This election season, a common perception has reasserted itself: that homelessness and public disorder are problems of big, progressive cities. There's another way to view it: These are *American* problems that tend to pool in certain spots, and end up being disproportionately borne by big cities.

During your walk, run, chores, or commute today, pop in your earbuds and listen to this piece from my colleague @lizamelia.bsky.social (who edited Lost Patients). It's the most intimate look at immigrant detention I've heard. It takes place at Tacoma's ICE facility.

5 yrs after a Black teen was killed at CHOP, city officials + some protesters say he was firing a gun before he was shot. There’s no evidence of that in videos we’ve reviewed, including those filed by city to defend itself in a lawsuit from the boy’s father. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

We dug through many hundreds of pages of court documents to find some new clues in the unsolved fatal shooting of Antonio Mays Jr. at CHOP, an unhealed wound from the protests of 2020 in Seattle.

Every few days I think about a 22-year-old I met last year at Seattle's open-air drug market at 12th and Jackson. As our interview wrapped up, he urged me to dig into the foster care system and what it does to people like him. It is comforting to know that @claudiarowe.bsky.social did just that.

Did the attention economy make us weird? Or did it just expose us to how weird so many of us already were?

...Nah.

One of my main issues with Bluesky is that 50% of the accounts on here are extraterrestrials.

Genuine question: Why haven't we seen more organized and widespread opposition to the attention economy and what it's wrought in so many aspects of our lives: political polarization and radicalization, attention spans, childhood development, losing loved ones to conspiracies, screen addiction?

I shudder to imagine what a panicked, scrambling AI industry is about to inflict on human civilization in an attempt to make the math work on this.

Several of the conservative influencers meeting with Trump, including Choe, are from Seattle. Mining Seattle and other blue cities for shock content has been a reliable formula for success and power among conservative influencers for years. Some reporting that keeps being relevant:

"Slop" is okay, but I'm really hoping "munge" catches on.

Here's Brian Eno with the most devastatingly accurate description I've yet heard of things made with generative AI: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/o...

Reading @edzitron.com on how the rush to automate jobs using AI is a function of bosses being increasingly disconnected from what their companies actually produce, reducing every job to its outputs: www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

Hearing "antifa" in the news is a trip; To me, it's such a relic of 2017-2018, when many of us covered regular right-wing protests and leftist counterprotests in the PNW. Appreciated this necessary refresher on antifa and all the mythologizing around it by @letsgomathias.bsky.social on @kuow.org:

Alternative view: What they actually built was a bunch of janky, addictive toys.

A point missing from years of “learn to code” taunts: Building a career out of any kind of creative work requires a level of risk tolerance, scrappiness, and entrepreneurship that’s probably alien to anyone aspiring to graduate college directly into a six-figure job.

At what point do journalists get to start taunting tech people with “Learn to write”?

RIP Kaleb Horton kalebhorton.ghost.io/2025-so-far/

Many Cascade PBS journalists I admire are losing their jobs. Seattle is also losing a valuable piece of its news ecosystem. I think of the many journalists scattered throughout local newsrooms who passed through Cascade PBS/Crosscut at some point, freelanced there, or got their start there.

If I could make people understand one thing about the computer, it would be that if a piece of information feels too good — if it has that sweet, addictive pull — there's a good chance it's bad for you. People have come to understand this about food. Maybe they can learn the same for information.

I will not stop saying it: "Fantasy A Gets a Mattress" is the most authentically Seattle piece of art to come out in a decade. I hope the filmmakers get a distributer. Some laugh out loud moments in this story by @vivmccall.bsky.social:

A few days later, I'm still surprised at how bleak this made me feel. Sometimes a piece of writing manages to pull something ubiquitous out of the air and make it visible.

In the lead-up to Sean Feucht's prayer rally in Seattle this weekend, @thestranger.com published this smart piece explaining how figures on the right intentionally provoke leftist counter-protest so they can farm the interactions for content.

Holy shit. The Stranger's @vivmccall.bsky.social attends the Sean Feucht prayer rally in Gas Works Park and walks away with one of the best pieces of magazine writing I've seen come out of Seattle in a long time. @thestranger.com

A main difference between this site and Twitter is that a subtly different spice blend of personality disorders predominates here

I'm glad I went to WorldCon today because someone just got up to the mic and told George R.R. Martin to his face that he's going to die soon and started to ask whether Brandon Sanderson would finish his books and everyone started to boo.

There's something very powerful about the idea of positioning high-quality podcasts as pro-human in a culture that is increasingly algorithm-driven and AI-created. Creators of things have a choice: join the slop or bet on there being a backlash to the slop. From @jodyavirgan.com:

Everyone should go listen to the Lost Patients podcast right now. Incredible reporting by @willjames.bsky.social and @sydbrownstone.bsky.social that lays out how we got here and what we can expect if this comes to pass. www.npr.org/podcasts/510...

Seattle: Can we please pull out all the stops to bring my neighbor's cat home? If you live on Capitol Hill, anywhere near 14th and Harrison/Republican, please check your basements and anywhere a cat might get trapped.

Five years ago today, Antonio Mays Jr., 16, was killed in Seattle's CHOP zone. Witnesses said armed protesters volunteering as CHOP security shot up a Jeep he was in. We've been digging up new info on the case, including the note Antonio wrote his dad before leaving to join Seattle protests:

Five years after a teen’s killing ended the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, the homicide case is shrouded in secrecy, and potential evidence may have disappeared.

Prestige podcasts have always made more sense as a public media product (which is how they started) than as a profit-making venture. So many talented people have been hurt in the scramble to make lots of money off of a form that is ultimately a creative, public service-oriented endeavor.

Reminder to find me at #IRE2025 in New Orleans later this week. I'll be speaking on the panels below, both discussions on how to make in-depth reporting come to life in audio. Hope to see you there.

Unbelievably proud to have collaborated with these two, who just won the nation's top honor for young journalists for their work on Lost Patients. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Overjoyed to hear Lost Patients, a podcast about living with psychosis in an American city, won a Livingston Award today. One of the best things I heard last year. All the flowers to @sydbrownstone @otherwilljames @esmyjimenez www.npr.org/podcasts/510...

If you'll be at next week's Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, I'll be speaking on two panels: - The Middle road: Journalism in the liminal space between hard-hitting and hopeful (Fri 2:30pm) - Juggling print and audio investigations (Fri 3:45pm) #IRE2025 schedules.ire.org/ire-2025/

A certain type of shamelessness is the ultimate superpower in this world we've built. These are the folks who will pull ahead: those unrestrained by an internal sense of right and wrong, who believe the ends justify the means. It's everywhere.

Covering homelessness confronts reporters with impossible situations and scrambles conventional journalism rules and norms. We made this guide to help. I'm proud to have played a small role and I'm grateful for @lisahalverstadt.bsky.social's leadership and contributions by lots of others.

🧵Career highlight I hope will have many positive ripples: @poynterinstitute.bsky.social just published a guide to homelesness reporting that I've spent months creating with an impressive group of journalists across the country with years of experience on the beat.

Kenny Taylor died last night after suffering a stroke a few months ago. Kenny became one of the first tenants to ever live in DESC housing after moving off the streets of Seattle 30 years ago. He lived in DESC’s Union Hotel ever since. This is a picture he gave me. It’s of his cat, Treasure.

Many cases right now of people saying what society needs is propaganda they happen to agree with. The unsatisfying truth is that it actually need more journalism, which is a different thing. An insightful read by @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social: www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/free-advic...

Next week (Tuesday 5/13), I'll be part of a panel discussion about Housing First at Town Hall Seattle. The discussion follows a screening of the documentary "Beyond the Bridge." Come join us and bring your questions about homelessness. townhallseattle.org/event/beyond...

Reporters all around the U.S. are navigating how to report on the rise of homelessness. It's a topic that can short circuit a lot of traditional journalism rules and conventions. A group of journalists led by @lisahalverstadt.bsky.social put together a reporting guide based on our experiences:

This is terrible news for local journalism and for a Tacoma News-Tribune staff that also suffered the loss of Matt Driscoll last year.

LISTEN to this new KUOW piece to hear ADAI's Caleb Banta-Green talk about new approaches to buprenorphine that can help folks on fentanyl, including higher doses that stave off withdrawal and long-lasting injectables that block opioid receptors for up to a month: www.kuow.org/stories/fent...

If you missed my reporting on the fentanyl trade at 12th and Jackson in Seattle's Little Saigon, my friends on @kuow.org's daily podcast, Seattle Now, re-aired the audio documentary on Saturday. Take a listen:

A takeaway of The Daily's interview with Christopher Rufo: Rufo saw the post-2020 "reckoning" period and the spread of DEI as a time when mainstream Americans were exposed to leftist ideology (previously contained within universities, etc.) and he saw an opportunity to rally them against it... 1/

NPR Network has been nominated for FOUR Peabody Awards! 🎉 Tested: Bucket of Eels, CBC, NPR's Embedded 🎉 Supermajority: @wpln and NPR's Embedded 🎉 Lost Patients: @kuow & The Seattle Times 🎉: Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows -@wnyc and The History Channel Congratulations to these teams!