With state and national elections imminent, a large helping of politics with your news is pretty much unavoidable. And while it’s easy to guess what end of the spectrum political ads sit on (thanks to those handy endorsed by and paid for declarations), that’s not always true of the news we read online. That’s why…

Edmonds resident and travel guru Rick Steves is wrapping up a statewide lecture tour to promote his (and others’) longstanding argument for why Washington State should decriminalize marijuana. In case you live in a dense, dense fog, the issue is on the ballot next month as I-502, which, if approved, would eliminate criminal penalties for…

Leslie Helm, editor of our sister magazine Seattle Business, boarded All Nippon Airway’s very first Boeing 787 Dreamliner flight to Tokyo this week. Read his account over at the Seattle Biz blog, in which he describes both the ups… The sun coming through the unusually large window was blinding as we took off, but rather…

Tonight brings the first of four presidential debates, which will no doubt set the tone for all future water cooler discussion around the Obama vs. Romney political race. Jim Lehrer hosts and the topics have been announced as follows: The Economy, parts 1, 2 and 3 (a new series from George R. R. Martin?), health…

For decades, Pier 57 owner Hal Griffith dreamed of building a Ferris wheel at the end of the historic landing. Now, after 30 years, he’s putting his money where his dreams are—and he says the time couldn’t be better; he fears the waterfront is in real peril, thanks to the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement. “We…

It’s not that people didn’t want to watch The State of the Prostate (Parts 1, 2 & 3) or Clearing up Controversies in Ankle Fracture Management. It’s just that that’s not all they wanted to watch when they tuned in years ago to Channel 27, the University of Washington’s noncommercial, educational TV station. The UW…

People living in Bellingham have a pretty forgiving attitude toward the trains that rumble through town. The shrill whistles, the squeal of wheels, the waits at crossings—that’s just part of life in this laid-back college town. But now something else is roaring down the tracks, and it has the town’s full attention. About 800 people…

Aerojet, a company located in Redmond, Washington, has provided propulsion for every mission to Mars, including the one that saw “Curiosity,” NASA’s latest Mars rover touch down successfully late Sunday night. Our partners at King 5 News interviewed the gleeful scientists at the company yesterday.  

  Those Pink Lady apples you’re eyeing at the supermarket cost $2.49 a pound. A feather-light pint of organic raspberries? Five bucks. But at the new, 7-acre Beacon Hill Food Forest, these and other garden produce will be free (with a little sweat equity encouraged). Funded in part by the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, and…

When the Volunteer Park Conservatory opened its doors in 1912, there was no art museum, no “Black Sun” sculpture, no Shakespeare in the Park to keep it company. For 100 years, the Victorian botanical garden, built of cast iron and 3,426 panes of glass, has been treating visitors to rare bromeliads, ferns, palms, cacti, succulents…

What began as a search for a better coffee machine in a local start-up’s break room has evolved into the perfect Seattle combo: coffee and robots. Last winter, the employees at ZipWhip (zipwhip.com), a Queen Anne-based company focused on “cloud texting” (i.e., taking text messaging beyond the bounds of mobile devices and onto all Internet-connected…

If you’ve always wondered how the Space Needle came to be—or if you’d like to know why Seattle Center was almost named “Pleasure Island,” grab a seat at a special Elliott Bay Books event this Saturday. The eminent local experts on Seattle history (not to mention monopolizers of the most entertaining World’s Fair trivia) are…