition of “our people.” And somehow, in the process, he widened me too.

Not into perfection. Into possibility.

So yes, let the headlines remember the campaign, the coalition, the “Keep Hope Alive” refrain. But as we mourn Jesse Jackson’s passing, I want to name this quieter legacy: that in a country, and a church culture, where cruelty could masquerade as conviction, he chose to insist on the full humanity of queer people. He did it clearly, publicly, and without apology.

And because he did, a Black boy learned that love is an ethic, not a weakness. That manhood is not forged in exclusion but in accountability. That faith, at its best, is expansive. And that interrupting inherited hatred begins with a deliberate declaration: they are people, too.

Keep hope alive, yes.

But let it be hope wide enough to hold all of us without exceptions or asterisks.

Think You Are the King of the Bus?

Nathalie Graham — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 12:43:00 -0800

I was excited to play. And then I lost. Twice. by Nathalie Graham

People who take the bus are superior to exclusive light railers, who are only cosplaying as serious transit riders. That measly track can be the gateway drug into the vastness of Seattle’s public transportation network. It can only take you two directions today—and a third and fourth when the Cross Lake Connection unites the 2 Line with Seattle proper on March 28. On the bus, you can go anywhere.

At least, this is what I thought of myself. I take the bus frequently and have since I moved here almost 12 years ago. But a new game has humbled me.

Routle is a new daily iteration in the vein of Wordle (for the logophiles) and Worldle (for the geophiles), except it puts transit route knowledge to the test. Made by software engineer and self-described “mysterious train-loving hacker” one-time San Francisco resident River Honer, Routle shows one unlabeled King County Metro (or Sound Transit light rail) route each day. Players only see the route’s shape—there’s no map of Seattle—and have five guesses at which route it is (wrong guesses will appear on the screen). As transit nerds will note, it’s missing a few ferries, doesn’t include rapid ride routes and is limited to the Seattle area. Honer says she didn’t include everything because “Seattle’s bus network is very far reaching.” She’s open to feedback if people think she should expand the routes, but doesn’t want to make the game too hard.

Honer started with San Francisco’s transit routes and recently released versions of the game for us, Portland, and AC Transit in Alameda County, California.

Honer made the Seattle version because she used to spend summers here. She figured it would be a good option for Routle because of our “good number of iconic routes” and we have a population of transit enthusiasts.

I was excited to play. And then I lost. Twice.

It turns out I only know the buses I know, from the four Seattle neighborhoods I’ve lived in.

My husband, a lifelong Seattleite, got yesterday’s Routle (Route 3) in two guesses. Last night, we talked about how many routes in Seattle we knew. We attempted to name where each bus traveled from Route 2 through Route 79. This is hard to do. He paused to complain about the neutering of the 43, which used to run all the way to Ballard, and the 48, which used to reach Rainier Beach.

I sent the game to my mother-in-law, also a lifelong Seattleite. She mused about it. She grew up taking one set of routes, then used another set in young adulthood, and a whole different set as parents. The transit routes we know are extensions of our lives at any point in time.

It’s the same for Routle’s creator, Honer. She used to visit Seattle in the summers. “I remember when the link tunnel was the ‘bus tunnel,’” she reminisced. “I used the 12 and 10 buses to get to my summer job at Pike’s Place Market [sic]. I was also there when the South Lake Union streetcar was opened.”

For me, I knew the University District routes well, but they changed when the light rail came. I remember taking the 45 to Ballard for a first date at the end of freshman year. I learned the 65 when I graduated and had to commute to my first job. Then, it was all Capitol Hill routes. (And others, but I will not be doxing myself, you freaks).

Slog AM: ICE Left a $200 million Hole In Minneapolis’s Economy, Waymo Uses DoorDash to Close the Doors of Its Cars, Will the Seahawks Visit the White House?

Charles Mudede — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:40:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Charles Mudede

The Seahawks basically destroyed the Patriots to claim their second Super Bowl. Now comes the big question: Will the team visit the White House? Back in 2014, they made the trip and celebrated with the then president Barack Obama. But things are very different now. Trump is violently attacking cities and not even trying to hide his racism. The Seahawks have a lot Black players and the city it represents is considered a “Welcoming City.” How can this work out? Rumours recently circulated that the team had declined the standard invitation, but it’s now reported that the whole business is still very much up in the air. Also not verified is the rumor that the Seahawks haven’t received an invitation from Trump’s White House. Maybe both sides just want to keep their mouths shut and let this difficult matter quietly pass like two ships in the night.

Yesterday, at around 4:45 pm, we at the Stranger’s office saw through the windows something that had the likeness of snow. Was it the real stuff or not? We couldn’t tell. Maybe this was a collective hallucination. Today, expect a low of 31, a mostly cloudy morning, some rain in the afternoon, and, yet again, no snow.

KIRO Radio is popping the champagne because Seattle's noble attempt to improve the labor standards of hyper-exploited gig workers has apparently backfired. Drivers are now earning “20 cents less per hour than before.” They blamed this drop on Seattle leaders who apparently have no contact with reality, with capitalist reality. And what the captains of this mode of accumulation never stop telling us is this: Labor rights and rising wages are the sole cause of rising costs and immiseration of the poor. Any other explanation is, according to them, not realistic. It’s just labor’s demand for more and more that’s the root of all evil, they say.

A quick thing about a book I’m currently reading. It’s called Capitalism: A Global History. It’s by German-born economist and historian Sven Beckert. It’s 1344 pages. I’m near page 900. But what I've learned from this book is that the natural rate for wages in capitalism is zero. And the rise of wages is, essentially, nothing but the resistance by labor to this natural tendency. Beckert doesn’t exactly say this, but he does make it clear that a capitalism without any regulation must lead to its form of slavery, which is the commodification of the body. Wages above zero result in the commodification of labor power. I will stop there and now turn to the robots of the 21st century.

The best story I’ve heard in a minute is that Waymo, which is basically Uber without drivers, is turning to gig workers, such as those who work for DoorDash, to close car doors left open by flakey or crafty customers. And how much does Waymo pay for what can only be called the human touch? $11.25. So the zero wage robot is not yet up to snuff.

Now, let’s turn to something that should really alarm Seattle’s leaders. Operation Metro Surge not only brought death, state-sanctioned lawbreaking, and general mayhem to Minneapolis; it also delivered a big blow to the city’s economy. The estimated cost so far of an operation that began on the first day of the present year and had nothing to do with protecting Americans from the “worst of the worst” is $203.1 million. The bulk of this cost is attributed to revenue small businesses lost ($82 million). The rest of the tab went to lost wages ($47 million), social services that experienced extraordinary stress ($17 million), overtime pay to police officers and other city officials ($4 million), and hotel cancellations ($4 million). The city thinks it will take years to regain ground from this complete waste of money.

Now that ICE is bringing its post-apocalyptic show in Minneapolis to an end, the border czar, Tom (Bribe Loving) Homan, is looking for the next theater. Homan: "I've said from day one that, you know, we need to flood the zone and sanctuary cities with additional agents.” That "sanctuary city” could be Seattle. And the cost of this performance, which is all it really is, will be terrific. The only thing that might protect us from this massive waste of time, lives, and money is our tech hub status, which means we play an important role in maintaining the only game in town, the gigantic AI bubble.

Minneapolis officials have released an estimated tab on what Operation Metro Surge has cost city residents so far.

bit.ly/4cqEfFq

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— FOX 13 Seattle (@fox13seattle.bsky.social) February 15, 2026 at 6:00 AM

So, you still want to talk about how high wages always backfire. Well, what’s this in the Seattle Times? The pay ratio for Starbucks CEO, Brian Niccol, is an astounding 1,749 to 1. Meaning–he earns $30,992,773, and the average worker earns $17,279. My god. The pressure to reduce wages to zero is way too real in 2026. Again, nothing but labor’s resistance to the true nature of capitalism prevents this catastrophe. If we do nothing, the zero law will be, to use the words of Marx, like “the law of gravity [that] asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.”

Let’s end AM with an ‘80s tune that compares love-enthrallment with the condition of a robot, the Pointer Sister’s “Automatic.”

Third Time

Dan Savage — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:10:00 -0800

Got problems? Yes, you do! Email your question for the column to mailbox@savage.love! by Dan Savage My partner and I are both AFAB nonbinary queers in our mid-30s and have been together a long time. We don’t believe lifelong monogamy is realistic. We even started our relationship practicing ethical non-monogamy, then defaulted to monogamy for many years. We now have two very young children and are planning a third in the near future. Between parenting and a longstanding libido mismatch, our sex life has been hard for years. When we do have sex, it’s good, it’s just infrequent (maybe 1-3 times per month) and logistically difficult. I’m generally content, and sex simply isn’t a high priority for me right now. Over the past several months, my partner has asked about opening our relationship again. I’ve tried to engage, while also feeling that this stage of life might be the worst possible time to experiment with our relationship structure. Recently, after a long conversation about opening up,…

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Slog AM: Rev. Jesse Jackson Dies, Millionaires Tax Passes State Senate, Anderson Cooper Leaving 60 Minutes

Vivian McCall — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:03:00 -0800

The Stranger's Morning News Roundup. by Vivian McCall

Millionaires tax passes Senate: After a three hour debate, the 9.9 percent income tax on earnings over $1 million a year passed with a 27-22 vote. Three Democrats voted with Republicans. Lawmakers approved an amendment that repealed part of our sales tax, but didn’t approve a tax break on baby diapers.

Legalize It! “It” being smaller, cheaper elevators. The Washington State Senate approved a bill aimed at culling onerous standards that prevent elevators from being built at all. Sponsored by mushroom (and ibogaine) crusader Sen. Jesse Salomon, the bill will direct the state’s building code council to take on the issue next year.

Conviction in Anti-Trans Case: Andre Karlow is facing five to seven years in prison for beating a transgender woman in the University District last year. A jury found him guilty of a hate crime and second-degree assault. A group of men joined Karlow in the beating, but none have been identified. Six months earlier, Karlow was convicted of assaulting another trans woman, a Sound Transit fare ambassador, when she asked him for proof of payment.

Another Day, Another Boeing Suit Over Deadly Crash: Twenty families have sued the plane-maker over the South Korean Jeju Air Flight 7C 2216 crash, the country’s deadliest aviation disaster. The cases, representing 23 of the 179 people killed in the crash, all allege a bird strike just before landing, causing the electrical and hydraulics systems to fail. The families allege the company kept outdated safety systems on the aircraft to avoid costly redesigns and recertification processes, even though modern systems were safer.

Weather: There’s a chance of snow before 1 p.m., and a chance of rain after. If snow does fall, it’s not expected to stick. Our snow-they-won’t-they situation continues through Thursday night.

Rev. Jesse Jackson Dies: The civil rights leader, two-time presidential candidate, close ally of Dr. Martin Luther King, and unbelievably influential American was 84. In November, the Rev. Jackson was hospitalized to treat progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurodegenerative condition. He was somebody.

Seattle Judge Back in Action: City Attorney Erika Evans reversed her Republican predecessor’s order to routinely disqualify Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases like DUIs and domestic violence charges. “I believe in litigating cases—not attempting to ban judges we do not like,” Evans said in a statement.

Tick-tick-tick-tick: Anderson Cooper is leaving CBS’ 60 Minutes after 20 years balancing the job with his other low-stakes gig at CNN. The gay dad of news said in a statement that he wanted to spend more time with his children. While he didn’t say he wanted to spend less time with CBS News’ Bari Weiss, it certainly looks that way. (In December, Weiss speciously held a 60 Minutes report on CECOT prison in El Salvador, bringing a ton of attention to the segment and herself.)

In other CBS News news, Late Show host Stephen Colbert says the network’s lawyers yanked his interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico before air on Monday evening to comply with the FCC regulation that requires stations to give “equal time” to political candidates and their rivals. News is exempt, and for the past 20 years, talk shows have been considered exempt, too. But the FCC chair Brendan Carr is rejecting that thinking. “Fake news” shows like Colbert’s shouldn’t count on the exemption. Anyway, Colbert’s show posted it on YouTube.

The Hated Haters: Wired has been monitoring a forum for current and prospective Homeland Security Investigations Officers where ICE Agents talk shit on other ICE agents.

Who Will Lie to Us Now? DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin is leaving the Trump administration, two DHS officials told Politico. McLaughlin did not immediately respond to their request for comment.

Guthrie Case Update: The 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie has been missing for more than two weeks without a suspect. The night she disappeared, a masked person wearing a handgun holster in surveillance video outside her home is shown wearing a backpack exclusively sold at WalMart. Investigators are working with the company to develop leads on this suspect. Guthrie’s family, including her daughter, “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, are not suspects.

Drag Race Episode Seven: The Rudemption of Myki Meeks

Mike Kohfeld — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:01:00 -0800

We’re finally done with Rate-A-Queen! The cast is back to our regularly scheduled programming with parodies of hot-button political issues. In the words of Jane Don’t, “it’s a good day to be a clown.” by Mike Kohfeld

“Y’all are playing chess, I’m playing checkers. Wait, what’s the thing?”

Episode Seven began with the queens still reeling from their two-week Rate-A-Queen ordeal, in which the Miami alliance came out on top.

On Drag Race, queens love to talk too much after winning challenges or getting safe placements. Athena did the same, insisting her play was honest and not at all about strategy while the other queens rolled their eyes. When you’ve just won a challenge, it’s best to keep your mouth shut.

As if this wasn’t enough, the queens were given the Rate-A-Queen receipts. Mia looked stressed to see her ratings exposed… as if the producers were going to let any opportunity for drama to slide. Nini was pissed that everyone had given her mid-ratings for her Mother Mantis bit, and let it get into her head: “Does everybody not like me?”

Kenya was pleased to have avoided the bottom through her alliance-building. “Y’all are playing chess, I’m playing checkers. Wait, what’s the thing?” Bless her.

Myki Meeks was rated in the bottom by the queens despite having a strong talent act, and the receipts nearly brought her to tears. In a T-shirt that said REVENGE, Myki looked ready to prove herself this week. Maybe she’ll go full Arya Stark and start snatching faces.

Emmy-Baiting Drag Politics

If you’re not living under a rock, you know the 2026 midterm elections are going to be crucial for prying at least a little bit of power away from the world’s worst people. Drag Race celebrated the occasion by bringing us “totally twisted political ads that parody today’s most polarizing issues.” RuPaul added: “I deserve a fucking Emmy for that line.”

The queens had a serious moment talking about the difficulty of living in red states with drag bans and the rise of violence against queer people during Trump’s second term. The most visceral account was Discord’s experience with a lifetime friend and roommate. Radicalized by right-wing anti-queer rhetoric seemingly overnight, they destroyed almost all of Discord’s drag and artwork. Discord compared the current conservative movement to a cult. Hear, hear.

Mia balanced out the heaviness of the political discussion with a spontaneous dance party. It was the kind of genuine moment that has been missing in contemporary seasons of Drag Race.

The Future Liberals Want: Foreign Trade and Breastplate Socialism

The Main Challenge began when the queens were given five propositions on draggy subjects like breastplate entitlements, kai kai bans, and adding clowns to the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, paralleling real-world issues like bodily autonomy, trans rights, and immigration. I had to remind myself that this is a reality television show about drag queens acting stupid, but was interested to see how the cast would navigate the line between comedy and critique.

Discord and Nini did a sound job with “Prop Kiki.” Discord adopted a pro-kai kai stance as the sultry, sister-loving Lydia Liquorup. (Queer vocabulary lesson #1: to kiki is to chat, gossip, or tell stories; kai kai refers to sexual relations between drag queens.) Discord’s stage-whispered hook, “date a sister,” is destined to become a queer vocal stim in the manner of Valentina and Naomi Smalls’ “Club 96” (All Stars Season 4) or Alaska’s “your makeup is terrible” (Season 5). Nini struggled while recording the skit, but turned out a conservative church lady arguing against sister-dating, keeping the pair safe.

Darlene and Vita could not have been more dissimilar in their performances for “Prop 4Real.” Vita has struggled in past performance challenges, and this week was no different. She landed in the bottom for her stiff portrayal of a “traditional” drag queen.

In contrast, Darlene’s “bedroom queen bimbo” was hysterical, with the judges calling her performance “really stupid.” So stupid, in fact, that Darlene earned a top placement for the week.

Athena and Myki had fully-realized and memorable characters for “Prop 6969,” which sought to ban foreign trade (Queer vocabulary lesson #2: “trade” is queer slang for a masculine, straight-acting man).

Athena sold us an eerily convincing Republicanesque character named Connie Cumminside against Prop 6969. Her lustful desire to ban trade was giving MAGA backlash to Bad Bunny’s recent Super Bowl LX performance.

Myki was the standout of the week, with a punny performance arguing for steamy relations with foreign trade: “I’m concerned American citizen Stephanie Miller. But you can call me Lollipop!” Her playful irreverence won her the challenge. It felt like a karmic rebalance after Rate-A-Queen.

Meanwhile, Mia and Juicy struggled to write material for “Prop DD,” where Mia argued to require breastplates and padding for all drag queens while Juicy embraced a natural, environmentally-friendly “hog body.” Mia got some laughs, but Juicy floundered.

The pair fell into the bottom three. (If there had been a lip-sync-for-your-life between Mia and Juicy this week after they tied in a lip-sync-for-the-win two episodes ago, my wig would have flown into the troposphere.)

Can Somebody Just Treat My Gonorrhea?

Jane Don’t and Kenya worked together for “Prop C,” naming the pros and cons for adding clowns to the LGBTQIA acronym. Arguing against Prop C, Kenya played a decorated diva concerned about how “drag bars have been held captive by silly-ass drag queens who prioritize jokes and concepts over gowns.” Not in Seattle, surely! *clutches pearls*

Jane Don’t played Daisy Funbuttons, the gonorrhea-ridden Professor of Nose-Honking at Pacoima Community Clown College (this is literally the stupidest sentence I’ve ever written). Her performance was Drag Race comedy perfection, and she was ranked in the top by the judges. We really need to just crown her now. Or at the very least, get her some antibiotics.

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I Can See Right Through Her

These Season 18 girls brought some serious budget to the main stage, and the see-through outfits of Episode Seven did not disappoint.

Nini’s candy-wrapper look was sublime. If winning was solely about runway looks, Nini would be in the number one spot.

Jane’s Leigh Bowery-inspired checkered bodysuit with a short sheer pink dress fit the brief, but wasn’t as spectacular as her past looks. I later learned that she crafted it last-minute because her original designer didn’t deliver this look on time. What is it with late designers for these queens!?

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For her see-through business suit, Myki Meeks expressed, “the quality I cherish most in a workplace is transparency.” Snaps, girl. The judges loved it too, with RuPaul exclaiming, “this is what the whores wear in Seattle!” Maybe Myki can come live here, too.

Vita’s Last Act

Juicy’s Met Gala-worthy tulle fantasy and Vita’s divine water goddess (it was giving Yemayá) were superb, but their performances landed them in the bottom. The rest of the cast reacted with shock. “Vita versus Juicy? Two people I thought were gonna make it to the end!” said Discord. “I don’t even wanna watch this.”

But this was must-see TV. Vita held her own, but there is no stopping the elemental force that is Juicy Love Dion on the mainstage. Set to Dua Lipa’s “Houdini,” Juicy swept the lip-sync with grace, emotion, and jaw-dropping skill, including a handstand that tipped backwards into a split. There was no way RuPaul was going to let Juicy sashay away, and Vita was given the boot. I hope to see her in All Stars!

Next week, it’s the challenge you’ve been waiting for (or dreading): Snatch Game! Either way, this is not one to miss. I’m ready for Jane to earn a second win!

Stranger Suggests: An Award-Winning Author, Young Bruce Lee, and Clubbing at the Cottage

Julianne Bell — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 11:42:00 -0800

One really great thing to do every day of the week! by Julianne Bell MONDAY 2/16

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart with Living Hour

(MUSIC) The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is one of those indie bands that shaped the soundscape of the late aughts. Their shoegazey, synth-spiked rock blossomed out of New York as the band played shows around the city and shared songs on MySpace (RIP). The Pains—as they're affectionately known—disbanded in 2019 after releasing five albums, but announced a reunion in 2024 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of their debut album with shows across Europe and North America. It's been over 10 years since the group played Seattle, and I can't wait to sing along to every word of "A Teenager in Love," a bouncy track off their self-titled debut fitting for the week after Valentine's Day. Canadian dream pop/fuzzy rock band Living Hour and Portland alt-rock group the Prids round out the lineup. (Vera Project, 7 pm, all ages) SHANNON LUBETICH

TUESDAY 2/17

Nicola Griffith

(BOOKS) Seattle-based author and self-described “queer cripple with a PhD” Nicola Griffith has received countless honors, including two Washington State Book Awards and six Lambda Literary Awards, and was inducted into MOPOP’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2024. Her novels Hild, Spear, and Menewood explore the medieval era through a queer perspective, and she also cofounded the #CripLit movement with the late activist Alice Wong. Her latest work, She Is Here, is a new installment in PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series, in which “today’s edgiest fiction writers showcase their most provocative and politically challenging stories.” Griffith’s contribution combines fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork to discuss topics ranging from disability justice to the distinction between love and ownership. (Third Place Books Ravenna, 7 pm, all ages, free) JULIANNE BELL

WEDNESDAY 2/18

History Pub: The Vanguard Generation: African American Artists, 1880-1918

(TALKS) Before the Harlem Renaissance, there was the Vanguard Generation, aka the first wave of Black artists and performers who helped shape American popular culture in the shadow of Jim Crow. Active in the years between the Civil War and World War I, many were the first in their families to be born free (or to attend college), creating art under extraordinary constraints. Drawing from newly uncovered archival documents, scholar Daniel E. Atkinson brings their stories of talent, conflict, and solidarity to life for this unique edition of History Pub. Hosted in partnership with Humanities Washington, this event is a reminder that Black innovation has always been foundational. (Spanish Ballroom, Tacoma, 7 pm, all ages) LANGSTON THOMAS

THURSDAY 2/19

Young Dragon: A Bruce Lee Story

(PERFORMANCE) Keiko Green is a playwright, screenwriter, and performer who splits her time between Seattle and LA, and has written for TV shows like Hulu’s Interior Chinatown and the upcoming Apple TV series Margo’s Got Money Troubles. Last fall, Seattle hosted productions of two of her plays: Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play, a wacky time-traveling comedy set in 1999, and Hells Canyon, a chilling horror thriller. Now, there’s another opportunity to glimpse even more of Green’s impressive range with the Seattle Children’s Theatre premiere of her play Young Dragon, which shows Bruce Lee as an ambitious young man finding his place in the world in Seattle. I’m willing to bet audience members of all ages will be moved by Bruce’s journey to becoming a “flexible, fluid, and flowing master.” Seattle Children’s Theatre recently made the difficult decision to pull a two-week April run of Young Dragon from the Kennedy Center due to the impact of the Trump administration, which makes it even more important to support local productions like this one. (Seattle Children’s Theatre, times vary) JULIANNE BELL

FRIDAY 2/20

Next Exit

(PERFORMANCE) Meet j. chavez, a Seattle theatre maven who won the KCACTF (Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival)’s National Undergraduate Playwriting Award (whew), for their opus how to clean your room (and remember all your trauma). Their new play Next Exit deals passionately, yet sympathetically, with a man named Miguel trapped on a highway (sans car, I think), who is communing with and deriving philosophical companionship from a dead possum called Orlando. Some deer come out, and a Lady In Yellow, and a sinister force that threatens to eat up anyone and anything lingering too long by the sizzling side of I-5. I’m not clear on how this all flows together. But you should indubitably find out. (Annex Theatre, times vary, all ages) ANDREW HAMLIN

SATURDAY 2/21

Club 90s: Heated Rivalry

(PARTIES & NIGHTLIFE) I’m grateful for the spark of euphoria that the low-budget Canadian hockey drama Heated Rivalry has brought to the internet over the last few months. No matter what horrifying apocalyptic shit is happening in the news, NO ONE CAN TAKE THE COTTAGE FROM US. Composer Peter Peter’s soundtrack to the blockbuster show is equally as hot-and-heavy and obsession-worthy, and episodes also include some banger needle drops. At this rave, dance to Wolf Parade’s "I'll Believe in Anything,” and reenact the haunted club scene as Harrison’s cover of t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said” blares. This trendy event aims to let off some collective steam and celebrate queer joy—all this sexual tension has to go somewhere outside of streaming “KISS!” at every Kraken game. (The Showbox, 8:30 pm, 18+) BRI BREY

SUNDAY 2/22

Bitchin Bajas, Geologist

(MUSIC) Don’t be deceived by Chicago trio Bitchin Bajas’ goofy name: They’re one of the world’s headiest groups. Evolving out of neo-krautrockers Cave, BB synthesists Cooper Crain and Dan Quinlivan and saxophonist Rob Frye have been enhancing their melodic chops, creating majestic tracks that would sound righteous filling Europe’s most ornate cathedrals. This past October at Neptune Theatre, they outshone their much more celebrated headliners Stereolab in a set that made me feel as if I were on five hits of Owsley. Animal Collective member Geologist (aka Brian Weitz) just released Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?, the follow-up to last year’s arcane, abstracted Americana LP, A Shaw Deal, with Sleepy Doug Shaw. The new hurdy-gurdy-powered album’s a mystical avant-rock trip that I dig more than anything his parent group have done. (Sunset Tavern, 8 pm, 21+) DAVE SEGAL

Slog AM: The Government’s Out of Money Again, Two Immigrants Were Released from Tacoma’s Detention Center, and Who Knows, We Might Get Some Snow

Hannah Murphy Winter — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Hannah Murphy Winter

Good Morning! It’s Presidents Day, which our president is celebrating with an AI-generated Time magazine cover and the quote: “I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter.” This is probably what George Washington had in mind, right?

The Weather: We had our taste of False Spring, and now we’re back to winter for a bit. Highs in the 40s, lows right around freezing, and we might even get a little snow later in the week.

Some Good News: ICE released Wilmer Toledo-Martinez, a Vancouver, WA man who was mauled by an ICE dog in December, from the Northwest Detention Center. He still has to continue his immigration case, but he’s doing it from home with his wife (who is an American citizen) and three kids.

And He Wasn’t the Only One: Greggy Sorio, a Filipino immigrant who came to the US on a green card, had to lose a part of his foot to infection, bleed out of his rectum for a month, and lose a “dramatic” amount of weight before a judge demanded that he be released from the Northwest ICE Processing facility in Tacoma. Sorio is able to access real medical care now, but he’s still at risk of deportation.

Another Shutdown: In a Valentine’s gift to us all, the Department of Homeland Security technically ran out of funds on Saturday while Dems in Congress try to fight for some limitations on ICE’s funding. Unfortunately, ICE and Border Patrol will barely be affected. And nearly 85 percent of FEMA employees and 95 percent of TSA’s are expected to work without pay through the shutdown.

ICYMI: Last week was a really good week for local anti-ICE legislation. City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck introduced a moratorium on new detention centers in Seattle, and the County and the Port are blocking immigration agents from using their non-private land. Next up: let’s talk about the CCTV and ALRP cameras.

Trump Bombs 39th Boat: On Saturday, the military bombed another supposed narco-trafficking boat in the Caribbean. This illegal 5-month campaign, theoretically to fight the drug trade, has killed 133 people. This bombing killed three.

Pity the Millionaires: According to the Seattle Times’s Danny Westneat this weekend, taxing the rich is generally a popular and successful proposition. We learned that last week when, it turns out, the tax meant to fund our Social Housing Developer brought in more than double what was projected in its first year. (As Mayor Katie Wilson put it, this city is “filthy rich.”) And we know that the Millionaire Tax currently scooching through the leg is wildly popular. But Dems in the state leg (and Jamie Pedersen, specifically) are still considering a rollback for our Estate Tax to avoid the myth of the Fleeing Rich People.

Sheriff Certification: Right now in our state law, elected sheriffs are required to get certified by the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission within a year of taking office. Seems reasonable, right? But right now, if they just… don’t do it, there’s nothing anyone can do about that. The state legislature introduced a bill that would oust sheriffs who aren’t certified. So naturally, Pierce County’s hyperconservative, transphobic Sheriff Keith Swank thinks it’s unfair.

A Headline From Popular Mechanics to Breakup the Doldrums Today: “Jesus Was a Psychedelic Mushroom, a Controversial Theory Suggests. Could It Reshape Christianity Forever?”

Olympic Breakdown: NBC spent the first half of the games talking about American figure skater Ilia “Quad God” Malinin as the new face of the sport and the inevitable gold medalist. And he is the only person who’s ever landed a quad axel in an international competition. But in his final skate in the competition, the 21-year-old fell twice, struggled to deliver any of the quad jumps he’s famous for, and ended up placing eighth in the competition. Watching reporters try to make him explain what happened within minutes of his walking off the ice was brutal, and he handled it with a lot of grace. He told the Athletic that he was feeling overwhelmed when he got onto the ice. “I just felt like all the just traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head,” he said. “And there’s just like so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there and I just did not handle them.” We’ll see him again in four years, and by then he’ll surely have figured out how to fight the yips.

The Curlers Are Fighting: Both the men’s and women’s Canadian curling teams were accused of cheating—both for getting too handsy with the stone after they released it. And if you’ve watched curling, you know it’s a very mild-mannered sport (they’ve got brooms for fuck’s sake), but the head of the Men’s curling team threw around enough “fucks” that news reports called the exchange NSFW.

Wanna watch some of the action for yourself? Our local Granite Curling Club is throwing watch parties all weekend.

They Don’t Make ’Em Like They Used to: Naturally, when Olympians medal, they fuckin’ party. And who would take their medal off?? But it turns out, someone cut some corners on this year’s medals, and they’re popping right off their ribbons while the athletes celebrate. “Don’t jump in them. I was jumping in excitement and it broke,” said women’s downhill ski gold medalist Breezy Johnson. “I’m sure somebody will fix it. It’s not crazy broken but a little broken.”

Fun Olympics Fact: There’s a move in ice dancing called a twizzle. You’re welcome.

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Eddie Lin's District 2 Is Racially Diverse

Charles Mudede — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0800

The former assistant attorney for the Seattle City Attorney’s Office easily won The Stranger's endorsement. His big message? Seattle needs more housing, and from all sectors: private, parastatal, social. But is he too soft on cops? by Charles Mudede

I enter Cal Anderson Park. It’s 10:15 a.m. The sky is bright blue with long and high clouds. The sun is low. And a seagull stands on top of the city’s best fountain. What’s on its mind? On the concrete rim that circles the fountain’s pooled water, someone wrote with a spray can: “Death to AmeriKKK!” Now that’s on my mind. US fascism.

Unbeknownst to me, Councilmember Eddie Lin is also in the park, also near the fountain. In November 2025, he won District 2’s special election by nearly 40 points. On December 2, he was sworn in. Today, we are meeting at The Stranger’s office for a quick check-in. How is it going so far? Is he working on his promises? Is the job harder than he expected? That sort of thing. While talking on the phone about some community matter, Lin spots me. Does he also notice the contemplative seagull on the fountain or the anti-fascist graffiti?

At 10:35, we are in The Stranger’s conference room. It has a view of the rainbow crosswalk next to the Wildrose and, in the distance, two towers that will soon have the repurposed corpse of a Boeing 747 near the ground floors between them. I was introduced to Eddie Lin in this conference room in June of 2025 for the SECB endorsement meeting for the primaries. The former assistant attorney for the Seattle City Attorney’s Office easily won our endorsement. His big message? Seattle needs more housing, and from all sectors: private, parastatal, social.

“I saw you in the park,” Lin says to me as he places his phone on the conference table. “Funny you should bring that up,” I say. “I was thinking about facism in the US while crossing the park. And [you] being not only a person of color but the one who represents the most diverse district in Seattle, I want to begin by talking about ICE. When they come, they are coming for us. Is there really anything that can be done?” I also live in District 2.

Lin explains that he and Erika Evans, the new city attorney, are looking at the options closely and working with immigrant professionals and activists to prepare and protect all of the members of the community, many of whom are from Somalia, from what’s happening in Minneapolis. But, I say, ICE still just breaks the law. They break into homes without warrants. We saw this happen to an American citizen, ChongLy Thao. ICE just disregarded the law. Treated the Hmong American with no record like a criminal. Trump has made it loud and clear that this agency operates outside of conventional law. They can use excessive force and even act as if they can kill people with impunity. How can Seattle prepare for a federal organization that’s operating like a street gang?

After a moment's thought, Lin puts on his lawyer hat and says it like it is: “There are a couple things for me. One: There are certain crimes committed [by ICE agents] that are not just federal crimes. They're also state crimes. Murder is a state crime that does not [in Washington] have a statute of limitation. And it can't be pardoned by the president, and so, you know, I think, these federal agents need to be worried about that. The president is trying to send this message that he will protect them and pardon them. He can't pardon a state crime. So, he's going to be out of office someday. [And] Republicans will not be in control forever. They can't protect these people forever. So, I think we need to make these agents understand this. Yes, the statute of limitations for excessive force is something like five years. Yes, I would like it to be longer. But that is the way I’m looking at it. You are not protected from state crimes.”

When I ask about how things have been since he took office, he brightens a little and explains that, to be honest, not much has happened. He was sworn in. He made the transition, and he is now settling in. Then I ask about his top priority: affordable housing. Any new developments in that direction?

He is honest. Not much has happened in the immediate sense because housing is always a long-term commitment. “Even if we change zoning rules,” he says, “it’s still going to take years to see the results. The kind of housing crisis we are in now was caused many years ago. … But we still have to deal with the homeless crisis. That has to be done right now. … So, I support things like the tiny home villages or [other forms of] transitional housing. I'm supportive of [Mayor Katie Wilson’s] focus on that and want to do what I can to support her. Whether it's with resources, finding locations, or permitting, or land-use issues. But I think the whole city should be a part of transitional housing. Not just South Seattle.”

I bring up the fact that, though he’s considered a progressive, some think he is a touch soft on cops. He seems a little surprised by this, but it was mentioned in The Stranger’s 2025 primary endorsement. In response, Lin brings up that he, along with Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Rob Saka, voted against the police guild contract because it was woefully inadequate when it came to police accountability. Lin leaves it at that. Action counts more than words.

I Saw U: Making Eye Contact at the ICE Protest, Winning a Prize on the Claw Machine, and Looking Like Chad Michael Murray with Kurt Cobain Hair

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:00:00 -0800

Did you see someone? Say something! by Anonymous

Mullet 4 Mullet at the Ice Protest: Revolutionary Eye Contact

You: pink/purple curly mullet cutie carrying a long sign Me: gray/black mullet w boot sign. We locked eyes many a time, let’s go on a date? FUCK ICE!

Southcenter skate claw machine

You: short masc in a hat. Me: red jacket zombie shirt. You watched me win a prize for my friend’s birthday. I should have won you one too! Forgive me?

Benbow 80's Nohjty

You're Lisa charming smile in black shoulder length hair, my name is Stanton dark hair wearing black with a Debra Harry Blonde t shirt coffee?

Say She She @ Showbox, 1/31

You: sleepy eyes, strong nose, beanie. Me: glittery earrings, glasses, strappy top. Smiled at you again as I left with my (platonic) pal. Coffee?

yoga on 1/21..more than just the sauna making me sweat

You warned me about the faulty bathroom lock..I eavesdropped on your conversation about dating shows..let me be a contender? :)

SIFF Uptown 2025

You used to work in the ticket booth. You looked like Chad Michael Murray with Kurt Cobain hair. Where did you go!

Best Bangs at Macrina Bakery

You're the stunning tall beauty with bangs and a great smile at Macrina Bakery in Maple Leaf. We talked about movies. I'd love to continue the convo!

Goth Cutie outside of Corner Pocket

We talked for a little bit about music, but I was too nervous to ask about your number. Give me a chance to make up for my slip.

Is it a match? Leave a comment here or on our Instagram post to connect!

Did you see someone? Say something! Submit your own I Saw U message here and maybe we'll include it in the next roundup!

Look, I Didn’t Want to Like Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights

Audrey Vann — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0800

But I Would Absolutely Let Jacob Elordi Be Mean to Me

by Audrey Vann

I think anyone who has read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights can agree that it’s a challenging read. Perspectives change chapter to chapter, Joseph the servant’s dialogue is basically unreadable, and most of Heathcliff and Cathy’s love story is played out through the next generation after—spoiler alert—Cathy dies during childbirth. In Emerald Fennell’s adaptation, she focuses on the most engaging elements of the book: Heathcliff and Cathy’s love, passion, and mutual destruction.

The film never claimed to be a perfect mirror of the book. Fennell herself said, when explaining the quotes around the title of her adaption: “What I can say is I'm making a version of [the book]. There's a version that I remembered reading that isn't quite real. And there's a version [where] I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn't.”

With this in mind, she was successful. Each character felt like a doll Fennell uses to play out her version of the story—the obsessive childhood bond between Heathcliff and Cathy at Wuthering Heights (Cathy’s family home), Cathy’s eventual choice of social status over love, her early death, and Heathcliff’s lifelong spiral into revenge. A literal doll motif continuously shows up in the film, too, beginning with a young Cathy, who watches a man being hanged while tightly clutching her doll. Again, when Cathy marries the wealthy suitor Linton (Shazad Latif), and her new sister-in-law, Isabella (Alison Oliver), gifts her a handmade doll made using Cathy’s own collected hair. And, most notably, in the large dollhouse replica of Thrushcross Grange, the Linton estate, that stands looming behind the dining-room table. So, who better to play the starring role than Barbie herself, Margot Robbie?

At first, I was highly skeptical of the casting choices. Jacob Elordi was not at all how I imagined the scrappy, tortured, and probably-not-white orphan boy Heathcliff. But the longer I sit with the film, the more I can accept that he’s one of the only actors who could make this complex character work on screen. Brontë’s Heathcliff is cruel, insensitive, and brooding, and throughout the novel, I thought, why in the world are these women lusting after such an unlikable brute? But Elordi as Heathcliff—sweaty, grinning, and aroused—makes it make sense. You, too, would fold under the spell of his dark eyes with his fingers in your mouth. And, although Fennell’s interpretation of Linton is far more likable than Brontë’s, the choice is clear: Heathcliff eats Cathy out and licks the tears from her cheeks. Linton rails her in missionary while she dissociates.

Perhaps the most surprising element (and what I anticipate being the most controversial) is the innocent Isabella’s consent to Heathcliff’s cruel treatment of her. In the film, Heathcliff seduces Isabella (and later asks for her hand in marriage) only to punish Cathy, which he says explicitly. “Do you want me to stop?” he asks, several times, while taking off her nightgown. Isabella shakes her head no. After they marry, Nelly (Cathy’s companion, played by Hong Chau) stops by to see the newlyweds, only to find Isabella sporting a dog collar and chained up on her hands and knees, literally eating out of Heathcliff's hands. Nelly, horrified, attempts to free her, only to realize that the chains are not attached to anything—Isabella is a willing participant in this sadistic relationship. (Believe it or not, this is not how things go in Brontë’s 1847 novel.)

Elordi has managed to become the internet’s boyfriend through playing frightening men (see: Euphoria, Priscilla, Frankenstein). I would absolutely let that man be mean to me, and that’s what makes this film an alluring dollhouse to play inside.

Many people, including myself, were outraged upon the trailer’s release due to the not-period-accurate costumes. How silly I feel about that now! While living at Wuthering Heights, Cathy dresses in tattered cotton skirts and billowing linen blouses. Once she marries Linton, everything turns synthetic—iridescent lamé dresses, tight corsets, gaudy costume jewelry, and rhinestones glued to her cheeks—essentially, the wardrobe I would have dreamed up for myself as a 5-year-old who was obsessed with princesses and pop stars. The costuming plays a larger role in the film to show that Cathy is actually restricted by Linton, despite his wealth and status, and can only breathe in the arms of Heathcliff. To sum it up, the costumes are, as Aretha Franklin once said so eloquently: “great gowns, beautiful gowns.” Fun to look at, but not so fun to be trapped inside of.

This contrast between organic and synthetic is also present in Charli XCX’s soundtrack, which is equal parts epic string score and moody electronic pop. It isn’t as jarring in this period piece as you might imagine it to be.

As other critics have already noted, this is an extremely wet movie, soaked in uncooked egg, blood, spit, tears, snail slime, cooking oil, and rain, which adds a visceral quality to the film. Its lush, tactile visuals evoke whimsical movies of the past like the arthouse pornography of Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, surrealist stop-motion master Jan Švankmajer, the later films of Ingmar Bergman (Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander), and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. All things I suggest watching if you find yourself enjoying this decadently horny movie.

Look, I didn’t want to like it. I walked into the theater as a skeptic, but left feeling enraptured by Fennell's vision. I give it four out of five broken eggs (see the movie and you’ll understand).

The Best Bang for Your Buck Events in Seattle This Weekend: Feb 13–15, 2026

EverOut Staff — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0800

Sound Off!, Tết in Seattle, and More Cheap & Easy Events Under $20

by EverOut Staff

There's lots to love in our weekend guide, with festive events from Sound Off! 2026 to Tết in Seattle and from the Petit Troll Mardi Gras Parade to Sweetheart Book Fair. Plus, if the urge for new ink strikes, go get a Friday the 13th flash tattoo!

FRIDAY LIVE MUSIC

Slumber Party: Dalaine, Henry Mansfield
A concert in an artisanal chocolate shop that encourages wearing pajamas? Sign me up. Owned and operated by Seattle musician and chocolatier Aaron Lindstrom, Cocoa Legato hosts a few intimate shows each week, befitting of the shop's name—"legato" is an Italian musical term used to describe music played in a smooth and flowing way. This Friday's show features two incredible local acts: queer indie pop artist Henry Mansfield with a string ensemble and folk singer-songwriter Dalaine, whose 2023 NPR Tiny Desk entry was highlighted as one of their "Entries We Love." Bring your crush, your kids, your blankets and stuffies, and get ready for a Valentine's eve that's sweet in more ways than one. SHANNON LUBETICH
(Cocoa Legato, Greenwood, $15)

Local Lawmakers Are Finally Moving Against ICE

Hannah Murphy Winter — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 09:12:00 -0800

Impeding ICE with the combined powers of the city, county and the port. by Hannah Murphy Winter

This morning, Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck announced legislation to bar new or expanded detention facilities from being built within city limits. At the same time, Seattle Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa announced an order that would bar any expansion of immigration activity on Port land, and a second that provides civil rights education to anyone working on Port property.

Their announcement follows an anti-ICE-filled week. On Tuesday, City Council’s public safety committee passed a bill from Councilmember Maritza Rivera that struck dated language from the Municipal Code requiring city employees to “cooperate with, not hinder” immigration enforcement. On the same day, the Port Commission unanimously passed an order requiring that Port police clearly identify themselves so the public is less likely to confuse them with immigration enforcement. And yesterday, the County took action: County Executive Girmay Zahilay signed an executive order barring ICE from non-public spaces on King County-owned properties (like Mayor Katie Wilson did in Seattle last month), and County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda introduced a bill to codify his order into law.

None of this can stop ICE from operating in Seattle. But it can impede the agency.

The Detention Moratorium

As of last month, ICE was holding more than 73,000 people in detention across the country—a record high—and they expanded into 104 new detention facilities, almost doubling from the previous year. ICE is not releasing people on bail, so that number will continue to multiply. So, too, will the number of detention facilities. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill accounted for that. He set aside $45 billion, enough funding to to imprison another 135,000 people in new facilities by 2029, according to the American Immigration Council.

The closest ICE detention facility to Seattle is the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma. But in December, the federal government posted a pre-solicitation notice from the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, putting local contractors on notice that they were looking to build a facility about the same size as the NWDC, able to detain 1,600 people.

Rinck’s emergency legislation would block the construction of that facility or any other within city limits for the next year, giving City Council time to explore more permanent restrictions on ICE expansion. SeaTac actually beat her to the punch, passing their own detention moratorium this week.

The bill treats the threat of an ICE detention center as a bureaucratic land use issue, arguing that the city needs time to address any “mitigation measures" needed to build a facility in “Seattle’s dense urban environment."

“We need to be using every tool at our disposal to be really ensuring that we're not eating this administration's unconstitutional work and lawless agenda, and even if that means looking to land use as a tool,” Rinck tells The Stranger.

Rinck says she plans to share her bill with the Local Progress network, so other cities can copy her homework.

Rinck’s office says that Council President Joy Hollingsworth has agreed to allow the bill to skip the Land Use Committee, and instead be heard by the full council on Tuesday. Council could pass the bill as soon as February 24.

The Port’s Anti-ICE Agenda

Earlier this week, the Port Commission passed an order that helps make ICE clearly identifiable to the public—requiring that Port police are clearly identifiable, and can’t be confused with immigration enforcement.

Port Commissioner Hasegawa also plans to introduce two orders to regulate how ICE can interact with the Port, both of which will be introduced on February 24. The first order provides Know Your Rights education to anyone that’s working in the airport or other Port property, like the shops and restaurants at SeaTac. Immigration enforcement unavoidably operates in those areas, Hasegawa told The Stranger, and this order gives those workers the best chance to protect themselves and their colleagues.

The second mirrors the orders from Mayor Wilson and County Executive Zahilay: banning immigration enforcement from expanding their use of Port land for their operations. The presence of immigration at the Port is, again, unavoidable, Hasegawa acknowledges, but “the use of Port properties is narrow, and that it has to have an industrial purpose for one of our industries, our industry is not the prison industrial complex,” she says.

The commission could vote on both orders the day they're introduced, and Hasegawa says she's confident they'll pass.

The Ban from County Property

Mosqueda’s bill would lock Zahilay’s executive order into law, blocking ICE from entering (without a warrant) non-public areas of buildings, parking lots, garages, and vacant lots. They also can’t be used as an ICE staging area, or to process detainees. The bill would also require that County Executive Zahilay identify properties that ICE is likely to try to commandeer, and to preemptively plan for better security measures.

Mosqueda also accounted for private land. One whole section of the bill is dedicated to designing a template that reads:

"This property is a Stand Together King County partner. No agent of the federal government, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), may enter these premises for purposes of civil immigration enforcement, absent a valid judicial warrant or court order. This property may not be used for civil immigration enforcement operations, including as a staging area, processing location, or operations base."

You can also just write that on your door with some printer paper and a Sharpie, as we saw all over Minneapolis in the last few weeks.

Slog AM: SPD's May Day USA Fuck Up, EPA Won't Regulate Greenhouse Gases Anymore, Michigan Town Must Slaughter Park Deer

Nathalie Graham — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 08:27:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Nathalie Graham

Protect and Serve? Last summer's May Day USA event, the right-wing Christian extremist event held in Cal Anderson, was a clusterfuck largely because of the Seattle Police Department's biases against the people of this city, a new report found. SPD apparently didn't see what the big deal was about holding an anti-LGBT rally in the park—they "weren't familiar with the neighborhood's history," according to PubliCola. They viewed May Day USA as a "church group" and the counterprotesters as "antifa." They entered the event with a "anticipatory defensiveness" toward the counterprotesters—who they started referring to as "transtifa" after hearing May Day USA security use the term. SPD—which is largely made up of people who do not live in Seattle—also shared information with May Day USA security. This big mess of bias and animosity toward the people SPD is supposed to protect caused an aggressive police response and 23 arrests of counterprotesters.

Impeached: The Federal Way City Council voted 4-3 to remove Martin Moore from his post as council president. Moore posted on his official Facebook page in support of the anti-ICE student walkouts. The rest of the council did not like this. Despite public commenters speaking largely in favor of Moore's actions at a meeting Tuesday, the council sided against him. He'll still stay on council, but he's lost his presidential role.

The Weather: Say goodbye to dry skies. The rain is back. In case you're wondering if we'll get any more wintery weather, the Seattle Times has the answer: There is no hope for Seattle snow this year.

Well, what about ICE? In his first executive order, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay banned Immigration and Customs Enforcement from doing anything on nonpublic county-owned land. This includes "parking lots, vacant lots, buildings, and garages and prevents them from being used for staging areas, processing or operations bases." The executive order won't stop ICE if those gooners have a judicial warrant. Zahilay's order also directs $2 million to immigrant communities for "emergency food, housing, and legal aid" and steers the King County Sheriff's Department to make a plan for dealing with ICE, including how to identify undercover agents and how to respond if ICE and the public get into conflict.

Hey, get off of there! A person in Spokane hitched a ride on an ambulance, clinging to the back of the emergency vehicle on eastbound Interstate 90. That's not the suggested way to get to the hospital.

The EPA Is Done Regulating Greenhouse Gases: Hahaha. We are so boned. On Thursday, Donald Trump repealed the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger human life, thus ending our government's capacity to legally control pollution. This sweeping move means the Environmental Protection Agency can no longer regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. It's a rejection of science and an absolutely dismal backslide as the US faces the realities of climate change: more intense storms, wildfires, droughts, and natural disasters. This, of course, is only good for "billionaire polluters," reports The Guardian.

"Jayapal Pramila Search History": Attorney General Pam Bondi had a piece of paper titled "Jayapal Pramila Search History" detailing the un-redacted Epstein files Washington state Rep. Pramila Jayapal accessed in her review of the documents. This outraged House members since it showcased the Department of Justice's alleged betrayal of the separation of powers. The DOJ confirmed it is keeping tabs on what searches lawmakers are doing in the disgusting pit that is the trove of Epstein files."It is an outrage that [the justice department] is tracking members’ investigative steps,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin. He plans to open an inquiry into this "abuse of power."

Antitrust Dust Up: Gail Slater, the head of the Justice Department's antitrust unit, announced her resignation. This shake-up comes as the DOJ is set to deal with corporate mergers like the tug-of-war battle between Netflix and Paramount Skydance over ownership of Warner Bros. Discovery. Slater's deputy in the antitrust unit also left this week.

DHS Shutdown Imminent: With Democrats saying they won't approve more funding for DHS, funding for the department is expected to run out on Saturday. Democrats are holding out until Republicans agree to implement more stringent restrictions on ICE. Agencies under DHS like ICE and TSA could be affected. Will the Gestappo work for free?

Honoring the Dead Is Politics: Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from the Winter Olympics because he insisted on wearing a helmet honoring the athletes killed during Russia's war in Ukraine. His tribute apparently violated the Olympics' athlete expression guidelines. "I believe I am right in this case," Heraskevych told NBC News. "For me to back down is betraying [the people pictured on the helmet]."

Ukrainian skeleton slider withdrawn from Olympics after insisting on wearing helmet honoring dead athletes killed in Ukraine https://cnn.it/3ZtrjXN

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— CNN (@cnn.com) February 12, 2026 at 12:47 AM

Blood Moon on the Rise: A big, red Blood Moon—which is not just a fun way of saying having your period—will gush all over Washington night skies on March 3.

Oh Deer: The Michigan town of Iron Mountain has a deer problem. One of its parks has had a deer enclosure for 75 years. This is an odd choice since wild deer are prevalent. It's not like these people are lacking access to deer. Anyway, the enclosure is in dire need of upgrades. Like, $22,000 in one-time fixes and $16,000 in annual upkeep. The city council voted to close the pen. But, what to do with the deer? They are inbred, stupid, and diseased. They cannot be freed. So, they must be shot and killed. The people do not like this. Can't they save the deer? Probably not.

Good for Them: The Winter Olympic village ran out of condoms in three days. More are on the way.

A Long Read for Your Friday: You liked that Atlantic deep dive on Attorney General Pam Bondi? Then you'll love this Wall Street Journal story about what craven ghouls Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisor Corey Lewandowski are. A tidbit: Noem fired a US Coast Guard pilot after he left her blanket on a plane, but reinstated him when she realized there was no one else to fly her home. Plus, Lewandowski has been really trying to get someone to issue him a gun.

Happy Almost Valentine's Day: Here is a date idea. If you're looking for gifts, or a gesture, I recommend heading to Salmonberry Goods Green Grocer in Crown Heights and buying some of their handmade Valentine's Day pastries. Also, buy a bouquet while you're there.

A Song for All You Lovers:

Guest Rant: We Can’t Resist Trump Without Revenue

Teresa Mosqueda — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:15:00 -0800

Cities and counties are begging for more progressive revenue tools. And it just so happens there's this progressive revenue tool in the Leg right now.... by Teresa Mosqueda

As the federal government continues to sow chaos and force unprecedented cuts that threaten our communities in need, the work we do at the local level to provide stability and support is more critical than ever. But with limited local revenue tools, our county and city resources are already failing to keep up with growing community needs.

We cannot keep our communities housed, fed, and safe without new tools for revenue at the state and local level—and we cannot possibly fill the gaps left by looming federal funding cuts, which will leave cities and counties like ours (and its population of 2.4 million) without the money for basic community and infrastructure needs, like roads, sidewalks, childcare, food assistance, affordable housing, and other critical services. That is why state and local elected officials have been desperately asking the state legislature for new revenue options.

Furthermore, despite our state having among the highest concentrations of wealthy individuals and corporations in the country, our notoriously upside-down tax policies place an unfair burden on the backs of working families who have the least. This was true even before the Trump tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy were passed last year. This fundamental inequity is reflected in our local economic reality: massive wealth among a few and thriving large corporations alongside an affordability crisis and widening disparities between the haves and have-nots.

I join faith leaders, social service and housing providers, small businesses, and union members in calling for a Millionaires Tax. Senate Bill 6346, currently under consideration in Olympia, is a 9.9% tax on the few wealthy individuals earning $1 million or more that would take effect in 2028; with revenue coming in 2029, it would bring in over $3 billion for schools, child care, community colleges and higher education, health care and other essential services. It would also expand the Working Families Tax Credit and dedicate funding to county public defense services, a vital component of our justice system. This will help add balance to our regressive tax code and create a long-term funding source for community needs we know will only become more acute under the current federal administration. It is past time to pass this law.

It’s a critical step now in fixing our upside-down tax code and finding sustainable and equitable revenue sources for state and local services.

We are a region of abundance, rich in resources, with remarkable workers, small businesses and communities. We resist and reject federal attacks on fundamental rights and essential federal funding. We believe in shared responsibility, opportunity for all, and a level playing field. We believe in everyone doing their part. And this bill is one part of how we fight back and act locally to protect Washington residents.

Teresa Mosqueda is a King County Councilmember representing District 8, from Downtown Seattle to Vashon Island and beyond. Mosqueda has led on housing, health and worker protections in her time on King County and previously Seattle City Council, along with passing JumpStart in Seattle in 2020 to respond to growing needs and the pandemic.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Mercury Review

Dom Sinacola — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:07:00 -0800

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opens in wide release on Friday, February 13. by Dom Sinacola

This story was originally published by our sister paper, Portland Mercury.

For nearly 20 years, Torontonian best friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have chronicled the everyday existences of Torontonian best friends Matt (Johnson) and Jay (McCarrol) as they attempt to book a show for their band, Nirvanna the Band, at local venue the Rivoli.

Granted, they've never acknowledged that their band name might be a huge distraction for potential audiences, nor have they ever really contacted Rivoli management to ask about the venue’s scheduling process. In two decades, they’ve never even played a public show. Still, their mission abides; sometimes it means skydiving from the Canadian National (CN) Tower for some good old-fashioned viral marketing.

Nirvanna the Band the Show is that 20-year chronicle—a seemingly never-ending autobiographical narrative, like Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume My Struggle—that details their daily, repetitive, and sometimes dangerous schemes to score a show at the Rivoli.

What began as a baby-faced web series in 2007 and eventually graduated into a Viceland sitcom in 2017, is now Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. It's tantamount to their lives’ work. Distributed by Neon, recent Oscar-darlings who brought us The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value, the release of this film is second only to getting a gig at the Rivoli.

The movie is exceptionally funny, especially with an audience. Dopey gags, painful stunts, and mean-mugging abound as our protagonists accidentally transform their RV into a time machine, using Back to the Future as a blueprint to hatch a plan to, of course, get a show at the Rivoli.

Finding themselves in 2008, they’re confronted by achingly specific allusions from the first Obama administration. (Remember the original lyrics to Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started”?) So Matt and Jay must follow Doc Brown rules to get back to their future without changing their past.

Convinced by pop figureheads like Robert Zemeckis and shows like Entourage that the elemental tides of storytelling, fueled by farce and nostalgia, will allow them to accomplish all they put their minds to—which in this case is headlining a show at the Rivoli—Matt and Jay of Nirvanna the Band are slightly fictionalized versions of the real-life Matt and Jay. They’re two normal-ish elder millennials who have siphoned themselves through movie and TV tropes into timeless, innocent weirdos.

Thus, at the heart of Nirvanna the Band, meticulous parody and avoidance of copyright infringement rubs up against the bleak reality of urban life, creating a giddy friction between the bracing stupidity to which Matt and Jay devote themselves and the drudgery experienced by everyone else.

In fact, much of the anxious hilarity of the Nirvanna the Band the Show came from wondering, often aloud, what exactly was real and what was scripted. With cinematographers Jared Raab and Rich Williamson following Matt and Jay everywhere, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie also wavers, like its episodic predecessor, between faux documentary and hidden camera prank extravaganza.

But rather than exploiting cringe humor or just messing with unsuspecting normies, Matt and Jay discover a kind of freedom to be themselves while indulging their deeply cinematic impulses.

Once furnished with a studio budget, these impulses lead to some of the most dumbfounding scenes I’ve had the good fortune of witnessing in a theater. Yet, beneath the shock and awe, the Movie is the careful craft of dedicated artists. When Matt and Jay encounter their 2008 selves, the project doesn’t rely on de-aging CGI, but hundreds of hours of work from editors Robert Upchurch and Curt Lobb, who picked through old footage from the show’s initial web run. Behind Jay and Matt’s mania is a team quietly dedicated to unearthing miraculous material.

Similarly, outside of the thinly veiled facsimile of his life in Nirvanna the Band, Johnson has been a prolific filmmaker. After cutting his teeth on Nirvanna the Band the Show, he followed up his feature debut The Dirties (2011) with Operation Avalanche (2016), a comedy thriller about faking the Moon landing in 1969, which involved Johnson’s crew bluffing their way into NASA offices to surreptitiously film whole scenes on a shoestring budget.

In 2023, Johnson made Blackberry, a partly fabricated “true story” of the founding of the titular company, featuring a squealing, baldpated Glen Howerton. The next year, Johnson starred in Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara, in which he played an over-talkative guy named Matt, likely riffing on himself as much as he is in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Instead of inhabiting a character, he piles on layers of pop cultural patinas.

Whether it’s the aforementioned skydiving incident or sneaking onto a crime scene outside of Drake’s mansion, the hint of reality in the movie’s every moment is more than enough to sustain the spectacle. Even now, I can feel my stomach churn knowing that when Matt is standing on top of the CN Tower, trilby staying on his head by sheer will, there is more of a chance than not that Johnson actually did that.

Laughing, sometimes, is just what happens when your brain doesn’t know what else to do with the information being presented. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a tribute to the unbelievable shit you can pull off with your best friend and a few professional-looking cameras.

Do Matt and Jay make it back to the present? They have to, because Nirvanna the Band must go on, and more importantly, must play at the Rivoli. Someday. They have no other choice. For the real-life Johnson and McCarrol, this is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Existence, the stuff of crazed movie magic.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opens in wide release on Friday, February 13.

The Legislature Is Ready to Tax The Rich

Nathalie Graham — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:18:00 -0800

The millionaire's tax seems good, but is it great? by Nathalie Graham

Who will weep for the millionaires?

A 9.9 percent tax on annual earnings upward of $1 million could become reality in Washington state. A Senate bill is up for a full vote as soon as next week, and its companion in the House is still in committee. If either bill reaches Gov. Bob Ferguson’s desk with enough tax relief for small businesses and low-income households, he’s likely to sign it. With his pen stroke, we’ll join the ranks of futuristic societies such as New Jersey and Minnesota that have achieved the impossible: taxing income, perhaps fairly.

This is a good thing. The state needs new revenue. Over the next two years, we’ll have a $2 billion budget deficit. Across the next four years, we’re seeing double that. If the Leg hadn’t passed the biggest tax increase in state history and cut spending (even in areas they really shouldn’t have, like behavioral health, higher education, and healthcare) last session, we’d be dealing with a $16 billion deficit. When people complain that our ass tax code is the second most regressive in the nation behind Florida (a state that cannot decide if disease is bad), this is why that matters. We don’t have enough money for the basics and are still in a hole.

The millionaire’s tax will help dig us out. Democrats project it to siphon $3.5 billion from Scrooge McDuck-esque pools of money each year. The state will use that cashflow to expand the eligibility criteria for a low-income tax credit (basically, a sales tax rebate), fund public defenders (we’ve got a shortage), and extra padding for the scrawny general fund. It also cuts taxes on hygiene products, much to the amusement of esteemed doofus Danny Westneat. But is it enough?

With President Trump picking our state pocket book, maybe not. His Big Beautiful Bill, HR-1, will cut at least $3 billion in federal funds annually starting next year ($3.5 billion - $3 billion = goddamn it). And the millionaire’s tax won’t begin to offset that until 2029, the year we see our first payments.

The millionaire’s tax also comes with sweet savings for the Business Community—a juicy $600 million we’d otherwise collect. Similar to the Seattle Shield Tax passed last year, the millionaire’s tax would exempt thousands of small businesses from paying state Business & Occupation (B&O) taxes. To appease big business, the bill ends a B&O surcharge a year earlier than planned, unspooling work the Legislature did last session. A lot of people are not happy about this. But, we might not have been able to get a millionaire’s tax without this penance.

Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle), sponsor of the Senate bill, says the millionaires tax is our only option.

“It’s the proposal in front of us that we actually can have the votes to get out of the legislature,” he says. Plus, it’s broadly supported by 60 percent of voters, according to public opinion pollsters GBAO and DHM Research (which conducted polling for The Stranger last year). Their enthusiasm could make all the difference when the referendum enthusiasts, hedge fund millionaire Brian Heywood and anti-tax goblin Tim Eyman, come begging for signatures.

The people aren’t as jazzed about the business-friendly cuts. Pedersen says they’re “necessary” to dissuade big business from going to war with the bill. Last session, the People for an Affordable Washington PAC, which was made up of businesses not people, accumulated nearly $2.7 million to warp public opinion on new taxes. Behind the scenes, the businesses were “girding for battle” last session and preparing “to take the legislature’s tax increases to the ballot.” As he put it, “some deal" stopped them from doing that.

For years, Pedersen has sponsored or co-sponsored bills for progressive taxation—solutions that give Washington another revenue source other than sales taxes, business taxes, or property taxes. Pedersen has attempted to get some version of an income tax passed for years. The partial capital gains tax, which passed in 2021 was the closest he’s gotten. Last year, he sponsored bills for a wealth tax and a payroll tax, and they died tragically from a lack of votes. It’ll be the same fate for other progressive revenue taxes proposed this year, Pedersen says, pointing to Rep. Shaun Scott’s proposed state payroll tax, the Well Washington Fund. Pedersen, who shares a district with Scott, did not support the bill, modeled after Seattle’s JumpStart tax, because “it’s politically not feasible in the legislature” right now.

Scott, who must have wronged the Pedersens in a past life, says that’s “too bad, because people of our district deserve leaders who believe in collaboration.” He signed onto the House version of Pedersen’s bill, even though he didn’t like the B&O cuts, and he saw other shortcomings.

“Senator Pedersen’s income tax bill would barely skim the reductions we’ll be seeing to K–12 schools, housing, healthcare, and higher education,” says Scott.

He says the Well Washington Fund would prevent cuts to those essential services while making big companies pay their fare share and begin to fill the budget holes in 2027, two years before the millionaire’s tax kicks in.

“If Senate Majority Leader Pedersen had chosen to engage in the discussion around [the payroll tax bill] he would know that the Employment Security Department (ESD) has confirmed that my payroll tax could start being assessed by 2027, perhaps as soon as late 2026,” Scott wrote in an email.

“That is not true,” says Pedersen. “He either has not interacted with the agency or he’s not representing that correctly.”

Except it is true. The ESD confirmed Scott’s payroll tax could be up and running by August 2027.

As it stands now, the payroll tax is stalling out, but as Eli Goss from the Budget and Policy center says, bills aren’t truly dead until the session is over. The millionaires tax, meanwhile, is moving to the full Senate next week. The millionaires are unhappy. The Republicans are bristling. Tim Eyman keeps sending emails with AI images of mud-splattered pooches to represent the “Godless dirty dog Democrats.”

Pedersen isn’t counting it as a win yet. Not until it passes the legislature, survives the inevitable referendum campaign and Supreme Court challenge. “Those are the three big gates to pass through, before we can actually start to make a significant change in the second worst tax system in the country,” he says.

Ticket Alert: Zayn, Baby Keem, and More Seattle Events Going On Sale This Week

EverOut Staff — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:00:00 -0800

Plus, the Black Keys and More Event Updates for February 12

by EverOut Staff

Get ready to *add to cart*. R&B-influenced pop star Zayn embarks on his first solo headline arena tour this year, arriving in Seattle this September. Rapper and producer Baby Keem will support his sophomore album, Casino, on tour. Plus, blues rock duo The Black Keys supports their forthcoming album, Peaches!, with two nights at Remlinger Farms. Read on for details on those and other newly announced events, plus some news you can use.

Tickets go on sale at 10 am unless otherwise noted.

ON SALE FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13

MUSIC

Baby Keem: The Ca$ino Tour
WaMu Theater (Wed May 13)
On sale at noon

Bilmuri - Kinda Hard Tour
Paramount Theatre (Wed Sept 30)

The Black Keys: Peaches 'n Kream
Remlinger Farms (May 29–30)

The Live and Let Dry at Lady Jaye

Meg van Huygen — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0800

An Herbaceous Mocktail Made from Caffeinated Leaves, Iris Roots, and Almonds

by Meg van Huygen

Although I didn’t observe Dry January myself, I absolutely respect the game, just as I understand that the liver wants what it wants (and doesn’t what it doesn’t). I’m also always nosy about what drinks my friends order, even if they’re teetotal. So at West Seattle’s Lady Jaye last month, when my NA pal was raving about their tasty mango shrub, I did something I normally wouldn’t. I took a peek at the mocktails. Er, fauxtails. Foxtails. Whatever we’re calling them now.

One drink had three things I love and one I’d never even heard of. The Live and Let Dry consists of Three Spirit Livener, Lyre’s Amaretti, lime, ginger, and Casamara Club Alta. I’m an old friend and lover of the Casamara pantheon, so that was enough by itself to make the sale, frankly. But what in the fuck is Three Spirit Livener? Plus ginger AND amaretti? “If you want, I can add gin to it,” bartender Nick consoled me as he put the drink together. “It’s really good both ways.” Tempting, but I had him hold off. Let’s taste it in its purest form first.

If you don’t know the Casamara Club line of botanical sodas, they’re all very leafy and horticultural-flavored, like drinking trees. These alcohol-free takes on amari-based cocktails come in six different flaves, and while there’s one that tastes exactly like the smell of the hand soap in my mom’s bathroom, the Alta soda is fuckin’ elite. Inspired by the Negroni cocktail, it’s made of chinotto—a bitter orange that grows along the Calabrian coast—as well as allspice berries, mandarin, lemon, clove, anise, juniper, and orris root, which is the root of the Dalmatian iris. Warm spice, sharp citrus. It’s like piney Christmas lemonade.

Then there’s a drop of virgin amaretto from UK-based Lyre’s, which styles their booze-free version as “amaretti,” after the cookie. It’s peachy-vanilla, toasty and nutty, kind of marzipan-tastical. Lyre’s is less sweet than the boozy stuff, too (and it’s lovely over ice cream, by the way).

Finally, the dark horse: the Livener by Three Spirit. Its base is the dried leaves of the ilex guayusa, a caffeinated tree that grows in the Amazon rainforest; a strong guayusa tea is served at South American convivencias (social gatherings) as a pick-me-up. To this, Three Spirit adds watermelon, pomegranate, and schisandra berries, which are distantly related to star anise. This elixir also packs some heat, from both ginger and cayenne, and astringent tartness from hibiscus extract. They add extra caffeine to it, too, and a little punch of apple cider vinegar. It’s super complex and bright and reminds me a little bit of those fruit teas from boba shops, but with chili and extra herbs, and without the big sugary slap in the face.

Lady Jaye owner Sara Rosales says she was eager to work with this stuff specifically for its mood-enhancing ingredients. “In theory,” she says, “this cocktail actually makes you feel revived!” Damn, it’s like the opposite of a cocktail—in more ways than one.

The effect is at once delicious and fascinating. In the end, I drank up the whole glass before I remembered to ask Nick to add gin, then came back later to try the ginned-up version. Both ways are fabulous, of course. I’ll try it with bourbon next time.

Slog AM: ICE Out of MN, Seattle Hosts Big-Ass Parade, Bondi Snubs Epstein Survivors

Micah Yip — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:20:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Micah Yip

Thank Fuck: After two months of federal officers terrorizing, brutalizing, arresting, and killing people in Minneapolis, the Trump administration will end its “largest immigration enforcement operation ever,” border czar Tom Homan announced today. Homan touted the whole operation as a win that leaves Minnesota safer, “less of a sanctuary state for criminals.” A win? After two months of arresting more than 4,000 people, killing Alex Pretti and Renee Good, causing mass protests? The surge leaves Minnesota shaken, not safer. And though that operation is ending, immigration enforcement will continue, Homan pledged.

A Big-Ass Parade: I don’t give a fuck about football. But I have to say, the Seahawks’ massive party downtown yesterday sounded pretty sick. The team was paraded down Fourth Avenue in big military transport trucks, starting near Lumen Field and ending near the Space Needle, as an estimated 750,000 to 1 million cheered them on. People of all ages came from all over the state, with some claiming spots on the street the night before.

We Posted Some Rad Photos on Our Instagram Yesterday: Check ‘em out.

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A post shared by The Stranger 🗞 (@thestrangerseattle)

DwTF (Down With the Fence): Remember when the city fenced off Seven Hills Park in September due to homeless encampments? That park will finally reopen on February 26, park department officials said at a community meeting Tuesday night. There are plans for a new sign, “human and hound fitness installations” (which sound suspiciously furry-coded), and a little facelift, fixing infrastructure and trimming trees. Why they couldn’t do that while keeping the space open is a mystery. It’s not like the fence kept people out, meeting attendees said.

Gallup Gallops Away: From tracking presidential approval ratings, that is. Gallup announced yesterday that after 88 years, it will no longer measure presidential approval. The switch comes as President Donald Trump continues throwing temper tantrums over any media outlet/poll/person/anything that’s less than fawning, reality be damned (Trump’s Gallup approval rating fell to 36 percent in December). Still, Gallup insisted its decision was “solely based on Gallup’s research goals and priorities.” It sucks though — the Gallup Presidential Approval Rating is one of the most cited measurements of public opinion on presidents since Harry Truman was in office, The Guardian reported.

Gallup Has Scaled Back for Trump Before: In 2017, Gallup went from daily to weekly presidential approval tracking. A year later, they went down to monthly.

If you saw today's headline that Gallup will stop measuring presidential approval, they did the same thing in 2018. They do it whenever Trump is president.

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— Brandon Friedman (@brandonfriedman.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 11:27 AM

Two Actors Died: James Van Der Beek, known for his roles in Dawson’s Creek and Varsity Blues, died yesterday morning after battling stage 3 colorectal cancer. He was 48. Bud Cort, known for starring in Harold and Maude, also died yesterday after a long illness. He was 77.

Weather: Mostly cloudy with a high of 53. The sun will slowly break through as the day progresses. Tonight, temps will drop to a low of 43. There’s a 30 percent chance of rain.

Pam Bondi’s Testimony: Attorney General Pam Bondi hurled insults and dodged questions at yesterday’s House Judiciary hearing on her mishandling of the Epstein files. The stand out moment was when Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked Epstein’s victims in the audience to stand and raise their hands if they had not been able to get an appointment with the DOJ. All of them did.

This photo of Attorney General Pam Bondi looking down after the Epstein survivors in the room were asked to raise their hands if the current Justice Department has failed to speak with them is some fine photojournalism.

AP Photo by Tom Brenner.

Story: www.mississippifreepress.org/bondi-clashe...

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— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman.bsky.social) February 12, 2026 at 8:11 AM

What I Learned About Bondi from The Atlantic’s New Article: (1) Earlier in life, she was allegedly once so kindhearted she earned the nickname “Pambi,” like “Bambi.” (2) Foreshadowing her transformation from Pambi to MAGA ghoul, she once refused to return a dog she adopted to its rightful family, even after the four-year-old grandson begged her to. She instead hired a lawyer and accused the family of abusing the dog. (3) She has called reporters crying and begging them not to publish stories about her. There’s a lot more you should read.

This is some genuinely psycho shit...

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— brian pillion (@anaphoristand.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 12:02 PM

Amtrak Death: An Amtrak train on route from Portland to Seattle struck and killed a person south of Tukwila at about 9 p.m. Wednesday evening. Nobody on the train was injured.

Jaahnavi Kandula: The city will pay a $29 million settlement to the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, the 23-year-old graduate student from India struck and killed by a speeding Seattle officer Kevin Dave at a South Lake Union crosswalk in 2023. Dave was going 50 miles over the speed limit. He was cited for negligent driving, paid a $5,000 fine, and subsequently fired from the department, but was never criminally charged. The Seattle Times has the story.

False Alarm: Or should I say “False Package”? Yesterday, the 1 Line’s Lynnwood City Center Station closed around 5 p.m. while authorities responded to a report of a “suspicious package.” Riders were asked to leave the station and the King County Sheriff’s Office dispatched its K-9 bomb detection unit to the scene. But they didn’t find anything, and the station reopened about an hour later.

To the woman I saw belting “Pink Pony Club” on a Lime scooter late Sunday night in Capitol Hill, this one’s for you:

Social Housing, Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You

Micah Yip — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:45:00 -0800

After three years, two ballot measures and Tuesday’s City Council vote, Seattle is one step closer to being a more affordable city. by Micah Yip

After three years, two ballot measures and Tuesday’s City Council vote, Seattle is one step closer to being a more affordable city.

On Tuesday night, House Our Neighbors hosted an event featuring Mayor Katie Wilson, announcing the organization will be receiving $115 million through a voter-approved tax to build and buy buildings for affordable public housing. Rent is tied to the resident’s income. And because the buildings are mixed income, wealthier residents subsidize the cost. Earlier that day, City Council voted to turn on the tap, unanimously passing the interlocal agreement for the collection and disbursement of the funds between the city and the Seattle Social Housing Developer (SSHD).

“There is a lot of wealth in the city, and we continue to have one of the most regressive tax systems in the country, in the state,” said Wilson. “And it is very gratifying to know that we’re going to be able to use a little bit of that wealth and put it to work building housing.”

February must be a lucky month for housing in Seattle. In February 2023, Seattle voters passed I-135, which basically asked Seattle voters, “Hey, do you want us to form a social housing developer?” and Seattle said “yes.”

Then, in February last year, the city presented voters with two options to fund social housing: Prop 1A, a 5 percent tax on companies for each employee making more than $1 million per year; or Prop 1B, which wouldn’t create a new tax, but siphon $10 million per year from the Jumpstart payroll tax for only five years. Seattle passed Prop 1A.

SSHD’s interim CEO Tiffani McCoy announced that an estimated 170 companies in the city are subject to the tax, $115 million in the 2025 fiscal year—a figure far greater than the original estimate of $50 million.

Social housing is a new concept in Seattle, deviating from our profit-driven housing market that’s widely inaccessible for low- and middle-income people. Rents are meant to remain permanently affordable, with a target goal of around 30 percent of a person’s income. And it’s been successfully implemented in places like Vienna, Austria, Finland and Singapore. In the United States, only Seattle and Montgomery County, Maryland have taken the leap.

“Our main objective isn’t profit and we’re not determined by the markets that other, private landlords are,” SSHD spokesperson Lilly Fowler told The Stranger.

Maybe you’re wondering if you can be one of those hundreds benefitting from social housing this year. You could be, if you make anywhere up to 120 percent of the area’s median income (AMI). Fowler says they estimate the first building will open in about six months. You can register to stay updated here.

“In a moment when housing costs continue to rise and displacement pressures remain real, social housing is going to give us a tool that can match the scale of the problem,” Wilson said.

Correction: This article has been updated since publication. We incorrectly stated the Seattle Social Housing Developer hosted the event, when it was House Our Neighbors. We also stated that the city had collected $115 million in the last month of 2025. It had begun collecting funds from the 2025 tax year last month (January 2026). We also inaccurately stated that rent for these buildings would be capped at 30 percent. The target is around 30 percent of a tenant's income, but it's not legally mandated. We regret the errors.

Romancing the Tome

Julianne Bell — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0800

Talking Valentines, Heated Rivalry, and Sexy Fish Scaling with Author Olivia Waite

by Julianne Bell

Olivia Waite is a Seattle-based romance, sci-fi, and fantasy author, New York Times romance columnist, Jeopardy! champion, and accomplished fiber artist. I was introduced to her via her novel The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, which is not only a beguiling sapphic love story, but also a brilliant ode to the art of science and the science of art. Her latest book, Murder by Memory, a cozy sci-fi mystery set aboard an interstellar passenger liner and the first installment in her Dorothy Gentleman series, came out last March, and the sequel Nobody’s Baby comes out next month. (She’s also currently working on releasing a knitting pattern for the fern shawl that makes a cameo in Murder by Memory.) The Stranger caught up with her about Heated Rivalry, falling in love at karaoke, and how fish-scaling can be surprisingly romantic.

How did you first fall in love with the romance genre?
I stole my first romance novel from my mom when I was 5. It was a Johanna Lindsey sci-fi romance, so imagine Jupiter Ascending, but with orgasms, and my mom took it away, because nobody wants to explain that kind of thing to a toddler. I picked it up because the cover looked like Star Wars, which also tracks—the whole slave Leia bikini thing was absolutely in the marketing. And I wanted to see how it ended, so as soon as I was old enough to get a library card, I tracked down a copy and managed to finish it. I’ve been hooked ever since. It’s funny, because that’s both the first romance and the first sci-fi novel that I read.

As a romance author, what is it like to witness the Heated Rivalry craze erupt into the mainstream right now?
The audience reaction has been really gratifying, and then the nonstop bad takes have been deeply irritating. I’ve read the book [series Game Changers by Rachel Reid, from which the show is adapted] before, and I was also a fan of [director Jacob Tierney’s previous show] Letterkenny, so in that slim little Venn diagram of those two things, there were, like, five of us, and we were all so excited. People [were] like, romance adaptations are never good, and I’m like, No, you don’t understand this! Man will point a camera at a dude in a flannel shirt, and you have 18 feelings about it! I think one of the best things about it is that a lot of the conversations, even the difficult ones, have been very productive. People in very closeted industries who can’t come out are finding ways to talk about that with people that they know.

What adaptations would you like to see follow in the wake of its success?
I want the Alyssa Cole and Beverly Jenkins books, American historical romances specifically set around the experience of Black Americans. Beverly Jenkins has one called Forbidden that is set in a mining town where the machinery never stops whirring, and the hero is a Black man who can pass as white, which means he has access to bank accounts, so he’s helping the Black residents of the town gain credit and build up savings in a way that the bank wouldn’t let them. But in order to live as the authentic Black man he actually is, he has to give that up, and decide whether the job he’s doing is more important than his need to be acknowledged as someone with a family connection, rather than just a good ally. There’s part of himself that he’s had to keep very locked down. It’s gorgeous. There’s an old-timey baseball game, and there’s the heroine carrying her stove as she treks across the desert. It’s the book that made me say, God, fish-scaling is so romantic! And no, it’s not. Beverly Jenkins, what witchcraft is this?! I would love a big, splashy, Yellowstone-level adaptation.

What lessons can romance teach us during this difficult time in history?
Romance has lessons both positive and negative. I’ve read too much about romance history to pretend it’s all sunshine and rainbows. You get a lot of people saying, well, romance is by women, for women, therefore it’s automatically feminist, and, no. There are terrible and repressive romances being written, and it’s silly to pretend that’s not happening. But the thing that keeps me coming back to this genre as a source of optimism and strength and resilience is that sense that it’s an optimistic genre at its heart—it assumes that the world is improvable, and people can learn. People are worth keeping. They can learn better. Love is possible, and it just might not look like what you intended.

What is one romance book you think everyone should read?
After Hours at Dooryard Books by Cat Sebastian. It’s set in New York, 1968. It’s about a used bookstore owner and a down-on-his-luck mystery man. It’s also about the protests that are happening in the Civil Rights Movement and labor issues and queer issues in New York, and it’s an entire book list on its own. It is so sad and so good. It feels like somebody wrote you a love letter from 60 years ago to tell you it’s okay and we’ve been through this before.

You mentioned over email that you’ve submitted some Stranger valentines in the past; can you tell us about that?
They were actually for the man I ended up marrying. I can confirm that I met him singing Peter Gabriel in an Irish dive bar in Fremont. It was this absolute karaoke romance, and this guy gets up and starts screaming, and I go, “There he is. That’s what I’ve been waiting for.” We were dating about three months after that, and then we were engaged within the year. Then we spent like two and a half years planning the wedding. For those two and a half years, when I was still in that little Fremont apartment and just about to graduate from grad school and going to this karaoke bar down the corner every Monday night, February would come around, and we would send each other little notes in The Stranger, and it was fantastic.

Nobody’s Baby is out March 10 on Tor Publishing.

Backpack Beware

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:25:00 -0800

Signed, a former New Yorker, just trying to get home. by Anonymous

Seattle, I know you are relatively new to the public transit game, but I am BEGGING YOU to learn some basics about rush hour travel. You're relatively okay at standing to the right so people can walk by on the left on escalators, but for god's sakes, TAKE OFF YOUR BACKPACKS ON THE TRAIN!!

Picture this: It's 5 p.m., you're leaving the office. The train is packed full of tired, overworked, and underpaid people. You manage to squeeze on, only to get whacked by someone's backpack, while they are oblivious to the fact that by turning, they've turned their backpack into a weapon. You shift to the right, BAM! another backpack. You're being crushed in the doorway because you have nowhere to go. You look to the right, down the aisle, and see it looks relatively empty because everyone has their backpacks on! Each person takes up the space of two people: one space for their body and one space for their backpack.

Come on, y'all. We all want to get home. Take your backpacks off so we can fit more people on the train and not get clotheslined by a rogue backpack.

Signed,

A former New Yorker, just trying to get home

Slog AM: Ten are Dead After Mass Shooting in Canada, the Trump Administration Can’t Make Up Its Mind About the El Paso Airport, and It’s Super Bowl Parade Day in Seattle

Megan Seling — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 10:01:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Megan Seling

Today, Seattle Celebrates: It’s parade day for the Seattle Seahawks, who defeated the New England Patriots 29–13 in Sunday’s Bad Bunny Bowl. The morning begins with a trophy ceremony at Lumen Field at 10 a.m., and the parade will start at Fourth Avenue and Washington Street at 11 a.m. Officials say it should take approximately two hours for the parade to make its way down Fourth Avenue to Cedar Street. SPD is expecting about a million people, and they started closing roads at 6:30 a.m. It’s gonna be nuts. Either rush down there now and embrace madness, or avoid the area completely. There is no in between. Just stay off the pergola!

Mass Shooting in Canada: Ten people are dead, and more than 25 are wounded after a shooting at a small school in northern British Columbia. Police say the alleged shooter died by suicide. Two of the victims were found at a home believed to be connected to the incident. It’s the deadliest mass shooting in Canada since a shooter killed 13 people in Nova Scotia in 2020, and, as AP reports, “Canada’s government has responded to previous mass shootings with gun control measures, including a recently broadened ban on all guns it considers assault weapons.”

Meanwhile, in America: According to massshootingtracker.site, which is a real website, there have already been 45 mass shootings in the US this year (we’re on day 42), with a total of 62 people killed and 137 wounded. Your thoughts and prayers are bullshit.

Trump Administration Shuts Down El Paso Airport: Or not. Hard to say! On Tuesday night, Real World Boston star and the Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy claimed Mexican cartel drones breached US airspace, so he grounded all flights for 10 days. This morning, though, the Federal Aviation Administration rescinded that order and said the shutdown was “prompted by the Defense Department’s use of new counter-drone technology.” America: We’re doing a great job!

Tax the Rich! Hundreds of union members rallied at the Capitol in Olympia yesterday to demand that local lawmakers pass the millionaires tax, which “calls for a 9.9% tax on Washington residents making more than $1 million a year beginning in 2028.” Why wait until 2028? Tax those fuckers now, I say! Unfortunately, I am not in charge. Our own Nathalie Graham will have more about this Senate bill later at the stranger dot com. Stay tuned.

In Other Lawmaker News: Gov. Bob Ferguson is working with state lawmakers to add "mental health safeguards to AI chatbots.” The policy would “require companion chatbots to notify users they are interacting with AI and not a human at the beginning of the interaction and every three hours,” according to the Seattle Times. But why just every three hours? Make the robots say it every 30 minutes! Every three minutes, even! In fact, melt the robots! Burn OpenAI to the ground! Hack the planet! I have had too much coffee!

If You’re Wondering Why People Turn to Robots for Help: It’s because our city (our state, our country, our world) is terrible at offering people meaningful mental health support when they reach out for help, and a new report on King County’s lack of mental health referrals proves it. The King County sheriff’s 911 center has zero standard procedures to help people in crisis, and apparently don't refer them to the 988 suicide hotline either. Instead, they just send officers and hope it works out?

Strange Case Gets Stranger: Last night, police announced that they detained a person of interest in Rio Rico, Arizona, in connection with Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance. This morning, that person was released. Nancy, the 84-year-old mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie, has been missing for more than a week, and for several days, Savannah and her siblings have been releasing videos to Nancy’s believed captors, who allegedly asked for $6 million in Bitcoin.

And Stranger Still: Kash Patel and the Go Get ‘Em Kids released video footage yesterday of a masked person captured on a doorbell camera outside Nancy Guthrie’s home on the same night she went missing. According to one expert CNN interviewed, this person’s behavior is “impressive,” and they clearly did a “certain amount of planning.” What? Are we watching the same video? Dude looks like a bumbling idiot, rolling up to the house with a gun holstered directly above his crotch like someone said, “Put this on,” and he was like, “Okay, yeah, because I have definitely worn a gun before. I will just point it directly at my dick.” Then, guy was so ill-prepared for the presence of a very common doorbell camera that he paused to grab some weeds from the garden and attempted to fashion them into some kind of curtain, all the while staring directly into the camera lens at close range. And you want me to believe this is the same brilliant criminal mind capable of kidnapping the 84-year-old mother of a high-profile journalist and leading the FBI on a nationwide goose chase for more than a week? Sure, Jan.

Speaking of Kidnappings: ICE is still at it! Locals in Minneapolis shared this scene after the fact.

This is the aftermath of an ICE kidnapping a few blocks from my home in St. Paul—an hour ago. A quiet street full of broken glass and at least three wrecked cars. The target of the kidnapping was taken away by ambulance. He was on a stretcher and covered by a sheet, though a cop said he was alive.

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— Andrew Karre (@andrewkarre.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 8:46 AM

In Local Film News: Yesterday, The Stranger reported that the Boeing IMAX theater (the biggest IMAX theater in the state) is expected to be sold to the Space Needle Corporation. The theater is closed for now for a “brief renovation focused on improving the concessions and arrival experiences, scheduled to end in May.”

And now, I leave you with some of my favorite things to happen at the Olympics so far:

🥌 Commentators constantly referring to the US mixed doubles curling teammates as Girl Cory and Boy Korey. (Congrats on the silver, buddies!)

🏒 The US women’s hockey team allowing their opponents exactly one goal in four games, including a 5–0 victory over Team Canada. Even better, it’s the Torrent players who are leading the team in points! Hilary Knight has two goals and three assists, Alex Carpenter has three goals and two assists, and Hannah Bilka has three goals and one assist. (Britta Curl has zero goals, which is what she deserves, because she’s a transphobic asshole.)

😭 Ilia Malinin skating to the sound of his own voice in the ultimate masturbatory figure skating performance, which I actually hated very much but had a lot of fun laughing at. Just some of the lines the 21-year-old recites during his program: “The only true wisdom / Is in knowing you know nothing.” “You are something / But not nothing.” lol ok quad god

Rivera Introduces Bill to Protect Immigration Information

Micah Yip — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:05:00 -0800

Unfortunately, nothing in government is simple. While police are regulated under state law, local law, and department policy, there’s still a conflict between city code and state law Rivera’s bill does not address. by Micah Yip

Councilmember Maritza Rivera has done something right.

This morning, the Public Safety Committee passed her bill that protects immigrants from our own municipal code. It strikes language that says city employees (including police) must “cooperate with, not hinder” federal immigration enforcement, and adds a section clarifying that they are not to share personal information with federal immigration agencies, either.

Yay! Thanks, Rivera!

Unfortunately, nothing in government is that simple. While police are regulated under state law, local law, and department policy, there’s still a conflict between city code and state law Rivera’s bill does not address.

Let’s start with the language repeal. Rivera’s bill removes that “cooperation” line, which originated in 1986 from an initiative passed by Seattle voters (what the hell, ’80s Seattle voters!). Excellent first step. Rivera’s bill also creates a new section in the Seattle Municipal Code (SMC) blocking city employees and officers from sharing personal information—like someone’s address, phone number or social media handle—for immigration enforcement, except if required by a court order. Good second step.

Both changes align city code with state laws like the 2019 Keep Washington Working (KWW) Act and the 2020 Courts Open to All (COTA) Act, which place information collection and sharing restrictions on local law enforcement, judges, court personnel and prosecutors. The bill also aligns the city code with the city code. In 2003, a “don’t ask” policy was added to the SMC—city employees can’t ask about someone’s immigration status.

Except officers if they have “reasonable suspicion” that (1) a person has been previously deported, (2) that person is again in the United States and (3) they’ve committed or are committing a felony.

SPD has its own policies separate from, but governed by, city and state law. According to Council Central Staff, the department has “chosen to enact a policy” for immigration situations that is “quite a bit narrower and does not contemplate any of the criteria” described in current city or state law. Even though there is a discrepancy, SPD tells its officers, “Just don’t ask.”

It’s unclear enough that Councilmember Eddie Lin abstained.

“I don’t want to hold up the important bill and good work that you brought forward, Councilmember Rivera,” he said. “But it just seems like there’s still a bit of confusion, at least in my mind.”

Rivera acknowledged the shortfalls. She said KWW likely overrides the SMC code, but said they’d need to do further legal analysis before amending that section. She was adamant—passionate, even—that the bill should still be passed.

“One doesn’t preclude the other, so we can move this bill forward,” Rivera said. “[We can] take this what I deem to be an important step, all while then having the conversations about what else.”

The bill passed, with Rivera, Committee Chair Bob Kettle and Vice Chair Rob Saka voting yes. Councilmember Debora Juarez was absent. It’ll go before the full City Council at the February 17 meeting.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated that SPD policies undermine Rivera’s bill. The language of SPD policy, the Seattle Municipal Code, and Washington State Law conflict, but SPD policy will be expected to conform to changes in the municipal code.

Pacific Science Center’s Boeing IMAX Theater to Be Sold to Space Needle

Chase Hutchinson — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:45:00 -0800

The Boeing IMAX theater, the biggest IMAX theatre in the state, has been closed since Feb. 1 and will be sold to a new owner: the Space Needle Corporation, the Pacific Science Center confirmed in an email Tuesday.

“PacSci will not resume operations in that theater,” the spokesperson said. “Once the transaction concludes, we anticipate that the buyer will make some renovations and reopen the theater as an IMAX experience later this spring.”

The question of what that “IMAX experience” entails will now be top of mind for Seattle movie lovers. Many consider the Boeing IMAX to be one of the best places to go see the biggest releases of the year, but staff who spoke to The Stranger are concerned that this new buyer isn’t interested in screening first-run releases of Hollywood films, like Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey. A spokesperson for PacSci said they will be showing Nolan’s film at their smaller theater, the PACCAR, but deferred questions about the future of film programming at the Boeing IMAX to the Space Needle Corporation.

In a statement shared with The Seattle Times, Space Needle CEO Ron Sevart said “we’re excited to partner with Pacific Science Center in continuing the availability of two IMAX theaters on the Seattle Center Campus” and that it will continue to operate as a movie theater following a "brief renovation focused on improving the concessions and arrival experiences, scheduled to end in May." However, he didn’t specify what movies or programming will be shown there, only saying “we haven’t explored any use other than as an IMAX theater.”

“While continued operation of the Boeing IMAX Theater is our short-term focus, we can’t wait to explore other partnership opportunities that support the future of Pacific Science Center and the Seattle Center,” Sevart said in a release.

Also speaking to the Times, PacSci President and CEO Will Daugherty said, “the economics of operating a movie theater have become increasingly challenging. It made sense for PacSci to include the Boeing IMAX Theater in this transaction.”

Can our movie theaters catch a break already? SIFF ended its lease at the Egyptian last year, the Varsity Theatre closed just last month, and the Grand Illusion is still looking for a new home. However, the Boeing IMAX is something different. It’s the region’s “only true IMAX,” as the theater’s website once referred to it, with a 1.42:1 aspect ratio AKA a massive screen. When Ryan Coogler’s stellar vampire horror Sinners swept the nation last year, it was one of only a handful of places in the country where you could see the film as the filmmaker intended. (Having seen the film, I can’t overstate how much of an impact this makes.)

Now, it’s an open question whether they’ll be able to experience anything like that again anytime soon at the Boeing IMAX. As for the impact the sale could have on employees, a spokesperson for PacSci said “we have not yet determined the impact on PacSci staffing.”

Editor's Note: A previous version of this story said that the sale was final. Since publication, the Pacific Science Center has clarified that the sale has not yet gone through, but is expected to.

Beneath the Mask

Amanda Manitach — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0800

Shapiro’s journey through the art world is a storied one. by Amanda Manitach

Somewhere in Manhattan, sometime in the mid 1980s: a friend invited Ann Leda Shapiro to a clandestine gathering of nameless, faceless women at an artist’s loft. “Come to this meeting,” she was told. “We’re pissed off. We’re going to do something.” It turned out to be the beginning of the Guerrilla Girls.

Shapiro kept the secret of her involvement for 40 years; she will still only say so much. But there is one story about the time The Washington Post was sending people up to conduct a photoshoot. This posed a problem, as one of the primary commitments of the group was anonymity. Shapiro, taking notes for their meeting, was scribbling down ideas as fast as they came, when she committed a misspelling that would make art history: instead of guerrilla, she wrote gorilla. It was an a-ha moment, and their solution—the now-iconic gorilla mask—was born.

Shapiro’s journey through the art world is a storied one, her intersection with the Guerilla Girls just one of many tantalizing threads that could be spun into a volume. As she (selectively) spills the lore, our conversation is lubricated by multiple cups of coffee served in the artist’s Vashon Island living room. It’s a well-loved and lived-in house just up the road from a rocky slip of beach. Sun glitters off the face of the water, flooding the space with dappled light that dances across the ceiling with each break in the clouds. An acupuncturist’s table—not an easel or drawing desk—takes primary place in the room.

She’s lived here for 30 years, tucked away from the limelight.

Like the majority of female artists who achieve renown, it’s only been later in life that she’s been getting her flowers. (Shapiro turns 80 this August, though age feels like a preposterous abstraction here; she moves and speaks with the vivacity of someone 80 going on 18.) Last spring her solo exhibit, Interconnected Worlds, debuted in Antwerp. Another solo, Body Is Landscape, is currently hanging in Hong Kong. This January, Shapiro received the Betty Bowen Award—one of the region’s most coveted—which comes with a hefty cash prize and an exhibition at Seattle Art Museum. (Hers is scheduled for 2027.)

Categorizing Shapiro’s work is no easy feat. Watercolor and gouache paintings with an energetic, illustrative quality that plumb the esoteric, autobiographical, cosmic cartographies of the body. The body is ever-present in her work. Bodies that serve as landscapes. Bodies that swim in celestial storms and electric seas. Bodies as fine as stardust. Bodies that turn into trees that turn into something much deeper and primal. Detail so minute it seems physically impossible. Humor that is by turns brash, vulnerable, and grotesque mingles with sacred rage throughout earlier work; later imagery unfolds labyrinthine (self)portraiture that could keep a psychoanalyst busy for years.

It’s the kind of work the world is hungry for now. But it wasn’t always like this.

Shapiro grew up a “red diaper baby,” the daughter of card-carrying, working-class Communist parents who lived in a housing project in Queens. They were “neglectful, but had fabulous values,” she notes. Shapiro’s mother encouraged her artistic tendencies (which included being allowed to paint on the walls). On Saturdays, they took the train into the city so Shapiro could take classes at the MoMA’s art school, where she learned to “paint with sponges and throw paint at paper.” When the family eventually relocated to Manhattan, they moved into an apartment directly across from the American Museum of Natural History—a proximity that contributed to the development of Shapiro’s approach to close observation of the natural world. There was never going to be any other way but art for Shapiro; in her free time after high school she haunted the museum across the street, filling sketchbooks with intricate drawings of its curiosities while inquisitive museum guards looked on.

After high school, Shapiro rented a walk-up on the Lower East Side—the kind with a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet down the hall. She worked at a library, then an advertising agency (where, to assuage boredom, she typed out entire chapters of Moby Dick, one page at a time). She saved enough cash to catch a hippie bus to San Francisco, where she rented a room under a staircase and enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute. She modeled and painted murals for money. She marched with Allen Ginsberg and made low-tech, psychedelic oil-and-paint visuals for the first Kool-Aid Acid Test concert (Shapiro was perhaps the only person present not tripping on drugs).

She attended the University of California, Davis, for grad school, where the critiques were performed exclusively by mustached men. When they brought her to tears during her first review (her paintings were too “primitive,” they berated), Shapiro resolved to never let such a thing happen again. At the next review, she arrived with a rubber penis strapped to her face. She nearly asphyxiated (she forgot to poke holes in the tip), but the stunt was so off-putting it worked; from that day on, the mustaches kept mum and she earned an MFA without further incident.

After graduating, Shapiro traded oil paints for watercolors, scaling to a more intimate style that reflected the inspirations of her youth: Little Lulu comics and the delicate nature drawings of her museum sketchbooks. When a curator from the Whitney Museum of American Art paid Shapiro a studio visit, they offered her a solo show of works on paper—an honor for any artist, let alone a recent graduate. But when the exhibit opened in the fall of 1973, Shapiro was appalled to find they had pulled three of her best paintings at the last minute. “I was shocked,” she says. “I had no idea I was doing anything that was controversial.”

The censored works in question—three watercolors completed in 1971—seem disparate at first glance, but each is threaded with the same provocative humor as Shapiro’s rubber dick that doubled as a mask. One of the paintings, Two Sides of Self, depicts a pair of hermaphroditic mermaids whose bodies appear to conjoin at the breasts, lips, and (male) genitalia. The central figure in Woman Landing on Man in the Moon is a female astronaut in a NASA spacesuit; three American flag patches placed across the uniform reveal slits through which breasts and a penis protrude. Across the inky void in the background, a fleet of tiny airplanes skywrites: one needs a cock to get by.

“I was just asking questions innocently, like, what is male and what is female?” says Shapiro. “There was no multiplicity of pronouns then, or anything like that. I was asking, do you have to be male—or act like a male—to be able to move ahead in the world, to be visible?”

The Whitney wasn’t having it.

Happily, Two Sides of Self and Woman Landing on Man in the Moon were both eventually acquired by the Seattle Art Museum in 2015—part of the Deed of Gift spearheaded by artist Matthew Offenbacher and his partner Jennifer Nemhauser after he won the Neddy Artist Award. Offenbacher used around $20,000 of the award funds to purchase works by women and queer artists, which were then gifted to SAM as a gesture of solidarity to the community and an attempt to help rectify the dearth of work by minorities in the museum’s collection.

That would be far in the future, however.

Following the ’73 exhibit, Shapiro withdrew from the art world. She would continue to paint, but she would not be censored, nor self-censor. Going forward, she exhibited only in underground spaces and spent the next two decades as a self-described “academic vagabond woman.” She taught criticism and art at universities across the country. She spent a semester in a boat sailing the world. In her six years of undergrad and graduate school, Shapiro had never had a woman teacher, not once; while teaching, she found herself the sole woman in every department. The token female academic, with a strap-on cock for a nose.

Or a gorilla mask. It was around this time that Shapiro found herself amid a group of like-minded artists who were pissed. It was also around this time that a close friend was diagnosed with AIDS, an event that would indirectly shift the trajectory of her life. Shapiro took up volunteering at a clinic in Austin that treated people with the disease. The clinic happened to specialize in acupuncture.

“When I started reading about the theory and history and philosophy of Chinese medicine, it was like falling in love,” she says. The definition of qi is not merely energy, Shapiro explains: “It is matter on the verge of becoming. It’s that moment when you’re living and dying simultaneously. And that’s what I’m trying to paint about, the dichotomies—that things aren’t in opposition, but they’re in interconnectivity.”

Shapiro left her university job to study acupuncture in Seattle. Just for a year (she thought). She fell for the practice as much as the theory—and she was really good at it.

To say Shapiro’s work/life amounts to something approximating Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art, in which everything merges into a cohesive whole—is far from a stretch, as art and acupuncture melded on the island she made home. During this time she published multiple books, including a picture book about Vashon, My Island, and a graphic novel, Art Notes of an Acupuncturist. In the latter, she outlines a pictorial history of the synaesthetic cosmologies contained within the human body. With bursts of grotesque humor and poetic wit, Shapiro illustrates the interconnections at play in orifices and organs, tracing the invisible threads between elements and colors, emotions and smells. It reads like a legend to unlock the symbolism of her later work.

Because the demand for Shapiro’s art has increased, there’s less time for acupuncture lately; almost all her hours are committed to the studio, where she’s currently working on six pieces for her upcoming exhibit at SAM. As she leads the way into her workspace—a standalone building behind her house, where soft island light pours through skylights—she explains a piece she is working on, about the ginkgo trees she recently encountered in Japan. “They’re the oldest trees in existence, living fossils,” Shapiro muses. “They survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb.”

But, of course, it’s about more than just that. If you look closely, you can trace the nervous system of the universe in the wood and roots of those trees.

ICE Says They Will Play “Key Part of Overall Security Apparatus” of World Cup

Vivian McCall — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:25:00 -0800

Hey, we’re hosting the World Cup, and not far from the immigrant rich Chinatown-International District. And since this is the “World” Cup, tens of thousands of people from around the world will be here. That's a problem! by Vivian McCall

While defending Trump’s mass deportation program before Congress today, ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons told Rep. Nellie Pou of New Jersey that the agency would be a “key part of the overall security apparatus” of the FIFA World Cup this year.

Hey, we’re hosting the World Cup, and not far from the immigrant rich Chinatown-International District. And since this is the “World” Cup, the world will be here.

That’s a problem. Not only for us, but for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Pou’s East Rutherford, New Jersey, and all the other host cities that’ve promised to protect their immigrants from this violent, unpopular agency.

I asked Mayor Katie Wilson’s office if A) this is the first they’ve heard of this B) whether the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, Customs and Border Protection, or the Trump Administration informed the city of its “security apparatus” C) if they suspected this would happen, given ICE’s vague security role at the Winter Olympics and D) what it can do to protect Seattle if ICE does come here for the World Cup.

The office did not return my request for comment.

Lyons didn’t pull this plan out of thin air. Last summer, Border Patrol posted and then deleted a statement on Facebook saying that they would be “suited and booted ready to provide security for the first round of games.” And yesterday, radio station KTTH wrote that Seattle will “be protected by a unified, multi-agency security operation” as it prepares to host the matches.

“What you have when you have U.S. government agencies thinking about the defense and the security of U.S. national security and citizens is pulling together our top resources and the most experienced folks from the U.S. government who have worked on these major events,” Mignon Houston, the deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, told conservative radio host Jason Rantz.

The Unraveling

Dan Savage — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0800

Record your question for the Savage Lovecast at savage.love/askdan! by Dan Savage I had a great time at Mr. Mid-Atlantic Leather last month in Washington D.C. For those who don’t know, MAL is an annual fetish event for gay men. There is a lot of socializing in the lobby of the host hotel and a lot of kinky play in the rooms. One of the highlights for me was a mummification party. However, things got awkward when I had to explain to my friends that my husband thought I was on a business trip. We’ve been together for 25 years, living a happy life in a very blue college town in a very red state. Early in the relationship, he discovered that I am into BDSM when he found some Polaroids and some bondage gear in a duffel bag in the back of the closet. I had planned to tell him, just not at the very beginning of our relationship. Instead of…

[ Read more ]

Slog AM: Millionaire Tax Advances, Trump’s Consumer Protection Bureau Lost Us $19 Billion, EPA to Revoke Legal Basis of Clean Air Act Protections

Vivian McCall — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:09:00 -0800

The Stranger's Morning News Roundup by Vivian McCall

Senate Committee Passes Millionaire’s Tax: The 9.9 percent income tax on people making more than $1 million a year is moving forward with a tax break for small businesses. Businesses making $300,000 or less won’t have to pay a dime of the state’s business and occupation (B&O) tax, while those making below $600,000 will see limited relief. The state Senate could vote on the bill as early as next week.

Party Fouls: Police arrested several people after the Seahawks won the Superbowl Sunday night. For having a good time? No, for DUI, assault, and weapons violations.

Not the Olympic Marmot! Our local whistling rodent isn’t on the endangered species list yet, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service has determined a petition to list them warrants further review. As temperatures warm, trees are advancing up the mountain, destroying the alpine meadows they call home. There’s no place else for them to go.

Fortunately, climate change is not real. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency will revoke the “endangerment finding” this week, an Obama-era policy that determined that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide threaten public health. The finding is the legal basis for nearly all regulations under the Clean Air Act.

At least we have our health? Roughly 19,000 fewer Washingtonians signed up for health insurance through the state’s online marketplace this year. The drop isn’t as bad as the state predicted (80,000), but decidedly not good either. The state’s Cascade Care Savings plan for people who make up to 250 percent of the federal poverty line helped mitigate the loss of federal subsidies this year, but it won’t last.

At least we have … capitalism? Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has largely stopped protecting us, a decision that has cost Americans about $19 billion in the last year. The report says in the last year the CFPB has abandoned major consumer protections, stalled investigations, and dismissed lawsuits. Last year, Trump announced that he wanted to essentially pull the plug on the agency, reducing staff from 1,689 to 207, a move mercifully blocked in the courts.

Um, chat? Next month, default gamer messaging app Discord will automatically set user accounts to “teen-appropriate” experience, unless they can verify their age with a government ID or an AI face scan. This is the same company that exposed the government IDs of 70,000 users when a third party service it used for age verification was hacked.

Hostage Situation: Trump posted that he won’t open the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Winsor, Canada until Canada has “fully compensated” the US for “everything we have given them.” “With all we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least half of this asset.” Trump also said that if Canada made a trade deal with China, “the first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.” What?

Rare W: The Republican Governor of New Hampshire vetoed her party’s anti-trans bathroom bill for a third time. Here’s the state’s motto: Live Free or Die.

ICYMI: If you miss rooting for the home team, you could watch Seattle drag queen Jane Don’t compete on Drag Race. Stranger contributor Mike Kohfeld has another RuPaul recap.

Phone … wallet … keys, and OH NO! A Louisiana National Guard soldier left his AR-15 in a hotel bathroom on Bourbon Street while on patrol in the French Quarter. “I kind of feel bad for him because that's one of the main rules of being in the Army I would think is you're always supposed to have your weapon in your hands and not in somebody else’s,” said French Quarter performer Nervous Dwayne.

I know nothing gets past you. But the less observant people in your life will appreciate this explainer of the political and cultural references in Bad Bunny’s Superbowl performance.

I believe many, many things get past this guy:

It literally had a heterosexual wedding, dude

[image or embed]
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) February 10, 2026 at 5:21 AM

Liar: Trump has maintained he knew nothing of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes. But in 2006, he told the then-chief of the Palm Beach police department Micahel Reiter that Epstein’s “activities” with teenage girls were well known in New York and Palm Beach. “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Reiter recalled Trump saying in a 2019 FBI interview released in the Epstein case files.

A song for Trump:

Drag Race Episode Six: It’s the State of Florida vs. Jane Don’t

Mike Kohfeld — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:07:00 -0800

Drag Race Episode Six, the end of Rate-a-Queen. by Mike Kohfeld

This week, we wrapped up Season 18’s Rate-A-Queen talent show. Some queens showed that savvy strategy can outweigh a mid performance, but others *cough* Jane Don’t *cough* proved that reality TV shenanigans will never eclipse star quality. Let’s get into it.

The End of Glam

Ciara Myst, the lovable oddball from Indy, took center stage after being rated in the lowest position by her fellow queens last week. Her fate depended on the second round of Rate-A-Queen, as she would have to lip-sync against the lowest rated queen this week to save herself from elimination.

In the werkroom, Ciara, Vita, Darlene, Juicy, Nini, and Mia put their heads together to strategize for Rate-A-Queen before the second round of talent performances. Ciara thought she’d be able to out-perform Discord in a lip-sync battle, so she quietly asked her Team Glam sisters to rate Discord in the bottom regardless of how well Discord did in the talent show.

It didn’t take Juicy and Vita long to spill this tea to their buddy Discord, who wasn’t shaken by the challenge (though, we got a great cutaway of her pretending to be a Britney Spears superfan to out-psych Ciara). Ultimately, Discord’s punk rock performance was solid enough to keep her safe this week. Her glittering, bloody CEO runway look didn’t impress the judges, but its anticapitalist edge struck the right chord for me. Discord Mangione, anyone?

During a walkthrough, Michelle Visage called out Kenya for fumbling her lyrics during her lip-sync against Briar in Episode Four. “Drag queens’ number one job is to lip-sync, and to know their words,” Visage warned as she pointed a long red nail at Kenya. “Learn your lyrics.”

Kenya was shook, and sure enough, she missed several many more words while lip-syncing to her own song during her talent performance. However, Kenya’s alliance with the Miami girls paid off, and she was rated safe.

Myki Meeks of Orlando (aka Arya Stark who grows up to be BenDeLaCreme) learned that being everyone’s friend but nobody’s best friend is the silent killer during Rate-A-Queen. Her Bride of Frankenstein striptease number was a hit. We’ve seen burlesque many times on Drag Race, but bejeweled entrails? Gore-geous.

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Unfortunately, this is Rate-A-Queen, and Myki’s relationships were not strong enough to support her talent. She was rated last, falling into the bottom two alongside Ciara. RIP Glam Alliance, you really had no chance.

The Dion Dynasty

Athena “The Godmother” Dion protested against strategy-based play this week, claiming the rating should be based purely on performance. Either this was a ploy or she needs her memory checked, because she spent most of last week making arrangements for her drag family Juicy and Mia to receive top placements in Rate-A-Queen.

For her runway and performance, Athena leaned heavily into her Greek heritage. Her surreal evil-eye (mati) themed dress was a perfect blend of camp, glamour, and culture. As for the talent show, her Greek-themed variety act was solid but not show-stopping. The word “quaint” came to mind.

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A post shared by A T H E N A • D I O N (@athenadion)

But Rate-A-Queen is not about who has the best talent performance: it’s about leveraging relationships. Athena’s strategy of stacking votes in her favor by putting her Miami sisters on the judging panel during her performance was a brilliant move, and she was rated in the top two for Episode Six.

Jane Don’t vs. the (Allegedly) Illiterate Floridians

Jane Don’t may not have had a drag family to back her up in voting this week, but she didn’t need it.

The most effective drag artists are master historians, remixing references that transport the audience out of reality. On Drag Race, RuPaul has often said that drag queens need to be pop culture experts and rewards queens who know their shit, even when the references are relatively obscure. Seattle’s Jinkx Monsoon was a great example of this, introducing an entire generation to Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale during Season 5’s Snatch Game.

By Episode Six, Jane has proven she has a Ph.D. in Gay Culture. She described her exquisitely feathered chartreuse runway piece as “Galliano for Dior, refracted into this very musketeer 17th-century French moment,” which is queer word salad for “a really fucking cool look.” Even Michelle Visage, who famously hates the color green, had nothing negative to say about Jane’s runway.

Jane knew that her cabaret act inspired by Bette Midler would immediately read for the judges, because this bitch does her homework. She was less confident that the other queens would understand the reference, especially since half of them are allegedly illiterate Floridians.

If the other queens didn’t pick up the Bette Midler, it didn’t matter. Jane’s act was a winning blend of risqué humor, saloon girl style, and loads of confidence. She was voted into the top alongside Athena during the Rate-A-Queen deliberations. On Drag Race, it really doesn’t get much better than lyrics like “No train of thought, but a nice caboose.”

“We’re lip-syncing a punk song and she’s dressed as Donald Duck”

At the end of Episode Six, Jane and Athena, our top two, faced off for the win to “Jerkin” by Australian punk band Amyl and the Sniffers (vocalist Amy Taylor was the guest judge). Jane figured she’d have an easy win. “We’re lip-syncing a punk song and she’s dressed as Donald Duck,” referring to Athena’s glitzy Greek granny-core talent look. However, Athena turned it out, cementing Dion supremacy for a second week in a row. Her win was well-deserved given how well she played the social game of Rate-A-Queen. (And still, Jane’s been in the top for every episode so far. The only thing keeping Jane from winning Season 18 at this point is a Rate-A-Queen finale.) The real winner of this lip-sync, though, was Nini Coco’s neon-Teletubbie-meets-infinity-labia runway look. Seeing her bobbing back and forth beyond Jane and Athena was sending me.

The aforementioned labia. MTV

As much as we love Discord and Kenya, they were saved by the Rate-A-Queen rules this week. A shocked Myki Meeks was declared the bottom queen, and she lip-synced against Ciara to Britney Spears’ “Toxic.”.

The lip-sync concluded, but before RuPaul could pass judgement, she turned to Michelle Visage and said quietly, “This song was Season 4. Jiggly did it.”

“Bless her,” Michelle replied.

(Quick herstory lesson: After competing on Drag Race and Drag Race All Stars, fan favorite Jiggly Caliente became a judge on Drag Race Philippines and also had featured roles on Broad City and Pose. She tragically passed away in 2025 due to complications from sepsis after an emergency surgery. I couldn’t help but think of Briar Blush, who had just been hospitalized for sepsis after filming Season 18.)

My reverie was broken by RuPaul announcing Myki as the winner of the lip-sync.This came as no surprise—the only reason why Myki was in the bottom this week was because of Rate-A-Queen shenanigans. Ciara Myst was asked to sashay away.

Next week, the queens are tasked with creating political ads (!) plus, the cast get the Rate-A-Queen receipts. It’ll be like the producers throwing a ham hock to a pack of starving wolves. Let the drama roll!

The X Factor

Meg van Huygen — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0800

“Seattle has better Chinese food than New York." by Meg van Huygen

“Seattle has better Chinese food than New York, anyway,” Xian Zhang quips from the couch in her new office, overlooking Second Avenue. “Well, in New York, it’s mainly Cantonese food. But I find Chinese food from the north actually better here. I’m from the north, so I like the handmade dumplings and hand-pulled noodles, that kind of thing. Seattle does it better.”

Before she even landed, word was already on the street that the Seattle Symphony’s new music director is a massive foodie. Sure enough, it’s only a few minutes before she’s comparing our restaurants to those in her home of the last decade.

Zhang is still pulling double duty between Seattle and the New Jersey Symphony, where she’s been the resident music director since 2016. “My son, it’s his junior year,” she explains, “and it’s too late for him to change schools, so he’s finishing high school there. I don’t wanna mess up his life!” But since accepting a five-year contract in Seattle last year, she admits, she’s been feeling a little more at ease out here.

“I grew up in a climate just like this—cold, a little humid and windy,” Zhang says, motioning toward the window. “And we had lots of shellfish,” she grins, bringing it back to food. “That’s my thing—my favorite! So Seattle is perfect for me, actually.”

It’s mutual, babe. Scoring Zhang is a monumental win for Seattle, and not only for her enormous talent and fiery vivacity. Alongside having no music director at all following Thomas Dausgaard’s sudden email ragequit in 2020, the Seattle Symphony’s had 17 conductors in its 123 years, and they all looked more or less the same—white and presumed male—until Zhang. It brings a li’l tear to the eye of this former Cornish piano major, who could only find one female American conductor to look up to in the late ’90s (the legendary Marin Alsop). Down around Benaroya Hall, when you see all the colorful media paraphernalia heralding Zhang’s arrival—there are vinyl stickers glued to the actual sidewalk, reading XIAN!—it seems like overkill at first. But then you’re like: You know what? Let them cook. This is the Seattle Symphony’s Cinderella moment.

Even today, the game’s still heavily dominated by men in the United States, with women and nonbinary people making up just 29.4 percent of American symphony conductors. It’s much worse outside the US, with a 2023 study reporting that just 11.2 percent of conductors are women worldwide. As well, 66.9 percent of American symphony conductors are white. No figures are currently available on how many of the remaining 33.1 percent are female or non-male, but one can imagine it’s a slender slice. There’s Zhang and there’s Alsop, who’s the laureate director of the Baltimore Symphony, and the Atlanta Symphony has Nathalie Stutzmann at the wheel. But when it comes to symphonies in major American cities, these three women pretty much make up the whole scene.

“There also just aren’t that many of us conductors,” Zhang points out, “women or men. It’s a numbers problem. Because it’s a hard job! Not so many people can do it.”

She said a mouthful there, because to watch this woman conduct an orchestra is electric. Armed with her baton, this mini maestra seems 10 feet tall, commanding her musical battalion with real joy and absolute authority. Even from the nosebleed seats, you can feel the crackle in the air. Few people can do that job, indeed.

Xian Zhang (“sh-yen jahng”) was born in 1973 in Dandong, near the North Korean border, to a music teacher mom and a luthier dad. When Western instruments were scarce in Cultural Revolution-era China, her father built a piano for her from scratch. She began piano lessons at age 3 and was practicing eight hours a day by elementary school. At 11, she was sent to the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing to study piano performance under Lingfen Wu, herself a pioneering female conductor.

Zhang was dropped into conducting somewhat against her will when, one day, Wu sent her 20-year-old student to sub at a rehearsal at the China National Opera. “I’d just finished learning The Marriage of Figaro from her—but I’d never conducted anything in my life! It was a four-and-a-half-hour production, with professional musicians. My teacher called in the day before and said, ‘Um, I don’t feel well, but I’m gonna send my student to conduct tomorrow. If she does a bad job at rehearsal, I will try to come in at intermission and take over.’

“The director of the opera was very mad at my teacher that morning,” Zhang laughs. “‘How can you do this to us? And send a little girl?’ I was very short, very tiny. I remember sitting on the bus with the other musicians going to the opera house, thinking, I’m gonna DIE today. I’m gonna mess this up and be so embarrassed, and I will die.” But she did it anyway, and when her teacher called at intermission to check in, she was told, “Well, she actually seems to be doing okay? She’s almost done with the second act.”

“And my teacher was like ‘Uh, okay, I still don’t feel good! Let her finish the show.’ The next day, she kept saying she was sick. So yeah, she gave me two shows with the China National Opera when I was 20. That was my first public conducting job.”

Zhang didn’t forget it, and today, she goes out of her way to pay it forward and support female orchestral musicians, along with those from other underrepresented groups. She points to a recent Benaroya performance of composer Michael Abels’s Delights and Dances performed by laureate winners of the Sphinx Competition, which is open to young Black and Latino string players in Detroit and endeavors to address systemic obstacles within their communities. “The quartet was all students who’d won a competition for young, less-privileged players. I really, really feel strongly about supporting this kind of program.”

Since leaving China in 1998 to pursue her doctorate in Cincinnati, Zhang’s led orchestras in Milan, Montréal, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Cardiff, Singapore, London, and dozens of US cities. As well as back home in Beijing—in addition to her current roles in Seattle and New Jersey, she’s also the principal guest conductor at the China National Opera this season. True to brand, only a month after her introductory gala at Benaroya Hall in September, she jetted off to Helsinki for the rest of 2025, where she’d already signed up to conduct Tosca before saying yes to Seattle.

Now that she’s picked the reins back up in Seattle, Zhang is super pumped for the production of Iris Unveiled (originally Iris dévoilée), playing February 12, 14, and 15. In a Peking opera-style concert suite that Zhang says is very special to her personally, Chinese-born French composer Qigang Chen mashes up Chinese stringed instruments like the pipa and erhu with a Western-style orchestra, as solo vocalists sing in both Western and Chinese operatic styles. The suite describes the story of Iris, the Greek goddess of the rainbow, employing texture and color to describe various facets of divine femininity: coyness, jealousy, voluptuousness, lust. As the central figure, soprano Meng Meng wears traditional Chinese makeup and a kuitou (头), an elaborate headdress loaded with pearls and tassels and pompoms.

The production’s timing is pinned to the Lunar New Year and the Seattle Symphony’s second annual Lunar New Year Gala. Benaroya Hall’s lobby will be decked out for the holiday, tickets include a multi-course authentic Chinese dinner, and there’ll be performances by select artists from Iris Unveiled’s cast. “I’m so excited, yes!” Zhang says. “The story is based on old Chinese poems, and there’s some really authentic Chinese art involved in the program. And I find the music just strikingly beautiful.” The show, she adds, will be a great way for her to begin engaging with the Asian community here in Seattle, as a fresh start for the new year.

Zhang isn’t new to Seattle, for what it’s worth, having first guest-conducted the Seattle Symphony in 2008. “I’ve always liked Seattle! To me, Seattle has come up as one of the most vibrant cities in America nowadays. I like the people. They’re different from the East Coast—slightly laid-back, and they’re not as edgy. And also, I like the diversity of the community. I feel comfortable here, you know, as an Asian person.

“And I like the food here too!” she says, splitting off to enthusiastically recommend a hot pot restaurant off Aurora. “It’s like a shabu-shabu place. I know the name in Chinese but not in English!” She goes on to rave about the meat combo, as passionately as she spoke about Iris Unveiled. After playing 20 Questions, we realize it’s No.9 Alley Hot Pot in Bitter Lake.

Despite our rep as one of the nation’s most progressive cities, Seattle’s classical music scene has been kind of a musty old ghost ship over the last few years, with nobody at the helm. So it’s sincerely thrilling to see the fiery, sizzling energy that Zhang brings on board. Right out of the gate, she’s going out of her way to platform women, POC, and other underrepresented musicians, along with youth orchestras, local composers, and hell, the restaurant scene, too. Seattle’s classical community has needed this delicious zap in the butt since 1903. No amount of vinyl sidewalk stickers with her name on them is enough.

Get a Friday the 13th Tattoo at One of These Seattle Shops

Shannon Lubetich — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:35:00 -0800

Special Flash Deals for February 13, 2026

by Shannon Lubetich

Friday the 13th occurs three times in 2026—the most it’s possible to have in a calendar year—which means more flash tattoos and more fun. This month, the inky tradition coincides with Valentine’s Day weekend, prompting fun designs that are both creepy and cute. Whether you’re looking to get your first tatt or you’re running out of skin space, we’ve compiled a list where you can get inked as part of the occasion. Don't forget your photo ID!

Blood Orange Tattoo
It’s citrus season, and this shop has the juice. With dozens of adorable designs, Blood Orange Tattoo will run a flash event on Sunday and donate part of the proceeds to Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. Get some ink and spread the love, y’all.
Fremont

Green Tulip Tattoo
Grab an appointment at this tattoo collective on Valentine’s Day to select from one of their four talented artists’ flash sheets, which include a number of stick and poke designs. They’ll be taking clients from 11 am to “whenever,” and offering up treats, merch, and “LOVEly vibes.”
Uptown

Did You Get a Stranger Valentine?

Megan Seling — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 12:30:00 -0800

All is full of love. by Megan Seling

Illustrations by April Finfrock

If you need proof that there is still love in the world, look no further than our February issue. It's packed with hundreds and hundreds of reader-submitted love notes, all gushing with sweet sentiments and declarations of admiration.

There's a Valentine for Pookie Mamacita, Kitty, and Goose. There are people celebrating love landmarks like anniversaries, moving in together, and having a baby. I think there's even a marriage proposal?

Read through hundreds of reader-submitted Valentines here. Or, grab an issue at one of our hundreds of distro locations to find it in print!

♥ COSMO’S MOON

Aimee, When I met you everything started to make sense. Let’s continue doing crosswords at the bar, kiss in photobooths, and have fun together. Rheese

♥ CUTEST GOOSE

Steve with the long hair. Cutest skateboarder out there. Sweet goose. I found you.

♥ YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE!

I love you, Daniel! I’ll wash your back and you wash mine... Let’s keep taking care of each other. Life is hard but loving you is easy.

♥ CW LOVES CW

This year will be 20yrs we’ve spent together. I cannot wait for a tree filled, moss in our toes, playing in our forest in Forks for 20 or 40 more. <3

♥ WEENER STUFF

Oh handsome ween, I love you to bikini bottom and back. Love Jean <3

♥ FOR MY SUNFLOWER

L, During this season you’re sole reason I don’t mind the gray so I wanted to say: Happy Valentines, Love the sun is waiting above. -B

♥ IT’S OFFICIALLY LOVE

We officially did it!!! We are each others till the cold hand of death decides to take us. I will always LOVE YOU. -To the most caring woman I know

♥ MY LOVING EVIL EX

Dear Grady, Roses are red, we swore we were done, then New Year’s Eve slid into my DMs. Maybe 2026 is the sequel we didn’t plan but kinda want?

♥ TWO FROGS IN LOVE

Here’s to another frog filled year of love and joy. I’m looking forward to our new froggy abode <3 please let me paint the walls yellow

Stranger Suggests: Wikipedia Rabbit Holes, a Masked Chillwave Band, and a Retelling of Cupid and Psyche

Julianne Bell — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 12:17:00 -0800

One Really Great Thing to Do Every Day of the Week

by Julianne Bell MONDAY 2/9

Asher Perlman & Tom Toro

(LITERATURE) If you’ve ever found yourself shedding a tear at a comic strip or recoiling with existential dread from a political cartoon, this one’s for you. New Yorker contributors Asher Perlman and Tom Toro are coming to Elliott Bay Book Company to discuss their new cartoon collections, Hi, It’s Me Again and And to Think We Started As a Book Club…. The former from Perlman (also a writer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) pairs sharp, surreal humor with relatable existential spirals, while Toro’s new release skews wry and whimsical. With both artists exploring everything from anxiety to mortality to modern bureaucracy, expect a dynamic conversation about why life’s strangest moments often make the best punchlines. (Elliott Bay Book Company, 7 pm, free with RSVP, all ages) LANGSTON THOMAS

TUESDAY 2/10

Olivia Barton: For Myself and For You Tour

Cry along to Olivia Barton's cathartic music at Barboza on Tuesday, February 10. BLAIRE BEAMER

(MUSIC) It's hard to ignore the similarities between Orlando-born indie folk artist Olivia Barton and folk-rock darling Phoebe Bridgers. Barton's recent track "Dad Song" brings to mind Bridgers' "Kyoto"—both songs allude to complicated relationships with their fathers as Barton laments "God, I'm such a hypocrite, writing this instead of picking up the phone" and Bridgers sings "You called me from a payphone / They still got payphones / It cost a dollar a minute / To tell me you're getting sober." Barton also explores queer love, heartbreak, and anxiety on her third full-length For Myself and For You, which was co-produced by Pinegrove’s Sam Skinner and highlights her songwriting talent and ability to balance delicacy with an emotional punch. Don't miss this show from the singer-songwriter who's toured with Lizzy McAlpine and Madi Diaz; this time, she's headlining with support from confessional Utah artist Rachael Jenkins. (Barboza, 7 pm, all ages) SHANNON LUBETICH

WEDNESDAY 2/11

Blood Cultures

(MUSIC) They’re an anonymous, experimental indie-pop band who rock out on chillwave in hoods. What more do you need? I’m all about bands wearing disguises, and with the Residents out of commission for the moment (sigh), a quartet that tinks and reverbs and chirps along to videos of themselves (or somebody in hoods) lifting weights, shooting guns, making a mess with Chinese takeout, and turning themselves into scarecrows, just might fill dat gap. That was the gist of their video for the “Set It on Fire” single from their 2021 album LUNO, at least. What they’ll do in concert, I have no idea whatsoever, but it’s got to be conceptual. (Neumos, 7 pm, 21+) ANDREW HAMLIN

THURSDAY 2/12

Depths of Wikipedia

Dive deep into the weirdest corners of Wikipedia with comedian and journalist Annie Rauwerda at the Neptune on Thursday, February 12. IAN SHIFF

(COMEDY) Launched in 2001 as an end-all, be-all online encyclopedia, Wikipedia has fully reached cultural icon status in today’s world—not necessarily for its reliability (s/o misinformation and donation pop-ups), but for the absolutely ridiculous humans who write, edit, and speedrun it ad nauseam. Wildly popular (1.6 million followers and counting) account Depths of Wikipedia bears witness to this chaos, spotlighting the site’s strangest corners. Comedian and journalist Annie Rauwerda, who helms the site, has turned the most absurd Wikipedia gems into a live show that’s part comedy, part podcast, part beautifully deranged PowerPoint presentation, and she’ll kick off the latest tour in Seattle! I have no idea what to expect, but that’s kind of the point. (Neptune Theatre, 7 pm, all ages) LANGSTON THOMAS

FRIDAY 2/13

Till We Have Faces

See Taproot Theatre's production of C.S. Lewis's Greek mythology retelling Till We Have Faces, running Tuesday through Saturday until February 21. GIAO NGUYEN

(THEATRE) In one of his letters, C.S. Lewis wrote that he believed that his final novel, Till We Have Faces, was “far and away” his best, “but it has, with critics and the public, been my greatest failure.” So when I saw that Taproot Theatre was premiering an adaptation of the book, I figured it was time to read it. I’m happy to report the critics were wrong. The book is a reinterpretation of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, written from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister. She’s filing a complaint to the gods (relatable). Taproot’s staged production is the first of its kind—a passion project of the theater’s producing artistic director Karen Lund—and it’s only running through this month. (Taproot Theatre, 7:30–10 pm, 16+) HANNAH MURPHY WINTER

SATURDAY 2/14

Valentine's Day Show: Glenn Hendrick with John Bellows, babyboy, and Plastic Wildflowers

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(MUSIC) Disclaimer: My best friend Kirsten is helping organize this event and will be performing, but even if they weren't, I'd still recommend it—it's a night of excellent artists at a cozy, intimate venue, all in support of some truly essential causes. The lineup includes the lush, groovy quintet babyboy, the nostalgic yet lyrically frank Cleveland group Plastic Wildflowers, and the San Juan Island artist and musician Glenn Hendrick, who weaves "heartbreaking lyrics with stripped down hooks to reel you into the apocalypse" and will perform alongside singer-songwriter John Bellows. Merch sales and a raffle will raise funds for Gaza and for supporting Seattle families with legal fees for immigration court. What better way to spend your Valentine's Day than honoring art, love, and community in all of its myriad forms? (The Rabbit Box Theatre, 8 pm, all ages) JULIANNE BELL

SUNDAY 2/15

Cécile McLorin Salvant

(MUSIC) Cécile McLorin Salvant has the most exciting voice in contemporary jazz. It’s not just her pitch-perfect voice, which reaches the heights of Edith Piaf, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, and Kate Bush, but the inventiveness with which she flexes her vocals. On her most recent album, Oh Snap, the three-time Grammy Award winner and MacArthur Fellow croons through a dozen short, intimate original songs (plus an a cappella cover of the Commodores’ “Brick House”) that she never intended to see the light of day. Setting out on a personal creative quest to place spontaneity and joy at the heart of her writing process, Salvant tinkered with home recording programs to craft personal songs inspired by the music that soundtracked her childhood in 1990s Miami, from grunge and pop boy bands to classical and folk music. The result of the album is a delightfully chaotic audio journal that will please fans of traditional jazz as well as genre rule-breakers like Erykah Badu and Solange. (Jazz Alley, 7:30 pm, all ages) AUDREY VANN

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How to Date Like an Asian

Michael Wong — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0800

Let me show you how to go on a date like an Asian person. by Michael Wong

After a decade of media dominance, the world finally must admit: Asians got swag. And somehow we are still facing an Asian birth-rate crisis (to the specific chagrin of my mother). So given the circumstances, and with Valentine’s Day on the way, let me show you how to go on a date like an Asian person, in Seattle. Let me know how it goes!

Pregame at Costco
Getting your date kicked off by flexing membership at an exclusive club is never a bad idea. And if you don’t know, Asian people feel the same way about Costco that white people feel about Trader Joe’s and Hispanic moms feel about Ross. It’s our mini Disneyland. It delights us.

Take a stroll and reacclimate to being around people after a long week working from home. Costco also gives you a chance to flex your financial prowess early by starting things off with a $1.50 hotdog combo, aka the Kirkland Signature aphrodisiac. This move will also save you both money on future eating opportunities—big-brain moment.

Find Gems at Uwajimaya and Kinokuniya Bookstore
Imagine if Barnes and Noble were an otaku, in a good way. That’s Kinokuniya, the bookstore at Uwajimaya in the CID. You’ll have a blast walking between the shelves, pointing at things you both like. This is also a great way to determine if your date can read.

The major play alert is the magazine section. The racks are teeming with more special interests than a community college catalog, like: POPEYE (for Japanese “city boy” fashion), Brutus (for culture and home inspo), or the Japan Railfan Magazine (for train lovers, plainly). Japanese magazines are a different breed, and while you probably can’t read them, you’ll still find a lot of inspiration and delight inside the pages. Browsing here is a concise way to learn more about your date’s interests, and for them to learn more about you, too. Look behind the counter for magazines that come with cool niche-interest gifts, like Sanrio or even Bape accessories.

Before heading out, pick out a couple snacks with your date at Uwajimaya, perhaps from the deli. Try a Mogu Mogu bottled drink if you haven’t yet—nata jellies (those translucent, chewy cubes made from fermented coconut water) are like a fidget spinner for your mouth.

Picnic in the CID Hing Hay Park
The next move is to head up the block to Hing Hay Park. It’s a tucked-away pocket of the CID with lots of seating, ornate pagodas, and plenty of characters. It’s the ideal home base to spread out your treasures, share some snacks and stories, and appreciate the energy of the neighborhood together.

Plus, if you’re feeling recently inspired by Marty Supreme, you could play each other at one of the public ping-pong tables, or embarrass yourself by playing against one of the Chinese grinders ready for a new victim.

Browse the CID Shops
Let the CID trinket observation commence. Check out Trichome, a longtime alt hot spot and gift shop for the indie streetwear kids and the psychedelic-interested among us, and not totally in the Spencer’s Gifts sort of way. Ask about the Lexco cases and the refrigerator behind the counter.

Other nearby stores you won’t want to miss include Shishido Zakka-Ya, a shop full of kawaii wares made by local Seattle AANHPI artists, Mam’s Books for the best selection of Asian authors and warm vibes, and Pink Gorilla, where your childhood video game nostalgia comes to life in vibrant tactile glory.

Walk the Jose Rizal Bridge
One of Seattle’s best viewpoints is the bridge that carries 12th Avenue South over the freeway. When it’s time to wrap up in the CID, take a short drive up to Jose Rizal Bridge. Park on the Beacon Hill side, near the Tower of Terror–looking building, then walk the bridge back towards the CID, enjoying the view together.

Not only is it a great place to snap pics of one another, catch a sunset, and appreciate the city, it’s also a great opportunity to flex your knowledge about Filipino explorer Jose Rizal, which I expect you to brush up on before this leg.

Try on Fits at Break Away Vintage on Pike
In the big 2026, we are saving money on clothes by shopping secondhand. No better place in Seattle to take in-store fit pics than at Break Away Vintage Market in Capitol Hill (formerly Late Night Vintage Market).

This spot, IMHO, is holding down the neighborhood, run by a group of fellas who in kind remind me that Seattle still has flavor. It’s laid out similar to the Winchester Mystery House, with hallways and stairs that lead you to unexpected places. Pick through racks and find items your date would find amusing, plus trying on the wildest things for a mini fashion show is never a miss.

Small Bites at Tamari Bar
By now it’s time for a proper meal. In this area—right down the street from Break Away—you have to go to Tamari Bar.

This spot feels casual by design, but the necessity of reservations signals the quality of the meal you’re about to enjoy. I also highly rate their inventiveness, and I’m sure your date will, too. Throw a dart at the menu and you will be thrilled, but don’t miss the famous “206 curry” in any iteration, the mazemen with Parmigiano Reggiano, or the bara-chirashi bowl.

Sip Highballs at Shibuya HiFi
To cap off this date, I suggest one of the coolest places in the city. Shibuya HiFi in Ballard is a vinyl bar and lounge inspired by Tokyo’s legendary jazz kissa (listening cafes). You initially enter through the “Living Room”—a swank, intimate space covered floor-to-ceiling with cedar planks and cozy furniture. Enjoy a highball at the bar, or perhaps a Pink Rabbits (made with Japanese Haku vodka and lychee).

When you’re reset, head back to the reservations-only HiFi Room, which feels like the living room of the world’s biggest audiophile. You’ll have to remove your shoes and leave your drink behind before entering and settling into the plush sofas or vintage Benaroya Hall seats.

Get enveloped in the album (that you’ll listen to start to finish), and if you get carried away by the ambience and realization that life doesn’t get better than this, my suggestion is to look over at your date, smile, and just let it happen.

Slog AM: The Seahawks Won, Bad Bunny Won More, and Trump Had a Terrible, No Good Sunday

Hannah Murphy Winter — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:47:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Hannah Murphy Winter

The Seahawks Won Benito Bowl LX: They did it. On Sunday, for the second time in the franchise’s 50-year history, Seattle won the Super Bowl. They beat the New England Patriots 29-13 and got to have their redemption arc after losing to the Pats in 2015. Get ready for the parade downtown on Wednesday! Not a football fan? Hometown pride not enough for you? Let me offer you this: Thanks to the Seahawks, Trump had a bad day on Sunday. He wanted the Pats to win so badly.

Benito Also Won the Benito Bowl: Thanks to Trump’s hissy fit about having a Spanish-language performer for the halftime show, Bad Bunny’s performance was always going to be political, and holy shit did he kill it. The entire performance was a love letter to Puerto Rico. The only English he spoke in the whole show was to say “God Bless America,” before listing all of the countries on the American continent. And when he appeared on stage with the Puerto Rican flag, it was the one with the light blue triangle—the independence flag. And on top of that, it was an impeccable performance. The set was a series of vignettes—including Benito giving a 5-year-old Latino boy his Grammy and an actual fucking wedding—and it was without a doubt the most lush, joyful performance I’ve seen on the Super Bowl stage. Watch it in full here.

Meanwhile, at the “All-American Halftime Show”: Because watching a Puerto Rican perform might make conservatives’ dicks fall off, TurningPointUSA hosted an “alternative” to the Super Bowl halftime show on YouTube. Apparently, about 2 million people streamed the pre-taped TPUSA fundraiser on YouTube, filling the live chat with American Flag emojis while Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett performed. Pete Hegseth threw a football. And that’s about all that happened.

Ring Tries to Pup-Wash Surveillance: In their 30-second Super Bowl ad, Ring cameras highlighted “Search Party,” a way to trigger all of your neighbors’ cameras to look for a dog if it’s gone missing. Sweet, right? But the system could have just as easily been called “Manhunt.” As USA Today put it, it’s The Dark Night brought to life. “Indeed, the Ring camera technology that uses AI to track multiple cameras in a vicinity to locate a lost dog is basically the same function that Wayne used to hack people's cell phones to create a high-frequency generator receiver to pin down the location for Gotham City's Clown Prince of Crime.”

Weather: Looks like the weather gods are smiling upon the Super Bowl parade. We’ll likely have some rain today, but Tuesday through Thursday should be sunny and in the 50s.

Got a spare $5 mil? Bill Gates isn’t selling Xanadu 2.0 (his megamansion) in Medina, but he is shedding one of his bonus houses around it. For a man worth more than $100 billion, selling a multi-million-dollar house is sort of like selling books to a used book store for the rest of us. For the low, low price of $4.8 million, you can be Bill Gates’s neighbor. But considering how many times his name has shown up in the Epstein files (namely for trying to sneak STI medication to his wife after he caught something from “Russian girls”), that might be bringing the price down a couple mil.

Speaking of Epstein and Microsoft Execs: It looks like Nathan Myhrvold, the chief tech officer for Microsoft from 1986 to 2000, did some time on Jeffrey’s island. He also emailed Epstein about how hard it is to “FedEx pussy,” and Epstein offered to “leave” a girl for Myhrvold at his lab.

The DOJ’s Hiring: But no one wants the job. Chad Mizelle, a former chief of staff to US Attorney General Pam Bondi, posted on the porn site formerly known as Twitter that “if you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda,” you should slide into his DMs. Once a coveted position for lawyers around the country, the application questionnaires now include questions like: “How would you help advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role?” And prioritizing loyalists has meant that they’re hiring shittier lawyers. I’m sure Nick Brown doesn’t mind.

Here's that Ring #SuperBowl commercial: pic.twitter.com/1gAxIJATdz
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) February 9, 2026

Two Million Souls: According to a recent study, after almost four years of fighting, the death toll in the Ukraine War is nearing 2 million. Two-thirds of those deaths are Russian, who lost about 35,000 troops a month in 2025.

Here’s a Dystopian Headline for You: “Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, Study Finds.” Apparently, ChatGPT and other LLMs could theoretically get into medical school, but diagnosing real humans is a whole other matter. Sometimes the chatbots generated information that was just wrong—fixating on elements of the patient’s descriptions that were irrelevant, providing a partial US phone number, or telling them to call the Australian emergency number. “In an extreme case, two users sent very similar messages describing symptoms of a subarachnoid hemorrhage but were given opposite advice,” the study’s authors wrote. “One user was told to lie down in a dark room, and the other user was given the correct recommendation to seek emergency care.” I know insurance is hell, but go to the doctor.

Biiiiig Hug: It’s been an unusually warm winter, even in Spokane, so when a deer was spotted stranded on the ice on top of Loon Lake, it was never going to be an easy rescue. Firefighter Gavin Gallagher scooched out to the center of the ice, lassoed her neck, and bearhugged her to keep her secure while the folks on land reeled them in. Rudely, she didn’t say thank you. “She ran off as, as expected,” one of the rescuers said, “to do deer things.”

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News We Didn’t Know We Needed: 404 Media published a roundup of studies about sex in space. Key lesson: Don’t make babies in space.

Because there’s no such thing as too much Bad Bunny today:

Celebrate Black History Month at These Seattle-Area Events

Langston Thomas — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0800

Gallery Shows, A Black-Owned Business Market, and More

by Langston Thomas

February is Black History Month, a time to recognize the contributions and struggles of Black Americans throughout our nation’s history. In the face of rising bigotry, continuing the work of antiracism and investing in Black futures remains as important as ever. Read on to find out ways you can honor and celebrate the month, from Melodies of the Diaspora: Celebrating 100 Years of Black History Month to America 250: The Verdict Is?

2026 Call to Conscience Black History Month Museum
South Seattle is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse areas of the city, which makes Call to Conscience essential viewing for Black History Month. This curated museum experience presented by Rainier Avenue Radio transforms the historic Columbia City Theater into a living archive of Black history around the Sound. While many installations run throughout the month, the experience evolves weekly, exploring everything from the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party to Jackson Street jazz and the legacy of Quincy Jones. Add in rotating exhibits on Black Tacoma, Black athletes in the Metro League, and the foundational work of blackpast.org, plus talks and special programs, and no two visits feel the same.
Columbia City Theater, Rainier Valley (Through Feb 28)

Purple Lemonade Collective

Nico Swenson — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0800

This Local Performance Troupe Radiates Joy and Ass-Shaking Confidence

by Nico Swenson

The world is full of lemons, but thank god there’s Purple Lemonade. This performance collective has taken over the city with their charisma, cross-genre dance, and scantily clad performances. As they strut the stage, you might see elements of hip-hop, reggaeton, flavors of camp—a whole glorious blend of street, club, and contemporary movement that refuses to be boxed into a singular style. From nightlife venues to theater spaces, their acts fill any venue with an ass-shaking confidence that radiates their mission of promoting playful self-expression.

The troupe was cofounded by Ronnie Gatsby and Kristen Puckhaber in 2016. The name pays homage to two of Gatsby’s big artistic influences: Prince and Beyoncé. “Lemonade,” a nod to Beyoncé’s 2016 album, “was Beyoncé taking a shitty experience and making something great,” says Gatsby. “The thing people used to ridicule me for, being flamboyant, is what has made me a place in the world. I turned that shit into lemonade.”

The collective has taken many forms in the past 10 years, but has always centered around a tight-knit, collaborative friendship. “What we value the most is being able to create cool shit together,” says Gatsby. “We love each other. We get to do what we love with friends.” That core value has stayed true as Gatsby passed the role of artistic director to Carlos Vidal.

Vidal joined Purple Lemonade two years ago. “It changed my life,” says Vidal. One of the things he found empowering was the expansive inclusion of styles. “As a performer, you can do whatever you want to do, just be you and show people how talented you are.” That mindset is why the group has expanded into other areas of entertainment, including drag shows, burlesque, and performing at major venues like the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Rep, and Pacific Northwest Ballet. Last summer, they performed at halftime with the cast of Tush for Seattle Reign’s Pride Match at Lumen Field. As regulars in local drag shows, they frequently work with local icons like Betty Wetter. “Collaborating with Purple Lemonade is a dream,” says Wetter. “They’ve created an environment full of love and support, so everyone shines when it’s showtime.”

When asked what people can expect to see, Vidal says “ass out.” The collective’s magnetism sends audiences into a frenzy. For Vidal, the inspiration it ignites in
others is a highlight of the work. “Whether that’s a feeling of ‘I’m going to be braver, I can be more expressive, I’m going to show more ass.’ You can make people feel confident, that’s the best part.”

The group creates in a very joint-effort way, with both the founders still part of the family and process. That connective energy will help them tackle a full and exciting year ahead. J’Adore at the Triple Door in February, Live Nude Mammals at Queer/Bar in March, and Hotel Gatsby at Intiman Theater in April are among upcoming events. “We want to be queer everywhere,” says Vidal. “With everything happening right now, we want to bring joy to people and have fun.”

Pop Loser # 15: Immaculate Collection with Biblioteka

Audrey Vann — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 14:24:00 -0800

This week's music news. by Audrey Vann

Welcome back to Pop Loser! This week, we dig into some highlights from the 68th Annual Grammy Awards. In another edition of Immaculate Collection, local punk band Biblioteka share their treasure troves of funky shoes, creepy dolls, and Magic: The Gathering cards. Plus, I have two moody song recommendations to get you through the rest of the week.

This Week in Music

The Grammys were on Sunday (if you even care). Politics seeped through the award show’s facade with ICE OUT pins on every lapel and speeches dedicated to immigrant solidarity from Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, Olivia Dean, and Kehlani. Other highlights from the show included a D’Angelo tribute from Lauryn Hill and performances from pop divas Addison Rae, Sabrina Carpenter, and Lady Gaga. Trump has already threatened to sue host Trevor Noah, who joked about his visits to Epstein Island.

The award show also brought us live TV gold. Cher made an appearance at the Grammys for the first time in 18 years to accept a lifetime achievement award and present the highly anticipated Record of the Year. What followed was an incredible chain of slipups, pauses, and missed marks that only Cher can get away with. Her appearance ended with her announcing the late Luther Vandross as the winner. (The winner was actually Kendrick Lamar and SZA, for their song “Luther”). This was the greatest award show moment since John Travolta introduced “the wickedly talented Adele Dazeem.”

Let’s talk fashion. There have been entire articles written about Chappell Roan’s red carpet look, but for all the wrong reasons (I am looking at you, New York Times). The merlot chiffon gown, held up by faux nipple piercings, was inspired by a look from Thierry Mugler’s fall 1998 couture collection and should make anyone gasp from its elegance, not prudishness. In the negative space on her skin, Roan was covered in delicate temporary tattoos of lace-woven horses. This is by far my favorite red carpet look of the last 20 years.

RIP Billy Bass Nelson. This week, we lost Billy Bass Nelson, the original bassist of the pioneering psychedelic funk band Funkadelic, who died just three days after his 75th birthday. No cause of death has been reported yet. It was also announced Monday night that Three Dog Night cofounder Chuck Negron, best known as the lead vocalist on “Joy to the World,” died at the age of 83.

The USA could never. Live music venues in the UK are now set to receive government support, following backlash to plans that would increase business rates, which could leave thousands of venues and pubs at risk of layoffs and closures. In response to the possible impact on live music, the Treasury has confirmed a new support package of nearly £100 million for live music venues across England and Wales.

Immaculate Collection with Biblioteka

If you’ve been nonstop bumping Amyl & the Sniffers’ third album, Cartoon Darkness, since it was released, might I suggest you add some Biblioteka into the rotation? Like the Aussie punks, Seattle’s Biblioteka are led by a high-energy vocal powerhouse, Mary Robins, who often sings about being turned on and pissed off (just listen to their newest single “Firestarter”). Ahead of the trio’s album release party at Neumos on Feb 12, I caught up with the band to discuss their obsessions, from funky shoes to creepy dolls.

Mary: Funky Shoes

What do you collect?
I collect shoes, namely, statement shoes and boots for playing shows. There’s something about stomping around in big, boxy boots that makes me feel like a giant praying-mantis-meets-Barbarella. Things I usually go for: platforms, chunky heels, and leopard.

What was the first item you acquired in this collection?
Jeffrey Campbell buckle ankle boots with a metal-caged heel. I wore them for our first Biblioteka show. They’re comfy and look so sick. Local shoe lore is that Jeffrey Campbell got his start working at the Tukwila Nordstrom in the women's shoe department, or so the people who work there have told me. I love a local legend, and I also had my first job at the Tukwila mall.

What is the most prized item in your collection?
The vintage, silver, pointy-toe cowboy boots. I got them at a vintage shop while we were in Spain on tour. They look amazing, one of a kind and out of this world. And they fit perfectly.

Tell me about an item you'd like to add to your collection or a new collection you'd like to start.
I’m trying to de-collect, especially since I grew up in a house where “collecting” can get out of hand, lol. So these days I’m selling clothes and shoes on my Depop :)

Hexx: Souvenir Dolls

What do you collect?
I collect a lot! Vinyl, vintage tees and bolos, guitars, and I also started a creepy doll collection.

What was the first item you acquired in this collection?

I started collecting souvenir plush/dolls/toys while out touring, and it all started with a creepy clown that I found in a Portland alley next to a bag of drugs. I left the drugs, took the clown, and proclaimed her name Gweneviere, which also happened to be the name of the venue owner’s daughter (who despises clowns). Gweneviere is our unofficial mascot!

What is the most prized item in your collection?

I have a green alien plush scored from a middle-of-nowhere gas station close to what I assume or wish to believe is Area 51.

Tell me about an item you'd like to add to your collection or a new collection you'd like to start.

I’d be good with another back alley clown.

Jules: Magic: The Gathering Cards

What do you collect?
I started collecting Magic: The Gathering cards entirely on accident, but now I’ve likely got around two or three thousand cards in my collection, and it is probably what I would need to sell off if I needed a quick windfall someday.

What was the first item you acquired in this collection?

I started playing around 2018 when a friend of mine moved back to town and decided to get us all hooked. The first Magic cards I bought on my own were from Mox Boarding House, a battle deck they had assembled called Chimera Flash. The deck was built around a card called Spellheart Chimera, which at the time felt like the strongest card imaginable. It has flying and trample AND its power is equal to the number of instants and sorceries in my graveyard? What could be better than that? Soon after I started collecting packs from the Guilds of Ravnica expansion, which had a card called Crackling Drake, which was basically the same as Spellheart Chimera but it also drew a card when it entered. The search for the strongest version of Spellheart Chimera still continues to this day.

What is the most prized item in your collection?

I’m a lifelong Sonic the Hedgehog fan, so I bought the crossover Secret Lair collection when they launched it. There are seven secret bonus cards, the seven chaos emeralds, that were all super rare drops for those who bought the collab. I ended up getting the red chaos emerald, it was such a thrill pulling that out of the pack. I’ve got it in my trade binder to proudly show, and it’s doubtful I’ll pull an individual card that I’m more stoked on.

Tell me about an item you'd like to add to your collection or a new collection you'd like to start.

Ideally, this collection never gets any bigger. I’d love to just survive for the rest of my Magic career by selling cards if I want to buy more cards. I’ve got too many of these things.

Music Events Worth Your Hard-Earned Money This Week

Naima Bock Feb 5, Tractor Tavern, 8 pm, 21+

Robyn Hitchcock Feb 6, Neptune Theatre, 8 pm, all ages

The Maya Experience Feb 6, Barboza, 6:30 pm, 21+

Audioasis Live Feb 7, KEXP, 5 pm, all ages

Claire Conway, Your Jack, Frankie Beach Feb 10, Sunset Tavern, 7:30 pm, 21+

Olivia Barton Feb 10, Barboza, 7 pm, all ages

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The Songs That Keep Me Up at Night

“Heavy, Why?” by Blackwater Holylight
Portland-born metal band Blackwater Holylight contrast their shimmering harmonies with sludgy, psychedelic instrumentals for a product that is haunting, beautiful, cathartic, and scary all at the same time. Their new album, Not Here Not Gone, was released on Friday and features some of their most approachable songs yet—take “Heavy, Why?” for example, which is reminiscent of 2010s rock bands like the Dum Dum Girls and Broken Water. I don't listen to very much metal, but I love this band—consider them your gateway into the genre.

“Bluebell” by Babes in Toyland

When I’m in a bad mood, I listen to Babes in Toyland’s 1992 album Fontanelle as loud as I can tolerate. I’ve been in a bad mood a lot this week, so naturally, “Bluebell” has been literally stuck in my head, keeping me up at night. Specifically, the part where she yells, “You know who you are / You're dead meat, motherfucker!” Listen to it for a cathartic release.

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