Skip to content

The Pulse: Shaking Off the Frost

Big ideas, jazzy teens, burger farewells, and dancing aluminum

By Sarah Stackhouse January 17, 2025

Seattle skyline at dusk with the Space Needle prominently featured, surrounded by modern skyscrapers and buildings, capturing the city’s rhythm like The Pulse of urban life.
Photo by Ganapathy Kumar / Unsplash

Seattle’s about to get a blast of icy air — and while I love the sharp clarity of a cold morning, it’s easy to romanticize when I’m indoors with a cup of coffee and my coziest socks. What’s your go-to for staying warm? Fleece-lined everything? A massive stack of library books? Let’s ride this cold snap together — here’s what’s happening this week.

Can a bear hug melt the Seattle Freeze?

Burgermaster’s first-ever location, a 73-year-old landmark, is closing its doors

Design fans: Don’t miss Boliglaboratorium: A Danish Housing Lab at UW.

Seattle is putting $108 million toward affordable housing.

This new dance show looks so expressive. I love modern dance, especially when this description is attached: “The dancers move around in a horde on the floor, slithering, crouching, and kicking; coming together and pulling apart; leading each other, then crawling up bodies, animal-like and desperate.”

Four local high school jazz bands made the Essentially Ellington finals — congrats, Garfield, Bothell, Roosevelt, and Mountlake Terrace!

The L.A. wildfires have burned more than 37,830 acres — that’s 315 times larger than the Great Seattle Fire of 1889.

Tank and the Bangas are at Neumos next week — got my tickets already.

A new bar specializing in low-proof and zero-proof cocktails that hasn’t opened yet is already generating buzz.

Would you go see this show in Olympia? The bodies wiggling around in those tubes cracks me up. 

An underwater volcano 300 miles off our coast is predicted to erupt by the end of the year. But don’t worry — it’s a mile underwater.

Seattle Humane is helping pets affected by the L.A. wildfire-affected find new homes.

Are you going to Seattle’s MLK Day march and rally? 

There’s a new dessert bar coming to Capitol Hill, and the black sesame hazelnut thumbprints already have my attention. 

And finally, a little levity from the comment section of our story Amazon Numbers Still Aren’t in, But Downtown is Again on the Upswing: “This has absolutely trashed the time it took to get my son to preschool. A previous 20-minute drive now takes 1 hr 20 min from Woodinville to Bellevue. Thanks 👍 Amazon.” — mrs.dunagan 

What’s catching your eye this week? Let us know @seattlemag.

Follow Us

A New Climate Fund Starts With Indigenous Leadership

A New Climate Fund Starts With Indigenous Leadership

The $5.5 million investment will support seven Tribal governments and Indigenous-led organizations working on climate projects across Greater Seattle and Puget Sound.

As we head into another summer of hotter days, drought, stress on waterways and habitat, and the now-familiar arrival of wildfire smoke, the First Peoples Climate Fund puts city and philanthropic money behind Native communities already doing the work of responding to these pressures, many of them closest to the impacts and with long-held knowledge…

Washington’s Gender Wage Gap is Widening, Study Finds

Washington’s Gender Wage Gap is Widening, Study Finds

Women earned $18,545 less than men in 2024, one of the widest disparities in the country.

The wage gap between men and women in Washington is the second widest in the country. An analysis released in March from the National Partnership for Women and Families found that women in Washington earned a median income $18,545 less than their male counterparts, the largest gap in the country second only to Utah. For…

A Letter to the Community

A Letter to the Community

For more than a decade, our competitor Seattle Met has been a meaningful and vibrant voice in our city’s media landscape. Its journalists, editors, and contributors have told important stories, celebrated our culture here, and helped define what it means to live in Seattle during a period of extraordinary growth and change. News that folks…

More Than a Watch Party

More Than a Watch Party

At the Museum of Flight, Seattle celebrated Artemis II with real ties to the mission.

A moon mission lifted off in Florida on Wednesday, but one of the most interesting places to see it was Seattle. On April 1, the Museum of Flight hosted a free public watch party for Artemis II, NASA’s first crewed mission around the moon in more than 50 years. The event included a live broadcast,…