Sarah Stackhouse
Seattle Sauna Festival Returns to Ballard for Another Round
Mobile saunas from around the Northwest will gather at the National Nordic Museum November 7-8.
In Seattle, November is usually something to face in a raincoat. At the National Nordic Museum, you can meet it in a bathing suit. The Seattle Sauna Festival returns to Ballard November 7-8 for its second year, bringing mobile saunas from around the Northwest onto the museum grounds. Visitors can try several, cool off in…
WALKDONTRUN Returns This Saturday, Turning Downtown Seattle Into a Sprawling Art Show
In its second year, the free festival brings 200-plus artists to a 20-block route September 19, with a secret garden and a former 7-Eleven stocked with art.
Most walks through downtown Seattle involve trying to get somewhere. On September 19, the crosswalk itself might be the reason to stop. Heap Troupe will turn a four-way crossing into a performance, one of dozens of encounters planned for this year’s WALKDONTRUN. The free, all-ages art walk stretches across more than 20 blocks. From 11…
Rearview Mirror: Seahawks Off the Field, Seattle on the Board, and Smoked Oysters
Things I did, saw, ate, learned, or read in the past week (or so).
HOOKED ON KNOCKS Admittedly, I am late to this one. The Seahawks’ first season of Hard Knocks, the HBO series that follows NFL teams through training camp, premiered in August, but until last week, I had never heard of it. To be honest, my football knowledge starts with knowing what a touchdown is and doesn’t…
Washington Has Incredible Oysters. Have You Tried Alaska’s?
A quick flight from Seattle—or a stop on an Alaska cruise—leads to Southeast Alaska’s floating oyster farms and a Ketchikan waterfront spot serving the local harvest.
Living in Seattle can make an oyster eater a little smug. Washington produces some of the best, and we know it. We have opinions about mignonette—do or don’t?—and can find a good dozen without leaving the neighborhood. So when an invitation to Southeast Alaska promised oysters that were “INSANE!” I wanted to see how they…
Studio Sessions: Ling Chun
The Seattle-based artist brings playful color to ceramics and neon while exploring memory, transformation, and life between cultures.
For Ling Chun, creating begins with something sensed before it can be named. Working with clay, glass, light, and sometimes synthetic hair, the Hong Kong-born artist gives physical form to things that words cannot always hold. “For me, the magnitude of making goes far beyond the object that is eventually produced,” Chun says. “The object…
Rearview Mirror: A Legendary Cocktail Bar, Kayaking With Herons, and the Prettiest Water Bottle
Things I did, saw, ate, learned, or read in the past week (or so).
DEATH (FINALLY) COMES TO SEATTLE After a few shifts in timing, Death & Co, the influential cocktail bar that opened in New York City’s East Village in 2006, is ready to welcome Seattle. Known for meticulous cocktails and a moody atmosphere, the company’s first Pacific Northwest bar will open inside Pioneer Square’s RailSpur development, joining…
The 2026 Washington State Book Award Finalists Are Here
Your fall reading list just got 41 books longer.
The 2026 Washington State Book Award finalists are in, and readers may want to clear some space on the nightstand. Judges selected 41 titles from 308 books written by Washington authors and published in 2025. The finalists span fiction, memoir, nonfiction, poetry, picture books, books for young readers, and young adult literature. Seattle is well…
Studio Sessions: Periko The Artist
The Mexican-born, Seattle-based artist paints vibrant figures that refuse to settle into fixed identities.
Can a painting ever contain an entire person? The works of Gerardo Peña, also known as Periko The Artist, leave room for their subjects to move and change, resisting the idea that any of us can be reduced to a single image or expression. Peña’s colorful, surreal figures capture something less fixed than a likeness,…
Can Alaska Kelp Help Washington Crops Beat the Heat?
A Ketchikan company is working with WSU researchers to see whether its kelp-based biostimulant can help grapes and berries withstand environmental stress.
From the floatplane, reddish-brown kelp traces the edges of the small islands between Ketchikan and Prince of Wales Island like brushstrokes on the surface of the water. Up close, on a rare 70-degree July day in Alaska, the kelp is glossy and beautiful, though the wind coming off the water makes it nearly impossible to…
PlantCon Is Coming for Seattle’s Windowsills
The nation’s largest gathering for houseplant lovers makes its Pacific Northwest debut this August with 200 booths, hands-on workshops, and a DJ.
My house is full of plants, enough that I’ve lost count. Houseplants have the same suspicious math as tattoos: One is rarely the final number. I propagate cuttings in jars of water, regularly rearrange corners of the house in pursuit of better light, and like to imagine the entire collection is improving the air. That…
Five Easy Summer Outings That Don’t Require a Big Plan
August is wonderful, but it can get a little feral when the kids are roaming free and school still feels far away. Consider this your low-effort rescue plan.
There’s a point in summer when the family starts to fray a little. Camps have come and gone, and the novelty of popsicles for lunch has worn off. Everyone wants something fun to do, but nobody needs a major production that involves sand all over the car or a ferry reservation. These five outings are…
A Spa for People Who Are Bad at Relaxing
Circle Wellness is bringing its private thermal circuit to Seattle, where a calm voice keeps time so you don’t have to.
From the outside, Circle Wellness does not look like a spa. It looks like the sort of large black structure you might hesitate to enter without first texting someone your coordinates. I arrived at its Vancouver, B.C., location on an unusually warm June afternoon and found no windows, almost no signage, and one massive steel…
Rearview Mirror: Storytellers in Clay, Wild Seattle, and an Alaskan Feast I’ll Never Forget
Things I did, saw, ate, learned, or read in the past week (or so).
CLAY RELATIONS I went to see the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s new Kondō family exhibit expecting beautiful ceramics, and there are plenty. What I didn’t expect was a fascinating story that starts with samurai. Long before pottery became the family trade, earlier generations guarded Kiyomizudera, a historic Buddhist temple in Kyoto. That role vanished when…
Join The Must List
Don't miss a thing.
Get Seattle's best events,handpicked
and delivered to your inbox weekly.