The Stranger's 2025 Climate Issue

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial

You look like you’re trying to save the planet. Would you like some help? An Illustrated Guide to Prepping

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2025 WELCOME TO CLIMATE ISSUE!

We started imagining this issue last year, before Donald Trump won the election; before he started dismantling FEMA, the EPA, NOAA, and every other agency that’s trying to help us stave off the climate crisis.

And while the country has changed in drastic ways since last year, our approach to this issue didn’t. From the beginning, we knew we couldn’t look at the climate crisis in a vacuum. We can’t separate it from the rest of our lives, our work, our art, or the way we imagine the future. Treating it as a separate issue just makes it easier to turn it into something huge, overwhelming, and unapproachable; or, worse, something we can pretend doesn’t exist— or deny altogether.

And so we built this issue with that in mind. We take on some of our region’s big, scientific questions about the climate crisis: Staff Writer Vivian McCall asks experts if we’re really on the cusp of cracking the code on nuclear fusion energy, as one local startup claims (p. 19). I asked if the fires that happened in Los Angeles in January could happen here (p. 12).

is transforming trash into treasure (p. 29). Through the process, we looked for little, compact seeds of hope. Our managing editor Megan Seling found one in a Bluesky thread, of all places, about how some scared, confused, half-pound pocket gophers turned the scorched ash from Mount St. Helens’s eruption into thriving wildlands again. We put that thread (written by science journalist Margaret Harris) in the hands of the talented illustrator Greg Stump, who turned it into a comic about surviving in a hostile environment—the same way the gophers kept digging through the ash (p. 25).

ISSU E 20

25

And we’re so excited to introduce you to Drippy, the Soggy Paper Straw (p. 14). We and our (very real and not at all made up) readers had a lot of questions about environmentalism in 2025. Is it worth it to replace your gas-powered car with an electric one? Are the recycling rules still the same as the ones we learned as kids? How many microplastics are really in my junk? Drippy (Microsoft’s Clippy’s Zoomer nephew) is here to answer all that and more.

But we also asked how the climate crisis shapes the art we make , and the art we seek. Senior Staff Writer Charles Mudede explored why there’s a trend of doomsday bunkers on TV, from Fallout to Silo to Paradise (p. 26). And Stranger contributor Nathalie Graham visited the recycling dump to see how their artists-in-residency program

Ultimately, if this issue does anything, I hope it reminds you that our future is still ours to imagine. Almost every story in this paper is a story about making beauty out of trash, ash, or absolutely nothing. So remember to keep digging.

Hannah Murphy Winter Editor-in-Chief

TYLER GROSS

I Saw U…

Dressed as a Latex Gimp on Fifth and Flirting with Your Eyes at Queer/Bar

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES YATES

Did you recently share a ~*moment*~ with someone while riding the bus, dancing at the club, or standing in line at the supermarket? Do you want to try to reconnect? Submit your own I Saw U at thestranger.com/isawu, and maybe we’ll include it in the next roundup! Look for a new batch of I Saw U messages every Thursday on thestranger.com.

Hailstorm Hottie (ugh)

You were walking your dog when we were caught in that freak 3/13 hailstorm. The hail was cold, your smile was warm - would love to grab some hot cocoa

Coat Check at Mother Russia

I was the stoner with the waxed jacket. I think we both felt this one was a bit of a stinker. Wanna see a better show together sometime?

Ballard Fred Meyer Red Mazda

As you opened your sunroof, we caught eye contact until you left. I felt the zoom zooms, did you? Let’s take a road trip to pound town.

I’ve seen you walk near Seattle Center a couple of times in your latex outfits - & I’m OBSESSED. You always brighten my day. Let’s be friends?

Cute masked person on 3/11 redeye to Detroit

You: Ponytail, green jacket, brown gingham skirt. Me: Long braid, giant sweater. We landed at 6am; I couldn’t think. Are you gay? Coffee?

Crutching it at Ballard Pool

You hurt your knee skiing but it didn’t keep you out of the fast lane! I was too shy to hold the door for you and your chaperone - red jacket, Mondays

Lowe’s Londoner, Mt. Baker

Actually you’re from the north of England and we chatted about my squeegee. I could talk with you 4ever. Me: dude (enthralled), you: so charming.

Eye contact galore at Taurus Ox

You: Blonde gal with 3 pals at Taurus Ox on 3/7. Me: Bearded guy clad in a sweater vest

with 2 pals. Wish we’d traded more than just repeated glances!

Rite of Spring smiles

You sat 3 rows in front of me (Orchestra Right, Row P) at the symphony 3/15. You-Patrick Stewart vibes. Me-auburn hair, big smiles.

Late-night bus bookworm

You did a double take when I sat in row across from you on the 40 at 11:15 pm on 3/2. Wish I had asked what you were reading, would still love to know

T4T friendship?

You and your partner said my boyfriend and I were cute together at Time Warp. We shared gossip from eavesdropping. Want to be friends?

Hottie with a bridge piercing & long brown hair

We made flirty eye contact at Queer Bars MX show on 2/21. You were with a friend and I was on a date so I didn’t go over but I wish I could have

Thai Crochet cardigan

You: dark beard, crochet cardigan eating pork belly at Thaiku and reading a book. I thought you were cute and sweet. Me: gray sweater & cool leg brace

My haircut isn’t cool enough

I don’t have a mullet, but I did eavesdrop your compliments to a friend at Rough & Tumble and clapped. Of COURSE your name is Jen (all good ones are!)

Missing wallet

To whoever found my wallet on the 36 and brought it to the BECU on Ranier Ave, thank you so much!!! Let me get you a coffee?

Baristas at Vivace on Broadway

I know it’s just your job, but as a lonely person it brightens my day when you remember my order. Thanks for your kindness and killer music taste <3

Is it a match? Follow The Stranger on Instagram and leave a comment on our weekly I Saw U posts to connect!

The 2025 Campaign Season Has Begun

Get In, We’re Gonna Unseat Some Local Conservatives

BY STRANGER ELECTION CONTROL BOARD

We blinked, and suddenly, we’re on the cusp of another local election season.

In case you haven’t been following the election so far (and with totalitarian takeover on our heels, we’d understand), here’s your chance to catch up. The filing deadlines are in early May, so there’s still time for some surprises, but even now, the election is shaping up to be an interesting one.

This year, we have a mayor’s race featuring an embattled moderate incumbent who speaks the language of progressivism, but governs like a conservative. We’ve got a challenger for the District 9 City Council seat and a wide-open race in District 2. And finally, a City Attorney race, where anyone with an ounce of progressivism (or human decency) has been eager to unseat the incumbent from the moment she took office.

We’ve got months before endorsement time, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t meet the candidates who have thrown their hats in the ring. Without further ado, here’s our quick breakdown of the local elections so far.

Mayor

Bruce Harrell, Seattle’s very own Chamber of Commerce sock puppet, finally has some challengers.

The biggest name in the game so far is Katie Wilson: a street-fighting policy wonk who’s built a strong, progressive reputation actually winning battles for working people (raising the minimum wage, keeping transit affordable). When she launched her campaign, she told The Stranger about the kind of mayor she hopes to be: a coalition builder who’s able to reach across the aisle to find common goals, without diluting progressive, research-backed policies. She described herself as someone who’s willing to test new ideas and push forward on issues that have stagnated in this city for a decade.

She’s untested in elected office—or even running in an election—but she urged voters to look at her record as a policy advocate. “I’ve spent the last 14 years of my career organizing, building powerful coalitions that win major victories for working people,” she told The Stranger. “And I’ve done all that from the outside. I would be happy to put my legislative record up against Bruce Harrell’s any day of the week.”

Then there’s Ry Armstrong, an MLK Labor Delegate for SAG-AFTRA and an elected member of the Actor’s Equity Association, repping 50,000 actors from Texas to Hawaii. This is Armstrong’s second go at elected office. In 2023, they ran for Kshama Sawant’s City Council seat in District 3, and while progressives generally got wildly outspent by big business (and therefore creamed) in that

election, Armstrong’s showing was particularly rough. Only 1.86 percent of the electorate (a total of 488 people) voted for Armstrong in that race. They’re proud of their big ideas, and a suite of progressive taxes to pay for them.

Ry and Katie are joined in the race by a handful of other candidates, including: MAGA-y Rachael Savage, the Republican who is campaigning to block permanent supportive housing and arrest homeless addicts as means of recovery; and Joe Molloy, a homeless man who says he lost his housing last year due to an unsupported disability, and is running his grassroots campaign from Tent City 3

City Council District 9

Seattle’s City Council President Sara Nelson has been on the council since 2022 and has been president since 2024. Her leadership has represented the Chamber of Commerce (and Amazon’s) bid to claim control of city government, so we’re very pleased to an-

nounce that she has a challenger. Her name is Dionne Foster, progressive policy wonk, and capital gains tax champion. Nelson, known for her right-leaning, business-first politics, might be in trouble, given the city’s enthusiastic support for progressive Alexis Mercedes Rinck in November, and the runaway success of February’s social housing initiative. Foster’s got the right ideas on housing and homelessness, but let’s be real, to quote a Reddit-er, if a rock ran against Nelson, some Seattleites would probably throw a vote its way just to avoid the “right-wing, inept millionaire” vibe.

City Council District 2

At the end of last year, Tammy Morales stepped down from her seat representing D2 on City Council, saying that the conservative, business-oriented City Council was a toxic, undemocratic environment. The council appointed Seattle Police Department crime prevention coordinator and

long-time City Council hopeful Mark Solomon to hold down the seat until this year’s election, when it goes back to the people.

So who’s gonna replace the progressive Morales? In the battle for D2’s vote, we start with Assistant City Attorney Eddie Lin, who primarily works with the Office of Housing. He describes himself as a champion of affordable housing, progressive revenue, and creating a city where “artists and bike messengers and baristas and educators can all afford to live here.” So far, he’s light on details for how he plans to do that, so we’ll be watching him closely.

Then there’s Adonis Ducksworth, the Mayor’s senior transportation policy official and one of the architects of the 2024 transportation levy. He’s pushing a platform that combines safety, affordability, and... skate parks? The lifelong skateboarder knows how important public space is for kids (yay) but he also believes safety in D2 comes with more cops (boo). Like Lin, though, he hasn’t offered many other details yet.

Eclipsing both of their fundraising, though, is a newer entrant: Takayo Minakami Ederer, a Columbia City-born real estate investor and karate instructor (and one of the first members of the women’s national karate team). Based on her early interviews, she’s largely running on a “public safety” platform—which, you guessed it, to her means more cops. She also acknowledges that we need more shelter beds, and advocates for a public-private partnership to make that happen.

City Attorney

In our friendly neighborhood City Attorney showdown, Nathan Rouse, Rory O’Sullivan, and Erika Evans all have big ideas on how to fix Seattle’s broken justice system in contrast to incumbent Ann Davison—spoiler alert: most of them don’t involve locking up more people. Rouse, a public defender who’s done with Davison’s “tough-on-crime” charade, wants to bring back community court and stop prosecuting minor offenses like SODA and SOAP violations (which, fun fact, aren’t even being enforced right now). Meanwhile, Evans is focusing on serving up anti-Trump tea and advocating for harm reduction programs that actually help people instead of shoving them into jail. And then there’s O’Sullivan, who thinks the City Attorney’s office could use a little more compassion and a little less spectacle. So, get ready for a race that could decide whether Seattle stays stuck in the criminal justice quicksand or finally tries to pull itself out with actual solutions.

Stranger Election Control Board is Marcus Harrison Green, Vivian McCall, Charles Mudede, Emily Nokes, Megan Seling, and Hannah Murphy Winter.

MARGARET FLATLEY

How Do You Lose 3,200 Dead People?

Unearthing the Story of Seattle’s Lost Cemetery

BY BESS LOVEJOY

PHOTOS BY BILLIE WINTER

Cari Simson first heard the rumor in the early 2000s.

Amid the dark, comfortable bars of Georgetown, and in other places where the neighborhood’s old-timers gathered, there were stories about a cemetery. It was a place that didn’t last, the old-timers said—a place where one day, all the bodies were dug up, and the ashes dumped into the nearby Duwamish River.

Simson, a local environmental consultant, producer, and mixed media artist, was intrigued by the stories. She’d spent years producing the annual Georgetown Haunted History Tour, and this elusive cemetery would have been a natural addition. But she didn’t start researching them in depth until 2022, after she met a kindred spirit.

Elke Hautala is a filmmaker, performer, and visual anthropologist. In 2022, she had undertaken a project on the challenges surrounding the Duwamish River, an often-forgotten waterway that was once home to rich wetlands and is today a Superfund site. That project brought her to Simson, who was helping to run a trash pickup via kayak on the river. The pair went out on the water together, and right away, they bonded over a shared love of cemeteries and ghost stories.

“Even during the deepest, darkest, dumbest days of the pandemic, we found joy through graveyards and picking up trash,” Simson says.

Today, Simson and Hautala produce and host a podcast called Invisible Histories , devoted to local stories that are rarely, if ever, told. Recent guests have included Cynthia Brothers of Vanishing Seattle and Taha Ebrahimi, author of the book Street Trees of Seattle But the first season focused on that cemetery in Georgetown—which, it turns out, was much more than a rumor.

The old-timers were right: There was a burial ground in the neighborhood (and not just Comet Lodge, now cut off from Georgetown by I-5 and ripe with its own strange lore). The Duwamish Cemetery was established in the 1870s as King County’s potter’s field, a place to bury the indigent or unclaimed dead. Located two blocks southwest of Corson Avenue South and East Marginal Way South at the site of what’s now Seattle Boiler Works, it was

a “burying place of unfortunates,” a large, overgrown “city of the dead,” as The Seattle Times put it in 1904

There were two common ways to end up at the potter’s field, according to Simson and Hautala. One was dying at the King County Poor Farm, which bordered the cemetery. Established in 1877, it was a working farm located where the South Seattle College Georgetown campus is now. If you were too poor or sick to take care of yourself in the late 19th century, that’s where the county sent you. Another route to the cemetery was dying at the nearby King County Hospital and Tuberculosis Sanatorium.

If you dropped dead in the middle of the city with no identification, the potter’s field would likely be your last stop.

Those weren’t the only paths to the cemetery. “If you dropped dead in the middle of the city with no identification,” Hautala told me on an early March Zoom call, the potter’s field would likely be your last stop. The same was true if no one came forward to claim your body or pay burial expenses, no matter how you had died. Turnaround was quick at local morgues—bodies

unclaimed for only two or three days were sent to the potter’s field.

That meant all kinds of folks ended up at this lonely, windy plot of land. Hautala describes one man whose naval buddies came and tried to dig him up after he was buried there by mistake. “We have to think about how news [traveled],” she told me. “It’s not like we had cell phones to call and say, ‘Soand-so hasn’t shown up for dinner.’”

Their podcast tells the stories of some of those buried at the potter’s field, including a formerly enslaved man named James Carter, and Thomas Blanck, who’s been called the “Jesse James of the Pacific Northwest.” One group that’s rarely at the potter’s field: women. The place was so stigmatized, staggering under the weight of that era’s criminalization of the poor, that the community often raised funds to bury women and children just about anywhere else.

The Duwamish Cemetery ran for fewer than 50 years, never to be replaced. In the early 1910s, King County moved to straighten and deepen the Duwamish River, which once flowed through about a dozen channels in its delta and down winding curves whose banks supported the Duwamish people for millennia. A straighter, deeper river surrounded by more solid land was much better for development, the county’s planners

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Bodies were supposed to be burned individually, with their resulting ashes placed in individual urns. That’s not what happened.

argued, and by 1912, the potter’s field was seen as in the way.

“From a colonizer or patriarchal perspective, it was useless land,” Simson says.

County commissioners made plans to exhume the cemetery’s 3,260 bodies and cremate them on-site. But by the time the job was given to Georgetown mortician C. E. Noice, only 39 days were left to complete the work before dredging was set to begin. The rush meant burning about 85 bodies a day at a crematorium equipped to handle about four. Bodies were supposed to be burned individually, with their resulting ashes placed in individual urns. That’s not what happened.

A state investigation, prompted by reporting from the progressive newspaper The Seattle Star, found that bodies had been burned together, that ashes frequently commingled, and that they were raked to the floor of the

crematorium before being divided haphazardly into individual receptacles. A subsequent grand jury investigation confirmed the findings, noting that the individually labeled urns were little more than fiction. What happened to the ashes was “beyond understanding,” in the words of the state auditor. Yet no punishment or actions came of the investigation.

Afterwards, the ashes vanished. No one knows exactly what happened to them, but Simson and Hautala say they were probably spread in the potato fields or, yes, dumped in the river. “We didn’t find evidence that the county set aside any other land for the future potter’s field, and the ashes were never reinterred anywhere else, as far as we can tell,” Simson says. While this may seem like nothing but a sad story from a more benighted era, Sim-

Clockwise from top: Cari Simson (left) and Elke Hautala stand near where, in the 1870s, the Duwamish Cemetery was established as King County’s potter’s field, “a place to bury the indigent or unclaimed dead”; the Seattle Boiler Works building now stands where it is believed the potter’s field once was; Simson shows the old potter’s field location on a map of Georgetown from 1905.

son and Hautala link it to issues the city and county face today. “There is a connection we want to make to people being invisible, living on the margins and dying, especially of overdoses nowadays, right here in King County today,” Hautala says. The pair recently attended one of monthly silent witnessing vigils organized by the Women in Black, which works to remember unhoused people who have died outside, in public places, or by violence in King County. In March, the vigil honored 25 people whose lives ended under such circumstances. (And while the county no longer has a potter’s field, the King County Indigent Remains Program now buries those who die unclaimed or without means in a special ceremony that happens every few years at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Renton.)

Ultimately, Simson and Hautala would love to see some kind of memorial at the former site of the potter’s field. That could be as simple as a plaque or as a high-tech project involving augmented reality. It may

even encompass fixing up the street by the river and creating a community space with support services. “Maybe that’s the best way to honor these people who were on the margins,” Hautala says.

Part of the challenge is figuring out how to remember people who are unnamed—only 855 of the Duwamish cemetery dead have names, thanks to a brush fire around 1910 that destroyed many of the burial ground’s markers.

The pair say they are happy to hear from the public about creative ideas for a memorial. In the meantime, they’re planning an immersive walking tour of related sites for May 2 and 3. While the details were still being confirmed at press time, the tour will likely include the old sites of the poor farm, crematory, and potter’s field, with theatrical and audio-visual elements.

Their goal is always to humanize, they say.

“These are 3,260 people who were mothers, daughters, fathers, brothers, sisters, you know,” Hautala says. ■

Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (BIMA) is excited to announce the return of the BRAVA Awards (BIMA Recognizes Achievement in the Visual Arts), a prestigious recognition of outstanding contemporary artists, craftspeople, and makers.

Applications Open April 1 - May 11, 2025

Each artist selected in one of four categories will receive:

an unrestricted award of $15,000

 a short video and promotion

 recognition at a live award program

EMERGING ARTIST AWARD (Puget Sound region)

ARTISTS’ BOOKS ARTIST AWARD (United States)

NATIVE AMERICAN & FIRST NATIONS

ARTIST AWARD (Salish Sea region)

2025 SPECIAL CHOICE AWARD: CHILDREN’S BOOK ILLUSTRATOR AWARD (Puget Sound region)

Could the LA Fires Happen Here?

Western Washington has always been fire country, but climate change has upped the game. Are we ready for it?

On January 1, 2025, a fire sparked outside of Los Angeles, near the Temescal Ridge Trail. It was a minor fire, only burning eight acres of wilderness. Most of us in Seattle didn’t hear about that one. Then six days later, the Pacific Palisades fire started tearing through the LA hills. The same day, about 30 miles away, the Eaton Fire ignited. From 1,100 miles north, Seattleites watched for more than three weeks as 14 wildfires teetered on the edge of a city, consuming 57,000 acres and killing at least 29 people. The Eaton and Palisades fires alone burned an area that would cover 70 percent of Seattle.

Standing in the Pacific Northwest, we could look at the LA fires in two ways: the first is as a disaster that happened in a dry, hot, drought-stricken climate, drastically different from the mossy, pine-y landscape on our horizon. Alternatively, though, we

could see them as fires that consumed suburbs built into fire-prone foothills, not dissimilar from our own.

So which one is right? Could a disaster like January’s wildfires happen here in Seattle?

I took the question to Crystal Raymond, the deputy director of policy and management at the University of Washington’s Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative. And you might’ve guessed by now that I didn’t get the clear-cut “no” that I’d hoped for.

“Of course, the answer is yes and no,” she told me over the phone.

To start, it helps to understand what led to the Los Angeles fires. At its core, it wasn’t tied to the climate crisis so much as it was a confluence of really bad luck. “You have three ingredients for these major fires,” explains Raymond. You need an ignition source (usually humans), fuel (dry brush, trees, etc.), and for large, fast-moving fires like these, you need winds that, rather than

coming from the cool, wet ocean, come from the east—like California’s Santa Ana winds.

Ignition can happen anywhere. It can occur naturally, but more often, it’s manmade—a cigarette butt, a campfire, a Cybertruck. King County’s Office of Emergency Management usually prepares for more ignition events starting after the Fourth of July; explosives make for excellent ignition events.

The “fuel” part of the equation can be affected by climate change. California’s rainy season came in late last year, leaving its iconic Chaparral shrubland—which is already small, dry fuel that thrives in fire country—especially dry.

When it comes to fires, fuel is quite possibly the greatest differentiator between Southern California and Western Washington. Where California has shrubs, we have thick, wooden trunks. Raymond recommends imagining a campfire. “Think about when someone throws a handful of dry grass or a dry shrub on their campfire.

That’s going to burn like that,” she says, snapping. “Now imagine you have a big, sort of dry log, and you put that on your campfire. Maybe if it’s really dry, that’s gonna catch. But typically, when you put a big, sort of dry log on the fire, it doesn’t.”

And then there’s the wind. In California, the Santa Ana winds are a part of the region’s identity. The wind events can happen dozens of times a year. Joan Didion wrote three haunting essays about them; the New York Times once said that “a dry, hot Santa Ana often symbolizes an unnamable menace lying just beneath the sun-shot surface of California life.” We have no such thing. In Seattle, most of our winds come from the west—full of cold, damp sea air that cools our climate down. “It’s what creates our coastal environment,” says Raymond. And when the winds do come from inland, they’re simply called “east winds” or “downslope winds,” she says, “because they come down from the Cascades and out towards the ocean.”

Forest Service researchers have been

Firefighter on January 7, the day that the Pacific Palisades Fire started. They burned for more than three weeks.

ERIC THAYER/GETTY IMAGES

connecting our east winds to fire risk since the 1950s. “There is a close relation between…severe easterly winds and large forest fires in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington,” Owen P. Cramer wrote from the Pacific Northwest Research Station in 1957. “With the east winds comes the dreaded combination of low humidity and high wind that in the past has whipped small fires into conflagrations such as the Tillamook fire of 1933 and the fire that burned Bandon in 1936.” (The Tillamook burned more than 300,000 acres of wildland before seasonal rains took it out; the Bandon caused almost 2,000 people to evacuate.)

When our east winds come around, they can create the same fast-moving fires that we saw in California. “They’re often very high wind speeds,” she says. “And they’re bringing hot, dry air from the interior of the continent to the west side. And so that’s what makes them particularly concerning for fire. We don’t get them as regularly and as often as they do in California, like the Santa Ana winds. And so that’s probably why they don’t have such a catchy phrase.”

So, to go back to Raymond’s “yes and no”: Obviously, we aren’t Southern California. According to the Forest Service, King County

Realistically, our region is much more prepared to respond to an earthquake than a wildfire.

is at higher risk of wildfires than just 60 percent of US counties, while LA County is in the 97th percentile. And without the Chaparral shrubland and Santa Ana winds of California, we’re at lower risk of such a severe fire. But, as Raymond says, “Western Washington is a fire-prone environment. Any ecosystem in the western United States has areas that burn. And have historically burned.”

We can see that pattern reflected over the last 150 years, Raymond says, and our region has had at least one like this in our very recent history: the 2020 Labor Day Fires in northwest Oregon. That September, a combination of these same conditions—ignition events, fuel, and high winds—burned more than a million acres in the Pacific Northwest, including almost 200,000 acres of National Forest land.

“The Labor Day fires in 2020 in Oregon are very much an example of large, fastmoving fires in our wetter forest types of Western Washington. So, yes, it can happen here,” she says.

So what do we do about it?

To understand fire management, it helps to learn one new vocabulary term: Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). It refers to the area where urban development and natural landscape (which they define as areas that are at least 50 percent burnable vegetation) either meet or intermix. Anyone talking about fire risk in our region will refer you to the Washington Department of Natural Resources’s WUI maps (pronounced woo-wee, like wookie).

Wildfires aren’t likely to touch densely

urban areas—concrete doesn’t burn well.

But our suburbs press against the Cascades. “Washington has always been a place where the land largely dictates how humans can live,” the Department of Natural Resources wrote in their primer for the WUI maps. “Our waterways define our cities’ boundaries. Our hills and mountains limit the extent of our sprawl.” But as our population grows (and our housing crisis increases), and we push the limits of that sprawl, we increase our chance of encountering fires instead of just oppressive, opaque (and toxic) smoke conditions.

The WUI maps show the “interface” in red and orange. (Don’t let that confuse you—DNR emphasizes that the maps do not represent fire risk, just development.) But several of our major suburbs are deep in that interface. Newcastle, Sammamish, Issaquah, and Woodinville are all surrounded by red and orange.

When those suburbs were built, wildfires were a rare concern on this side of the Cascades. Just a decade ago, there were twice as many fire starts in Eastern Washington than on our side. But for the first time in 2023, we outnumbered Eastern Washington.

This is where Raymond urges us to focus less on the possibility of a catastrophic wild-

fire like LA’s, and more on the increasing reality of our smaller fires—1,000 or 10,000 acres, say. Those are increasing with climate change, and will continue to do so. Which means our Wildland Urban Interface is more likely to encounter them every year.

“From an ecological perspective, they’re not very meaningful,” she says. “But when they’re in the Wildland Urban Interface, they can be really consequential. They won’t necessarily take off like fires do in a wind event, but those are ones that can put homes at risk.”

In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re preparing for these incidents from scratch in Western Washington. To start, fire experts are battling our lack of wildfire muscle memory, so to speak. “You talk to people in California, and a lot of people are like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been through an evacuation before. I remember 20 years ago, we evacuated here, or we evacuated when I was a kid,’” Raymond says. “There’s so many people who live here in Western Washington that that is not in their memory at all.”

Sheri Badger, the Public Information Officer for King County’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM), is part of the team that’s helping us build that muscle memory. She says the office has only been

focusing seriously on wildfires for about five years. And the Bolt Creek Fire in 2022, she says, which burned more than 10,000 acres in King and Snohomish Counties, was the event that shook them into action. “Before that, it was always ‘Yes, this could happen here.’ But having an example of, ‘Yes, this did happen here,’ was really instrumental, I think, in kick-starting a lot of our efforts.”

Wildfires are only one of 14 hazards that their office prepares the county for, ranging from dam failure to volcanoes to cyberterrorism. And they’ve prepared an “all hazards response” that can be applied to most of them. That can affect things like how our transit system responds, and how they send out alerts through SMS.

But realistically, our region is much more prepared to respond to an earthquake than to a wildfire. There are some fire-specific projects. The Office of Emergency Management is in their third year of implementing their “Ready, Set, Go” evacuation messaging (they found that Levels 1, 2, and 3 were too confusing for people). “This is something that is very familiar to people in the eastern part of the state, but for us here, it’s not,” Badger says.

“Ready” means evacuation is possible in your area. Keep track of local media, check on your neighbors, identify evacuation routes, make sure your go kit is up to date. “Set” means evacuation is likely to happen in your area with short notice. Get your go kit in your car and be ready to move. “Go” means get the hell out. Follow emergency officials’ instructions and don’t come back until officials tell you to. In all stages, they say, leave if you feel unsafe.

Our fire response is clearly still in its infancy, though. Five years is nothing in County Bureaucracy Time, and there are so many more factors that can inform how we relate to these fires before evacuation: building codes, landscaping, insurance. Last year, an investigation by KING 5 found that the Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner received more complaints of people being dropped by their insurance provider for wildfire risk in the first half of 2024 than the last two years combined.

Right now, a lot of that wildfire prep is left to individual decisions—to landscape with slow-burning trees or to build with more wildfire-resistant materials. For people who are eager to manage their fire risk themselves, Badger points to programs like the National Fire Protection Association’s Firewise, which provides resources so communities work together to take control of their own fire mitigation.

But as the Trump administration strips climate scientists out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which tracks wildfire conditions, we’re going to be more and more dependent on our local government to protect and prepare us for these increasing hazards.

I asked Badger if they felt like they were building a plane while they were flying it. “Yes,” she says. “But also, it’s not a new concept. It’s just new to us. Being able to take a look at the places around us— Eastern Washington, California, Eastern Oregon—we can see the plane they’ve built as we’re building ours.” ■

Portland blanketed in smoke from the 2020 Labor Day Fires.

WUI maps help us visualize the way we’re encroaching on burnable land.

Ask Drippy, the Soggy Paper Straw

KAREN HONG

Technically, The Stranger is recyclable, but I’m sure you already know that, BDSM. So here are a few other suggestions for your piles of [editor’s note: invaluable] paper:

• Wrapping paper

• Ransom notes

• That thing we all did with Silly Putty when we were kids

• Poorly executed Molotov cocktail

• Paper-mache—make a piñata of a Trump administration official of your choice

• Make biodegradable cups for your spring seedlings

• Wee-wee pads

Dear Drippy,

I really want to be a mindful consumer in this stupid world, but the garbage bins at my local coffee shop stress me the fuck out. The cups go in one place, the lids in another, it’s different at every shop, and honestly, all of the baristas are hot and intimidating. Do they actually separate everything?

Should I be this nervous?

—Coffee Under Pressure

With The Stranger ’s 2025 Climate Issue upon us, many of our (very real and not at all fake) readers have been asking us important questions about environmentalism, and how the many rules of reducing, reusing, and recycling have changed over the years.

We asked a J Pod orca if they would help us answer some of these (they have a fair amount of skin in the game, after all), and they told us to go fuck a yacht. Which, fair. Then, one day, on a sweaty afternoon in early spring, we came upon a day-old iced latte rolling around Pike Place Market. In that latte was Drippy, the Soggy Paper Straw. Drippy knows you’re imperfect, but ultimately want to help the planet, and he’s here to lend a lipstick-covered hand.

Dear Drippy,

I’ve had the same gas-powered car for the past six years. I bought it used, but its gas mileage isn’t terrible. Still, it burns fossil fuels, and I feel guilty every time I get in it. Should I get rid of my gas-powered car and get an EV?

—Guilty Gas Guzzler

You’re probably asking this question, GGG, because you know there are two things to consider here: the impact of driving your car, and the impact of making it. New stuff takes a lot of energy to make! The general wisdom is that the most environmentally friendly version of something is the one you already have.

And for most things (laptops, cell phones, etc.), using them as long as humanly possible is the best way to reduce your environmental impact. Electric cars require huge lithium batteries to run, and mining that lithium has a big ol’ environmental impact. Straight off the production line, an EV has a way bigger carbon footprint, so it’s easy to assume that driving your old, used car is the planet-saving move. But for cars, only 10 percent of its emissions in its lifetime come from manufacturing (compared to, say, an iPhone, which is more than 80 percent). So for cars, the way it’s powered is so much more important. So, if you’re looking to make a change, an electric vehicle might be the way to go. Better yet, how ’bout an e-bike and an ORCA card?

Dear Drippy,

I know the rules say I need to rinse out my recycling, but it’s a pain in the ass, and honestly, most of these rules turn out to be made up. Is this one of the real rules? How important is it actually to clean out my yogurt container?

—Frustrated Recycler Open to Yogurt Options

I know it’s annoying, FROYO, but it’s true. You should rinse your recyclables. Is it as serious as people make it seem? Not really. Not on an individual level. But imagine if every household in your neighborhood decided to put a

“mostly empty” jar of peanut butter in their recycling bin and, come collection day, all those jars got tossed around and melted their sweet, sweet insides all over the paper and cardboard that’s being collected at the same time. It’d be a mess. And why does that matter? Because, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, about 40 percent of all recycled materials are treated and sold to American manufacturers to be reused, and they can’t have more than a 1 percent contamination level. Cardboard, for example, is sold in 660-pound bales and sold for (on average) $35. But if it’s covered in yogurt, oil, and peanut butter? Worthless garbage.

Dear Drippy, The Stranger publishes every month now, and it’s too much. I’m buried in them already. How do I throw the paper away responsibly?

—Bogged Down by Stranger Mess

Look, I’ve been thrown in a lot of trash cans in my day, CUP, and most of them weren’t destined for the compost pile. Should you separate it? Yes! Most coffee shops are doing their damnedest to not fuckup the environment more than we already have. They bought compostable cups, for Christ’s sake. Will you be the first person to toss their cup in the wrong bin that day, undermining the whole effort? Absolutely not! I know they’re intimidating, but ask the hotties behind the bar. They’re the ones cleaning it up at the end of the day, so they always know best.

Dear Drippy,

I was always taught to unplug my chargers and appliances whenever I use them to try to save electricity. I unplug the toaster when I’m not using it, and wrap the little cord around the base until it’s ready to be used again. I’ve done this since I was a little kid, so I barely even think about it anymore. Meanwhile, my roommate falls asleep with the TV on and refuses to turn off lights when they leave the room. They say I’m fretting over a spark while the world is on fire. Are they right? Does it matter anymore?

—TV On Always, Still Trying

Let’s start with the lights, TOAST. If you’re still rocking incandescent bulbs, you’re wasting more electricity and money than you need to be. The best thing you can do for your household is get LED lightbulbs— they’re much more energy-efficient and long-lasting. Importantly, they’re also way less hideous than they used to be—you can often dial in the warmth and brightness without feeling like you’re living in an IKEA showroom, and the customizable color ones are honestly sick. There’s an exact math problem you can do with watts and cents, but in general, LED bulbs don’t take much to run at all—you’re probably talking something like a few dollars a month at the most extravagant usage. I’m a

straw, so my relationships may be different from yours, but my advice is don’t make a big deal out of this one.

When it comes to unplugging devices, things get more complicated. Standby power consumption (or “phantom energy”—oOoooOo) can contribute to higher electricity bills without you even realizing it because little bits of energy are trickling away while the lazy device is just sitting there doing nothing or pretending to be asleep. So yes, unplugging your contraptions will save electricity/money in the long run. How much you’ll be saving will depend on how many you have and how old they are, but according to the US Department of Energy, unplugging appli

Dear Drippy, How many microplastics doI eat in a day?

—Plastic-Vore Curious

Estimates vary, PVC, but the answer is never none, according to Sheela Sathyanarayana, associate professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at University of Washington. Toddlers tend to eat more plastic. So do adults who eat more processed foods. But no matter how many vegetables you eat, and how many chemicals you avoid, everyone in Seattle is ingesting a base level of microplastics from dust in the air.

Microplastics are not distinct from plastics. Tires, for instance, may constitute 78% of the microplastics in the ocean; clothes made with synthetic fibers like nylon,

Don’t throw that plastic bag in the garbage, you can recycle it at the store.

ances like toasters, printers, computers, electric toothbrushes, gaming systems, and chargers can save the average household up to $100 annually. Chargers? Ugh, I know, as if there’s nothing else to worry about. BUT, one of the easiest ways to do this is to use power strips. Power strips minimize your plug load, and then boop, you just flip one button. You didn’t ask, but no one enjoys getting hassled by a stickler so, y’know, let’s do our best and assume others are doing some version of their best as well.

Dear Drippy,

My pizza box is made of cardboard (recycling), but it’s covered in cheese and grease and rogue olives (compost). I’ve seen people toss it in both. Which one’s right?

—Pizza Paralysis

Technically, both. Depends if it’s greasy as shit. A clean pizza box goes in the recycling like any cardboard box, although I don’t think I’ve seen a clean pizza box in my life. If darkened by oil stains, or there’s a hardening stretch of cheese clinging onto it for dear life, toss it in the green Yard Waste bins. Don’t be fooled by the little plastic table thingy, though. It’s trash “unless your child can use it as dollhouse furniture,” says the ever-thrifty Seattle Public Utilities.

Are you going shopping? Don’t forget your reusable bag!

acrylic, and polyester shed plastic every time they’re washed. But some cosmetic company bastards have intentionally made small microbead plastics as filler and exfoliants. Microplastics are like glitter and go literally everywhere when released. We find them in the deepest parts of the ocean, on remote islands, embedded in Antarctic sea ice and (maybe) in every human testicle. Microplastics get into our food from the word go because we fertilize our crops with sewage sludge, a nutrient rich byproduct of municipal wastewater. As a result, European farmland may actually be the largest reservoir of microplastics in the world. When the microplastic-y soil runs off into rivers, streams and groundwater, the cycle begins anew. Are we screwed? Dr. Sathyanarayana says we just have to do what we can. You can reduce your exposure to microplastics by eating fresh, unprocessed foods, or filtering your air and water. But the biggest difference will require policy change.That’s the long answer. The short answer? Constantly ingesting microplastics seems totally inescapable, PVC. And it will be until we break the stranglehold single-use plastic has on our day-to-day lives.

Vivian

McCall, Emily Nokes, Megan Seling, and Hannah Murphy Winter helped Drippy with their research.

An Illustrated Guide to Prepping

Everything You’ll Need to Survive When the

BY CHARLES MUDEDE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MIKE MERG

After years of living with little to no perturbation beneath a live volcano and above the super-threatening Seattle Fault and seeing the violence of anthropogenic weather events increase, I finally snapped when, in late February, I read that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was cutting jobs at the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). That department, which manages around 75 percent of the high-voltage power in the Pacific Northwest, was already understaffed when Trump/Musk forced it to fire 89 employees and retire 240. Compound this brazen lunacy (“people

C LIMATE ISSU E

World Ends

running circles”) with a system that’s stressed by a warming climate, and what do you get? A mode of mind that no longer dismisses preppers. And because you live in the same “mad world, mad world” I live in, you, too, can’t afford to sleep on preparing for the worst. Nevertheless, I’m no expert on prepping. My mission is to not just survive the aftermath but to well wad it with the comforts to which I’m accustomed.

To ensure this outcome, I have bought these items while they are still affordable and available. You should consider doing the same.

400-Watt Solar Panels

Just in case gas runs out or is not available (a real possibility if we are hit by a very violent natural or climate-related disaster), it’s recommended you own high-quality solar panels. Do not buy panels that have less than 200 watts. They take forever to recharge anything of value. Aim for anything above 400 watts. Best of all are two portable panels that can, when combined, provide a total of 800 watts. These high-quality light-gathering machines cost around $700 and will, in the most difficult of circumstances: 1) power video games, 2) power tablets and phones with downloaded music, movies, and books, and, 3) heat water for coffee or ramen. Always keep lots of ramen in the house.

Yes, it runs on gas, but we live in a world where petroleum products are more compossible than alternatives. By compossible, I mean we have structured our culture in such a way that the most advanced infrastructure (which actualizes the virtual) involves fossil fuels. (This sucks, but we live in a culture that has kept the compossibles of

clean energy in an inchoate state.) So, when the DOGE blackouts arrive in the very near future, a portable gas-powered machine will reliably keep the whole house running for at least 12 hours, allowing you to take hot showers, keep food cold (a fridge is, after all, a time machine), and prepare hot meals with minimal trouble.

This tool has many advantages over its revivals (guns and bows), the main of which being you will never run out of rocks in the aftermath. Also, slingshots are just safer. Guns are likely to do harm to you and those close to you rather than to an armed adversary. But here is the problem with slingshots: You probably never learned how to make one. I once did, but the memory of that skill sank into

some deep part of my mind and will only resurface when I’m in that kind of delirium the fatally ill experience before death. What to do? You can, like I did, buy the real thing: the Best Slingshot series from Hella Slingshots. They are handmade from a forked tree branch—see, hella real. Put a stone in one of these bad boys, pull, release, and knock the life out of a bird (XvX) chilling in a tree.

Recipes for Pigeons

When my father, Ebenezer Mudede, visited Beijing in 1985 on state-related business (he was an economist for Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Industry and Technology), he was surprised to find not a single bird in the city’s skies. Why? They had been eaten. Though it’s hard to imagine today, back then, China was even poorer than many Sub-Saharan African countries. Seattle has in large numbers a kind of bird whose meat is reputed to be tasty

INGREDIENTS

2 whole pigeons

1 shallot, brunoise

Salt and white pepper

and tender: the pigeon. When the world is working, pigeons can live in peace with humans. But when things go wrong, such as a war or economic catastrophe, they are instantly seen (in cartoon fashion) for what they actually are: an easy source of protein that’s plucked and turned over a campfire spit.

If you are really set for a comfortable apocalypse, Ryan McLaughlin, the chef at Violet, offers this recipe:

SIMPLE SQUAB

METHOD

Using scissors or a small blade, cut through the backbone and breastplate of each pigeon to make two halves of breast and thigh. Season well with salt and pepper.

Sear pigeon on medium-high heat, skin side down, until well browned. Flip and lower heat to medium. Add a small knob of butter, the shallot, and a sprig or two of rosemary. Sauté shallot until soft and pigeon is just barely cooked through. Remove pigeon from pan.

Deglaze pan with a touch of wine, reduce until the pan is almost dry. Remove pan from heat and add a few more knobs of butter, stirring constantly to create a nice emulsification.

This is a simple preparation that would do well with foraged berries and greens. For instance, I would serve this pigeon over a bed of wild dandelion greens or watercress (well-washed, of course). The pan sauce would benefit greatly from the addition of any wild berries you might find here in the PNW. I like the Saskatoon berries when they are in season (July is peak time).

98-Piece

First Aid Kit

Don’t skimp. Pay $150 for a high-quality first aid kit. It must be waterproof and have space blankets, burn gel, hydration mods, large EMT shears, gloves— the works. Indeed, with the huge cuts DOGE is making on our healthcare system, you may need a nifty kit even before the apocalypse hits. Important note: Always keep several bottles of whiskey near your first aid kit. And to show your support to a country that will never become the 51st state, buy Canadian whiskey and not that MAGA Jack Daniels. n

Rosemary Wine

A few knobs of butter

Fusion Could Save the World

We Just Need to Figure It Out First

BY VIVIAN MCCALL

The word “nuclear” conjures two images: A family and a mushroom cloud. Or for some, two trumpeting columns coughing clouds over Springfield, Homer Simpson unaware of the glowing green rod that’s slipped into his jumpsuit. It does not conjure whatever the hell I was looking at in the basement of the Aerospace & Engineering Research Building at University of Washington: A Frankenstein’s Monster of telescope, cannon, and submarine.

There was a six-foot cylinder at the center of the room, held up by what looked like two sturdy metal sawhorses, gleaming in the fluorescent light like a new sheet of tinfoil. Portholes of dark glass with jutting rivets lined the side. On top, brackets secured a smaller, thinner metal tube at a 45-degree angle. My tour guides, two PhD students using the device, call it the “Z-pinch,” a name that doesn’t clear things up on its own.

The object in the middle of the room was a nuclear device for scientists to study nuclear fusion. It’s unrecognizable, perhaps, because most of our “nuclear” images stem from the nuclear fission—associated with power plants and atom bombs. But someday, fusion could power the Earth and take us to the stars.

Unlike fission, fusion doesn’t create gobs of radioactive waste for us to store for thousands of years. Fission is a chain reaction that can spiral out of control; but fusion reactors don’t melt down; they stop when the power is cut. Fusion also doesn’t require us to mine for rare, highly radioactive materials like uranium or plutonium. Water and lithium contain almost all that’s needed. Not only that, fusion has a higher energy yield than fission. It wouldn’t contribute to the greenhouse effect like oil and gas or depend on sunny weather like solar panels (and outside of a very freaky situation, birds aren’t likely to smack into a fusion reaction).

The problem is, we haven’t quite cracked fusion power yet.

Scientists know it’s possible and carries the potential for near-limitless amounts of clean energy. It would change our world forever, perhaps staving off resource wars and humanity’s final conclusion, choking on a puff of hydrocarbonic smog in a room with the thermostat turned all the way up. If fossil fuels are our fatal attraction, fusion could be our salvation.

The door to Professor Bhuvana Srinivasan’s office in the aerospace building is open. A bike helmet rests on a filing cabinet in the corner, and through a thin layer of dust, dappled underbrush peeks between towering trunks of a pine forest on her curved desktop monitor. The brightness is set to low, and the lights are off. She hovers by the light switch as I sit down and asks if I’d prefer them on. Through a window, bright sunlight washes the walls, a result of the fusion reactions she studies as a professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics.

Everything comes from fusion, she says. People like to say the sun is like a nuclear bomb perpetually exploding above us, but that’s not right. At its core lies something akin to a giant fusion reactor. Fusion is a nuclear process, but in this context, Srinivasan calls it fusion power. “Nuclear” comes with a lot of baggage (not to knock fission, she says, which has gotten better and cleaner over time).

At the most basic level, fission deals with splitting atoms, while fusion is about combining them. We accomplish fission by

taking the heaviest, largest, unstable atoms we can find and firing neutrons—particles that don’t have an electric charge—at their nuclei until they split, triggering a chain reaction with other atoms. We can harness this energy to power our homes or blow up someone else’s. (For some perspective, the first atomic bomb used 141 pounds of refined uranium. Only three pounds underwent fission to destroy Hiroshima with a halo of flame.)

The discovery of fission in late 1938 revolutionized nuclear physics. By 1945, when the US dropped its bombs, it was also a confirmation of everything we knew about human nature. (By 1952, we’d harnessed fusion for destruction in the form of the H-bomb.)

The first theory of fusion emerged in 1926, when British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington published The Internal Constitution of the Stars , his theory that fusion powers our sun—and all other suns, for that matter. He was right, and other physicists ferreted out the specifics over the next decade. In 1934, physicists Ernest Rutherford, Mark Oliphant, and Paul Harteck discovered that bombarding deuterium with deuterons (the nucleus of deuterium) released a tremendous font of energy, the first fusion reaction in the lab.

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We’ve been figuring out how to generate electricity from the reaction ever since. In the 1950s, Soviet scientists Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm designed the tokamak, the first attempt at confining plasma, a super-hot ionized gas, with magnets long enough for fusion to occur. In 1951, American Lyman Spitzer conceived the stellarator, another magnetic confinement device with a more complex magnetic topography, reflected by its asymmetrical design, like a twisted rubber band inside a Slinky. In the 1980s, two University of Utah chemists by the name of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann told the world they’d achieved fusion at room temperature, so-called “cold fusion,” but this was more science fiction than science fact, like the time Doc Brown used kitchen scraps to power the time-traveling DeLorean in Back

Unlike fission, fusion doesn’t create gobs of radioactive waste for us to store for thousands of years.

to the Future II . (Pons and Fleischmann never retracted their claims, but they could never reproduce them. Our understanding of physics doesn’t even support the possibility of cold fusion.)

Scientists around the world are trying to unlock the key to sustained fusion reactions that reliably generate more power than they take to initiate.

An important first step to getting a reaction to sustain itself without having to add more power, called ignition, was done for the first time in December 2022, when researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) near San Francisco fired 192 lasers at a pellet the size of a peppercorn, a diamond containing frozen deuterium and tritium, two heavier forms of hydrogen, separated by gold. When hit by the lasers, the gold begins to emit X-rays. These rays shine through the capsule, which heats to a temperature hotter than the core of the sun. The capsule’s outer layer of carbon almost explodes, but the counterforce of the X-rays causes it to implode. In this thermonuclear reaction, the deuterium and tritium fuse, releasing energy and helium just like the sun. This process of using lasers to rapidly heat and compress a capsule is called inertial confinement. It all happens in a flash, lasting tens of nanoseconds.

As Livermore had been lighting up these little spheres since 1997, it was a breakthrough so astounding and monumental that one scientist burst into joyful tears, according to The New York Times . The Secretary of Energy at the time called it one of the most impressive scientific feats of the century. In July 2023, they did it again, releasing even more energy. But their work was far from over, scientists stressed. It could be decades before we’re powering our cars and coffee makers this way—longer

than we may have to break our oil and gas habit before Earth goes kaput.

In her office, Professor Srinivasan ticked off a handful of the obstacles in our way. To generate the power we need, a power plant would have to expend several diamond pellets a second. We’ve yet to perfect them, which could be key. The more perfect the sphere, the more even the implosion. The more evenly the capsule implodes, the more effective the reaction. The highest-performing capsules have taken months to manufacture, which is much too long to be practical.

Our lasers aren’t fast enough, either. LLNL can only fire theirs about 10 times a day. We need powerful lasers that can fire many shots a second, a challenge because they get tremendously hot. Overdo that and you’ve got a broken laser and even more time lost.

And that’s just for inertial confinement. Another method of achieving fusion, called magnetic confinement fusion, relies on holding plasma (a state of matter where atoms are stripped of their electrons) in a state of equilibrium. In this case, it’s not speed scientists are looking for, but stability, by keeping the plasma locked in a tight “magnetic cage” long enough for fusion to occur. Left to their own devices, the super-heated atoms would ricochet off the walls of the reactor, like dollar store bouncy balls in a rubber room.

The turbulent magnetic fields are thrown easily out of whack, but they have to be unshakable. Physicists compare this to holding jelly with rubber bands. The tighter the compression, the more likely it is to erupt from the gaps. Unstable plasma won’t fuse, or may even channel a damaging beam of energy at one section of wall, paralyzing the reactor for days or weeks at a time. It’s not that these problems are unsolvable, they’re just devilishly tough. That’s what Professor Srinivasan’s PhD student, Daniel Alex, likes about them. He studies the magnetic fields self-generated by plasma. The swim of free ions and free electrons can cause currents, electric fields, and magnetic fields.

These magnetic fields affect how those diamond capsules implode when shot through with lasers. Localized magnetic fields can cause drops in temperature, which accelerate the mixing between the hot and cold layers, and cause the overall temperature of the capsule to drop. High temperatures get us the reaction that we want. The mixing also causes a slight asymmetry in the collapse, even in a capsule engineered to be perfectly round.

But these magnetic fields are not always accounted for in simulations. It’s expensive enough to study the hydrodynamic effects without tossing three-dimensional magnetic fields on top. Filling those gaps in our knowledge could improve simulations and get scientists closer to solving at least one efficiency problem, Alex explained.

With all the recent developments, it’s an exciting time to be a scientist studying fusion power, says Srinivasan. A good deal of support for fusion comes from Department of Energy grants, and Trump’s Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, an oil guy who is for liquefied natural gas and against solar and wind power, is a proponent of fission and fusion. He studied nuclear fusion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so

fusion technology may be spared from the federal government’s merciless budget cuts. The same can’t be said for research institutions themselves, the “woke” target of the Trump ignorance brigade.

“I graduated 10 PhD students, and they’ve all gone on to do wonderful things—work for the Department of Energy, national labs, industry, various things that contribute to many aspects of computation, plasma physics, and fusion,” Srinivasan says. “This year, I might not hire any graduate students, because I don’t know what’s going to happen with my funding… The uncertainty alone is keeping us from maintaining a certain level of workforce development and training necessary to promote our field.”

Back by the door of the Flow Z-Pinch lab in UW’s basement—a high-ceilinged concrete room crowded with hulking electrical equipment—sits a high-speed camera that shoots 5 million frames per second.

After hopping off a flight from the East Coast, UW Professor Uri Shumlak tells me he built it in 1998. The Z-Pinch wasn’t his idea; it’s been around for decades, the result of a literal bolt from the blue. In 1905, lightning struck a hollow metal lightning rod on a kerosene refinery in New South Wales, Australia, leaving it crushed and twisted.

Scientists rightly hypothesized its gnarled appearance came not from the power of the strike but by magnetism. Scientists already knew two electrified wires carrying currents in the same direction would drift toward one another. Since a metal tube is like a circle of wire, the lightning strike caused it to “pinch” inward.

In the 1950s, scientists in the UK took this concept to the earliest fusion experiments, running a strong electric current through hydrogen gas in a Z-pinch to create a plasma. They thought they’d achieved fusion then, but the experiments were ultimately a failure. Science dropped the device in favor of the Soviet tokamak, but the famed instability of the Z-pinch is precisely what interested Shumlak. He wanted to find novel ways to stabilize it. The key turned out to be “sheared flow,” or accelerating layers of plasma at different speeds within the fusion core.

Picture a car putting along the backed-up center lane of a highway. The faster the cars in the outer lanes are moving, the harder it is for the car to merge left or right. The faster-moving outer layer of plasma stabilizes the slower-moving inner layer, holding the plasma in place long enough, theoretically, to create fusion.

In 2017, Shumlak took this theory and founded Zap Energy with Brian A. Nelson and Benj Conway. They hope to scale it to high-performance plasmas that produce more energy than they put in. They’re working on technology to capture that steady flow of energy in a liquid blanket of lithium. The energy could generate heat, boiling water into a rising stream that spins a turbine, like most power plants use. Shumlak believes fusion is a matter of civilizational importance. As a child, working at a gas station in the 1970s, he watched cars in dizzying lines to fill up during OAPEC’s oil embargo on the United States. It struck him as ridiculous—the whole world revolving around the sludge

of decayed dinosaurs. It clicked early that energy derived from resources in the ground divided the world into haves and have-nots,.

“Fusion is the democratization of energy,” he says. “If you have access to water, you have all the fusion fuel you need to power your country. It would completely change the way we think about energy.”

Private capital from billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Sam Altman is flowing into companies on the quest to build an artificial star. Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Massachusetts has raised more than $2 billion for its work with a souped-up tokamak, with its 30-ton magnets generating a mind-boggling magnetic force equal to 10 rockets breaking free of the Earth. In 2024, Pacific Fusion raised $1 billion. With this unprecedented investment, this could be fusion’s moment.

The Altman-backed Helion Energy promises the age of fusion power will begin in Washington State by 2028, with an operational 50-megawatt fusion power plant in Malaga to power Microsoft data centers. (Billionaires preach worldsaving agendas, but they’ve been happy to sidestep climate goals for the energy

It could be decades before we’re powering our cars and coffee makers this way— longer than we may have to break our oil and gas habit before Earth goes kaput.

monster of AI. The motivation to power the tech they plan to suffuse our lives with can’t be ignored. Even data centers are stressing our grid.) With as many barriers and scientific unknowns—even unknown unknowns—ahead, 2028 is a big promise.

The company says its sixth prototype, Trenta, achieved enough fusion for commercially viable energy production, the first privately funded device to do so. But they ripped it up and started again with Polaris, its seventh. Both employ Magneto-Inertial fusion, a combination of inertial and magnetic confinement the company says is smaller and lower cost.

Michael Hua, Helion’s director of nuclear, chemical, and materials, says the company’s nimble, darling-killing focus on new iterations will propel them to meet their goal. The first test with Trenta answered 90 percent of their questions, he says. Helion could spend three years answering the last 10 percent, but building another device was faster and cheaper, he says. They’re not just focused on climate change; it’s a business, too. Should Helion crack fusion, the company would manufacture these reactors for the world.

Science can’t be rushed, but fusion’s true believers think capturing the sun in a bottle could light humanity’s future. For our sake, I hope they figure it out. It’s getting hot in here. ■

The Climate Change Book Matrix

BY STRANGER STAFF

Looking for a climate read that’ll match your deep sense of existential doom? Or a romp in climate futurism that gives you hope for tomorrow? We’ve got that and everything in between.

DOOMY

The Parable Trilogy by

The late sci-fi legend knew we’d all become climate refugees, eventually.

Arguably

The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff

The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle Bittle’s research included spending time in several “post-disaster” communities. Oof.

Yes,

This Changes Everything by

Placing the blame exactly where it should be: on corporations.

What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Climate Futurism at its best. It even has art projects.

The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee Ever think about how much CO2 it takes to send an email?

Get our next generation of environmental justice

Octavia Butler

Goodell Deeply reported, deeply depressing. 10/10

Climate Change from the Streets by Michael Méndez Climate action starts with the people!

Naomi Klein

One Turtle’s Last Straw by Elisa Boxer, illustrated by Marta Álvarez Miguéns

warriors started today!

The End of Nature by Bill McKibben

the first book on global warming for non-scientists.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson Hard cli-fi; one of the most striking opening scenes we’ve ever read.

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard Published in 1962 and [creepy sing-song voice] prescient

The Overstory by Richard Powers Placing the blame exactly where it should be: on humans.

The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg By the woman Trump once described as “a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

we included two by him: Masterful, speculative cli-fi is his whole thing.

@GREG.STUMP

The Bunker We Chose Why Post-Apocalyptic TV Is Capturing Our Psyches

BY CHARLES MUDEDE

Television, it seems, has entered the bunker.

Apple TV+’s Silo , Amazon’s Fallout, and Hulu’s Paradise are, one, hugely popular (the former was granted a third season; the latter two, a second), and take place after anthropogenic extinction-level events that push humanity underground, into a world of simulated sunlight and a nature that has been entirely replaced by agriculture.

What these shows have successfully sold to millions of Americans is the vision of a future where we survive the unsurvivable.

In all three shows, this forced community results in depression, madness, and a delicate social order that’s always on the verge of collapsing into pandemonium.

Each bunker is kept from the edge of collapse by a ruling class—a powerful few that withhold knowledge, resources, and basic freedoms from the people they theoretically care for.

And in each bunker, the common, working

people reject that premise. Revolutions explode regularly in Silo, whose subjects, 10,000 in number, have been in the bunker so long that they’ve lost their shared knowledge of the world on the surface to such an extent that stars—what they are and why they move across the sky—are mysterious to them.

In Paradise , it only takes a few years for discontent to escalate to an armed rebellion (led by Xavier Collins—Sterling K. Brown) that’s soon followed by bodies falling out of the fake sky, climate-control and surveillance computers crashing, and Secret Service agents killing Secret Service agents. At the heart of this mayhem is a tech billionaire (Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond— Julianne Nicholson) who is emotionally bankrupt and will do whatever it takes to maintain their grip on power.

In Fallout , the peace is destroyed by invaders from the toxic surface. (I like to think of these radioactive raiders as much like animal life that’s now found above the 56 million gallons of decaying nuclear mate-

Rebecca Ferguson plays the brave Juliette Nichols in Silo

rials buried in Hanford, Washington.)

In all shows, the bunkers don’t work out as planned. And I think this is what makes the shows progressive. Why? Because, ultimately, they all reach this conclusion: It’s much better to fix the world we live in than to give up and enter an underground world that’s dark, soulless, oppressive, and completely run by those who were mad enough to build bunkers as the only solution to capitalism’s destruction of everything that really matters to humans— the environment.

C

What we also see in these shows are societies ( Silo is organized like a city; Paradise , like a gated community, and Fallout, like rural America) is a kind of economy called “necro-economics.” LA-based philosopher Warren Montag borrowed the concept from the Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe—a state of affairs or social situation that places a higher value on things than on human life. Why else would the rich build bunkers but to maintain a social order, an economic system that’s clearly far from anything we can describe as pro-life?

like the bunkers in the TV shows: dark, militaristic, and unforgiving. (Trump also threatened to send people who vandalized Tesla cars—“domestic terrorists”—to this underground American prison.) The whole episode was unabashedly staged and shot in a manner that could be edited right into a season of Silo or Paradise

LIMATE ISSU E 20 25

Meanwhile, the price of gas is a more powerful political issue than global warming— taking up more space than rising sea levels, floods, and super-powerful hurricanes. That was what life was like before we entered the bunker that opened when Trump was reelected. But will we soon see the utter madness of our present bunker mentality? Will we demand that the vaults be opened and we return to the surface?

SPOILER ALERT. Each show has its own answer. Fallout says the surface might be bad, but nowhere near as bad as the bunkers. And the first seasons of both Silo and Paradise end with a single person, a brave

And now, we must ask the biggest question out there: Are these bunker shows about the future or the present? Maybe we enjoy these shows so much because we, at present, are already in bunkers that, considering the state of our rapidly deteriorating environment, are not made of concrete but the superstructural stuff of culture: government, churches, schools, the press. (The French philosopher Louis Althusser identified these cultural institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses—ISA.) Isn’t Trump’s presidency already a bunker society that’s made up of his hot air?

And last month, on the very week that more than 40 Americans were killed by what must have looked like world-ending tornadoes, wildfires, and dust storms, Trump’s administration released a video of alleged Venezuelan criminals (no proof of this was provided) who were flown to a prison in El Salvador that looked very much

Isn’t Trump’s presidency already a bunker society that’s made up of his hot air?

person (Rebecca Ferguson, in the case of Silo; Sterling K. Brown, in the case of Paradise), emerging from underground. But in the former, there is nothing on the surface. With Paradise, we expect what remains of life to, in season two, look pretty like the monsters, genetically modified freaks, cults, and cannibals who populate the surface of Fallout. End of ALERT.

The ultimate social benefit of bunker TV is that it arrived just in time to reveal that we are in Trump’s bunker world. The next step is to make our exit. ■

In Fallout, bunker-bound survivors of a nuclear exchange face new monsters on the surface.

Get Trashed

Seattle’s Recology Program Invites Artists to Find Inspiration in Garbage

BY NATHALIE GRAHAM

PHOTOS BY BILLIE WINTER

The sweet smell of garbage fills the warehouse, but it only registers in whiffs. A large, green apparatus in the center of the space houses machines that buzz and churn the air, keeping it from getting stagnant. Beyond the green walls, an M.C. Escher-like maze of conveyor belts and stairways moves 300 tons of King County recyclables daily— Coke cans, the Seattle Times business section, a mass of cardboard. Humans with spatulas flick out the undesirables, such as clothing, plastic bags, and even a string of Christmas lights, so the material doesn’t wrap around the spinning, wheel-like sorting contraptions. Despite the human quality control, one harnessed worker climbs inside the machine every night and cuts off any obstructions.

The process filters each item into its own place. Glass flows off one belt into a metal trough below in a cascade of sharp tinkles. Another magic machine magnetizes aluminum and flings it into a different stream. Lasers read the different

types of plastics and sort them into their appropriate streams.

In what feels like a choreographed dance, Recology trucks deliver new loads of recyclables into a mountainous pile. The pile was white before the pandemic, but the Amazonification of our lives turned it brown. It has stayed brown. Thick, black cobwebs cover the ceiling. A pile of real, non-recyclable trash—the rejected attempts at recycling found through sorting— lies next to the machine. Sometimes, it moves. Because of the rats. Seattle’s Material Recovery Facility (MRF) is a cacophonic, colorful symphony of industry, and it almost never stops—because the trash never stops. That symphony is the focal point of Recology’s annual artist-in-residence program.

Since 2015, Recology has chosen two artists annually for a four-month residency in their artist-in-residence (AIR) program.

Earning a $1,300 monthly stipend, artists gain unfettered, 24/7 access to the MRF

and all of its materials to create artwork that they’ll showcase at the end of the program. They can also scavenge for materials at the City of Seattle’s North Transfer Center and Recology’s stores, where hard-to-recycle material ends up. Recology educates the artists on the facility and recycling. They lead facility tours and become intertwined with the inner machinations of the recycling center.

In years past, artists have made Mondrian-style sculptures from the soles of unrecyclable shoes. Others have recovered spools of metal shower hoses and conduits, weaving them together into sculptures. One artist abandoned her original idea after spending hours on end at the MRF and instead made 3D-printed casts of the sorters’ hands.

The MRF is a treasure trove for artists, both with the material and inspiration it provides. In a world on the brink of climate disaster, having artists immersed in one aspect of

sustainability and communicating their experience through their work is a necessary kind of outreach. “What an individual artist can do in this program is give exposure [to sustainability] through their art or just talking about it,” says Amanda Manitach, artist and Recology AIR program manager.

When 2019 resident Susan Robb wove a blanket to commemorate the unrecyclable syringes, or “sharps,” she exposed the sheer volume of used needles being thrown away in the recycling. Whenever workers encounter sharps on the line at the MRF, the facility enacts a safety protocol, and they must note the day and the number of sharps recovered. Robb used plastic bags in her weaving, where each color corresponded to how many sharps were found on a particular day. Some days, they find more than 1,000. With 300 tons of recycling churning through every day, the MRF sees a lot of trash. And, while Seattle is one of the top three recycling cities in the nation, not everyone recycles well. People toss in questionable material all the time. Once someone

Maria Phillips and Amanda Manitach, program managers for Recology’s artist-in-residence program, stand among just some of the 300 tons of material the facility processes every day.

puts their recyclables into that blue bin, it’s no longer their problem. But it does become the MRF’s problem.

Maria Phillips, a program manager for Recology’s AIR, and an alumni of the program, focused her work during her residency on the unrecyclable plastic linings of to-go cups. “They’re a multi-layer material of plastic and paper,” Phillips says. “We’re told that they can be recycled.” They can’t be.

For her artwork, Phillips pulled apart the plastic and the paper in these cups to make pure paper and pure plastic. “I was trying to expose some of the greenwashing that goes on,” she says. After her show, some people came up to her and told her they wouldn’t get to-go cups anymore. She considered that a small victory.

The residency is often transformative for the artists.

“It gets into your soul after being here for four months,” says Manitach, who was one of 2023’s resident artists. She made collages out of cardboard and other recycled paper products. She spent hours next to the conveyor belt, picking through letters, boxes, and other perplexing things people threw away. One time, she found a trove of legal documents from the 1960s. Another time, a sex doll came down the line. The workers quickly pulled it.

“Actually being here and being in the [MRF] shifted my whole understanding of material on this almost spiritual level,” Manitach says. There was so much of it. The trash felt Sisyphean. Manitach described it as an “emotional heaviness.”

Before Phillips’ residency, she worked with found objects, so the residency program,

where she could sift through other people’s trash, seemed like a perfect fit. “It was one thing to find something on the ground that has a character or texture versus all of a sudden being submerged in it,” she said. Instead of finding one cap and using it, she was surrounded by thousands of those same caps. Being at the MRF showed them how important it is to communicate about what is and isn’t recyclable. It also taught Manitach how much individual action matters.

“The Material Recovery Facility feels like a character, and she’s got big, hairy grandmother energy.”

“I came away from this experience wanting to preach at everyone that your individual footprint does make a difference,” she said. Your K-cups, your sneakers, your bagfuls of shredded paper are being pulled by hand from the rivers of material because they cannot be recycled. “Every single object is being held,” Manitach says. “We can all do better.”

This year, Recology selected artists Colleen Louise Barry and Julia Monté for the program that will kick off in May. Both are excited about the journey awaiting them at the MRF. They’ll display their works in September. Monté regularly uses found materials in her sculptural work that emulates highway over-

Maria Phillips is an alumna of the artist-in-resident program.

passes and rollercoasters. In her current iterations of these both whimsical and brutalist structures, Monté coats them in layers of mortar. For her residency with Recology, she wants to go back to letting the found, raw material shine. “I want to consider how I can make what I’m making now about transit and communal experiences and the precarity of those structures by letting the material be what it is,” Monté says.

Barry, an artist, writer, and teacher with a

strong background in sculpture, was wowed by the MRF. “The MRF feels like a character, and she’s got big, hairy grandmother energy,” Barry says. “And it’s really intense because you walk in and all the detritus from all these people’s lives— baby formula, freaking memory boxes still full of pictures, people’s plastic from Trader Joe’s—all these things that we’re living with have all come to this one spot to meet their end.”

Inspired by her recent pregnancy, Barry wants to focus on feminine energy and cycles in her work for the residency. “I came into this with the idea of wanting to talk about circular economies and wanting to talk about cycles being inherently feminine energy, and wanting to make work about that kind of movement,” she said.

She envisions making giant, feminine sculptures from whatever she can scavenge. “I want them to feel big and imposing like the MRF and have a lot of movement and be sort of feminine divine,” she said. “I want them to feel a little scary.”

Of course, everything can change once they’re there and in the mix. Whatever they do, it’ll be important for Recology’s mission and may make a difference in how people consume and how they discard.

“Artists are the seeds,” Phillips says. “We’re the messengers.” ■

The facility uses magnetization to separate aluminum cans, which are then crushed, baled, and sold.

An art piece by Susan Robb, “Plastcadia” (2019), is made with non-recyclable film plastic.

Desert Power

Saharan Rock Stars Etran de L’Aïr Tap Into the Infinite

BY DAVE SEGAL

Not to get all chamber of commerce-y about it, but Seattle has played a crucial role in laying the foundation for Saharan rock’s current popularity. In the ’00s while based in the Emerald City, the esteemed global music label Sublime Frequencies issued transformative releases by Group Bombino, Group Doueh, and Koudede. Thus began the groundswell of Western interest in heathazed, mantric rock that’s imbued with the blues’ ability to transmute oppression into transcendent art.

But the real boom in guitar-centric African music occurred in the 2010s, when artists such as Bombino, Mdou Moctar, Tinariwen, Les Filles de Illighadad, and Tamikrest broke out into America’s live circuit. Etran de L’Aïr have joined these compelling musicians in the 21st century’s great Desert Rock Invasion.

Striking out from Agadez, Niger, Etran de L’Aïr (henceforth, EDL) consist of three brothers and a cousin: bassist Abdoulaye “Illa” Ibrahim, drummer Alghabid Ghabdouan, guitarist/vocalist Moussa “Abindi” Ibra, and guitarist/vocalist Abdourahamane “Allamine” Ibrahim.

They formed in 1995 as young lads (group leader Abindi was 9), playing Niger’s demanding wedding circuit and singing in Tamasheq, a language spoken mainly by nomadic tribes in North and West Africa. Very few Americans know Tamasheq, which could be considered an impediment to enjoyment, but the grain and intensity of EDL’s vocals make it easy

to understand the players’ profound joy and sadness.

According to EDL’s Portland-based label, Sahel Sounds, the members belonged to nomadic families that settled in Agadez after escaping the droughts of the 1970s. When they started the group, EDL only had one acoustic guitar and they’d thwack a calabash with a sandal for percussion. Before they attained American patronage, EDL would haul their own gear while on foot, sometimes traversing 25 kilometers (about 15 miles), to play free gigs.

Now three albums deep into their official music-biz career, EDL have adapted to this hemisphere’s protocols. That being said, their songs feel as if they are theoretically infinite and that they only truncate them into manageable durations to placate the demands and attention spans of the Western music industry. On their home turf, though, EDL have been known to play sets that would make Springsteen’s band look like slackers.

Saharan rock is a distant cousin of America’s desert rock, which arose in 1997 out of jam sessions manifested by stoner-rock behemoths Kyuss. While both strains of desert rock rely on repetition to drive home their incisive riffs, and both have their psychedelic moments, the American brand doesn’t tap into spirituality and strife

like its African counterparts do—unless you count running out of marijuana and getting sunburned to be serious hardships.

With the 2018 debut album, No. 1, EDL established their galvanizing approach and have continued on that path with few deviations through 2022’s Agadez and 2024’s 100% Sahara Guitar . The opening track from No. 1 , “Etran Hymne,” bears rough fidelity, but the guitars’ liquid gold tone is buoyed by beats that have a lopsided propulsion. What sounds like an agitated women’s choir ululates wildly, while the men sing in unison with poised defiance. That combo never gets old. On “Agrim Agadez,” the awkward beats clash with the coruscating guitar riffs. This is peak Saharan rock: roiling, trance-inducing juggernauts with intricately interlocking guitar motifs and massed vocals conveying indomitable joy among hardships that comfortable Westerners cannot fathom. “Hadija” conjures slow-rolling hypnosis with those mad lady trills in the background. Yes, there’s very little variation in the rhythms, but the guitar/ bass/vocal interaction is often riotous.

Sophomore LP Agadez boasts fuller production, boosting the songs’ impact while avoiding slickness. “Imouwizla” instantly pleases with easy-rolling blues rock, albeit with that patented rhythm which feels as if you’re on a merry-go-round with

Their songs feel as if they are theoretically

a sputtering motor. The galloping and undulating rock of “Toubouk Ine Chihoussay” accrues an irrepressible momentum, with the main cyclical guitar riff positively spangling with euphoria. If EDL have a “hit” single, this is it. “Karade Marhane” is an outlier with its darker mode and coiled rhythm, but it’s still a trance-inducer. The album closes with “Tarha Warghey Ichile,” a celebratory banger that begins at a phenomenal velocity and then accelerates near the end. You can imagine this went down a storm at the many Nigerien weddings EDL played.

EDL’s latest album, 100% Sahara Guitar, begins auspiciously with “Ighre Massina,” in which ebullient vocals, tight, cyclical guitar riffs (Moussa and Allamine are the Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of Africa), and ratatat drums that make you feel as if you’re running with one leg much shorter than the other. “Igrawahi” is EDL’s most laid-back song, and it’s nice to hear some variation in tempo and intensity. The singing is as gorgeous and yearning as the sparkling, mesmerizing guitars. In a better world, “Igrawahi” would be a smash hit. “Amidinine” rolls like a diamond-encrusted tank over dunes, unstoppable and glinting in the unforgiving sun.

As exhilarating as their recordings are, EDL are, by all reports, even more exciting live. They’re traveling over 7,000 miles to hit Seattle, so you’d best believe Etran de L’Aïr will bring the desert heat to zap your blues.

Etran de L’Aïr perform April 8 at Neumos,

LARRY HIRSHOWITZ

zoe | juniper & Xiu Xiu

MAY 17 & 18, 2025

BY NICO SWENSON

Seattle can’t get enough of everything Scott Shoemaker and Freddy Molitch create. If you’re unfamiliar, Shoemaker and Molitch are the artists behind annual traditions such as the ’80s, pill-popping, cartoonish hijinks of Ms. Pak-Man, and the wild holiday phenomenon Scott Shoemaker’s War on Christmas. Thankfully, their theatrical company—Shoes and Pants Productions— will be adding Scott Shoemaker’s :Probed! to their recurring arsenal of iconic shows to give fans a fix between seasons.

If you were lucky, you caught :Probed! at Re-bar back in 2019 before the world shut down. We’ve been living in a dystopian sci-fi thriller ever since, so what better time to dive into an investigation of aliens, Bigfoot, ghosts, and fraud channelers?

Shoes and Pants Productions has cracked

“Gay Bigfoot, gay ghosts, gay aliens— the paranormal is particularly queer.”

the code on cabaret-style theater with a multimedia spectacle of hilarious videos, brilliant character acting, and song parodies so good you’ll forget the original lyrics. They’re also known for their fantastical costumes, outrageous props, and delightfully outlandish plots, so :Probed! is sure to put the extra in extraterrestrial.

The structure Shoemaker and Molitch have developed comes from a deep understanding of their audiences. “We both have the same idea about how a show works and

what kind of experience we want the audience to have. We have a lot of respect for our audience,” Shoemaker says. “We really want to make sure that we’re giving people surprises, trying new things out, putting on a big spectacle.”

That commitment to surprise sets :Probed! apart from their other works in unique and exciting ways. “It is actually really different, a lot of the video is definitely more elaborate,” Shoemaker says. “I personally get to play a lot of different characters, which is great. Freddy’s really good at researching real things and making them funny. Obscure things and weird things. I would say you’re going to see Bigfoot in a new light.” The two list in tandem, “gay Bigfoot, gay ghosts, gay aliens—the paranormal is particularly queer.”

What makes these shows so special is rooted in the creative process the genius pair have cultivated. Romantic partners of 18 years, Shoemaker and Molitch are in a constant mode of creation. “We’re together all the time. I work from home now, and it’s just something that we talk about constantly,” Shoemaker says. “The ideas will just come, we write little things down, and finally, when it’s time to actually write, there’s all this stuff to pull from.” Molitch adds, “It’s just a constant little trickling in. And then we make a big outline of what we’re going to do; the marbles just fall into place.”

Both Molitch and Shoemaker draw from personal experiences, interests, and niche obsessions to keep fervor behind their creations. You might catch references to Unsolved Mysteries In Search of… with Leonard Nimoy, and other supernatural classics. “I remember thinking, okay, we want to do another show to just

diversify,” Molitch says. “What are we into? What do we spend our time looking at and researching? And it was all these paranormal shows; we just are constantly watching stuff like that. We think it’s hilarious and interesting.” Shoemaker adds, “I believe when we were at Disneyland, Freddy just thought of the title :Probed! If you pronounce the punctuation, it’s actually called Scott Shoemaker’s Colon Probed.” The burning question: How much of the show comes from their personal encounters of the third kind? “The show is obviously poking fun at all this stuff,” Schoemaker says, “but we are both ‘want to believe’ people. Both of us are very skeptical and rational, but we’re also fully into it and would love it to be real. It’s a good balance—we know a lot about it because we like it, but we can also kind of poke fun at it at the same time.” Molitch has had a fair share of ghostly experiences. “I grew up in really old houses, and my whole life I’ve always seen ghost things and weird stuff. I believe in a lot of it, but there’s also enough there to make fun of. Making fun of something doesn’t mean we don’t love it.” Shoemaker has had striking encounters of a small white hand playing tug-of-war with him over a curtain and the sound of seats thumping in an empty, dark theater.

We will have to see if the Intiman Cabaret has its own spirits! Intiman has transformed the old Erickson Theatre into a cocktail lounge-style cabaret featuring a season of one-person plays, drag, performance art, and musical acts. The refurbished space has come up at a very needed time for venues, especially ones that highlight variety shows, cabaret, queer art, and alternative performance. “Seattle just does not have very many performance spaces right now,” Shoemaker says. “Intiman approached us about being a part of their new series. They wanted to make a space for artists like us—the kind of people that worked at Re-bar, you know, the kind of people that do fringe theater, multimedia, multi-discipline, weirder stuff.”

Shoemaker and Molitch aren’t just keeping Seattle weird in their theatrical style, the subject matter of :Probed! is actually very connected to PNW history. We all know

you can’t drive half an hour outside Seattle without seeing a Bigfoot-themed coffee shop, but it turns out Washington has been home to many big cultural moments around the paranormal. “Ramtha lives in Yelm,” says Molitch, referring to the entity that School of Enlightenment founder J.Z. Knight purports to channel. “Even the term flying saucer was coined here by a pilot who saw UFOs by Mount Rainier.”

Whether you believe in creatures from the beyond or not, :Probed! is worth it for the night of assured laughter. A personal favorite trait of Shoes and Pants Productions is that they hit the sweet spot of both acknowledging the world around us while also offering the levity to laugh about it.

“People like to laugh about things that actually seriously affected their lives,”

Shoemaker says. “To be able to laugh about it relieves the pressure. We’re absurdists at heart, really. The real thing is that life is just absurd and we’re reflecting that. We’re all acknowledging that all of this is just fucking ridiculous, and we need to laugh at it.”

Molitch adds a note to their audiences: “Thank you for trusting us. Letting us put on bizarre, weird, extreme things. Every time we do a show, we’re a little like, have we gone too weird? Should we say this? Should we make these jokes? And then the audience pays us back so many times over with getting it, and being into it. We can get weirder. We can go further, and that’s such a gift to be given, especially when we can really get out there.”

“Really out there” is a great way to describe 2025 so far, too, so you’ll want to cope by marking your calendar for a full year of camptastic Shoes and Pants shows: Scott Shoemaker’s :Probed! is just around the corner, followed by the fan-favorite Ms. Pak-Man in June at the Triple Door, there are rumblings of a Halloween Hextravaganza and you never want to miss Scott Shoemaker’s War on Christmas . After all, like Shoemaker says: “Laughing is good in the face of adversity, and that’s how you deal with problems.”

Scott Shoemaker’s :Probed! runs April 10–13 at the Intiman Cabaret at Erickson Theatre, 21+.

Ahead of :Probed!, Intiman transformed the old Erickson Theatre into a cocktail lounge-style cabaret.

DOUG McLAUGHLIN

Funny Like Ha Ha

The Stranger’s 2025 Undisputable Champions of Comedy!

BY MEGAN SELING

On Saturday, April 5, some of Seattle’s funniest comedians will take the stage as part of The Stranger ’s annual Undisputable Champions of Comedy showcase. It’ll be hilarious! The lineup was curated with help from everyone’s comedy bestie, Emmett Montgomery, co-host of Joketellers Union at Clock-Out Lounge and purveyor

Describe your comedy in five words. Heartwarming, disruptive storytelling. Also, gay. What’s the first thing you did when you found out you were chosen as one of The Stranger of Comedy?

In all honesty, one of the first things I did was text my ex. Mostly because he’s a friend and I wanted to share the excitement. But also, who doesn’t revel in an ex seeing you win?

You’ve used comedy to deal with some heavy stuff. Why is platforming humor in dark times important to you?

Eight months after I started doing stand-up, my dad died suddenly (unrelated to the stand-up, I think. But his autopsy was inconclusive, so there’s really no way to know). Two weeks after he died, I was booked to do one of my first-ever paid spots. I didn’t think I could do it. The haze of acute grief was all-consuming—how could I get on stage and joke about pap smears and threesomes? So I didn’t. I talked about ICUs and funeral homes and my complicated relationship with my dad. My set was unpolished and raw. I closed by reading the “honest” obituary my siblings wouldn’t let me publish in the newspaper. As unconventional as my set was, it killed. This was a real turning point for me as an artist. These days, the majority of my material is true stories about my real life, dark times and all.

of all things delightfully weird. And this year’s lineup is stacked with talent, from a local comedy legend who once won over a crowd of bikers at an Aurora bar in the ’80s to a comic who uses laughter as a way to deal with grief. We even have a bunny and a fundamentalist Christian pastor on the bill! It’s gonna be great. Read on to get to know this year’s champs.

Describe your comedy in five words.

Casual, contemporary, smart, seeking validation.

Do you remember your first time doing stand-up? Were you immediately hooked?

Yes, and yes. I first tried stand-up when I was a sophomore in college. It was open mic night at a campus coffee shop, and I probably followed someone who did a cover of the Lumineers’ “Stubborn Love” and another who wrote a poem about growing up. I told a joke about seeing Drake in concert at Bumbershoot (early 2010s) and feeling left out because he was only focusing on the women in the audience. He brought a girl on stage, and I wished it was me. I was jealous and bummed. So I went home and listened to more Drake.

Now I have to ask the obvious follow-up question: Whose side are you on in Drake v. Kendrick? Haha, 10-something years out from the concert: 1,000% Kendrick.

Describe your comedy in five words. Fun, Sassy, Honest, Good, Universal.

Caroline Rhea was a recent guest on your comedy show My Straight Friends. She is so great! Please tell me you have a good Caroline Rhea story.

Describe your comedy in five words. Still relevant many years later?

What’s the first thing you did when you found out you were chosen as one of The Stranger’s Champions of Comedy?

Drank a beer, smoked a doobie, and thought, “What an honor…”

Caroline was such a treat. She was so nice and so sweet and very giving of her time. We played a game with her onstage, similar to Taboo, and she had to get me to say Sabrina the Teenage Witch. All the hints that were given to me sounded like the TV show Charmed, so that’s what I said. She stormed off the stage when I said that instead of Sabrina. It was hilarious to see and I felt so dumb afterward.

You have been referred to as “royalty” and “iconic” in Seattle’s comedy scene. And you just might be the most experienced comic in the showcase! How long have you been performing?

I have been doing comedy in the PNW, the West Coast, and Western Canada since 1983.

Do you remember your first time doing stand-up? Were you immediately hooked? My first time doing comedy was a major rush because it turned out successful. It was for a room full of bikers. And hell yeah, I was hooked.

PHIL BURTON

CLIFF BARNES

EMMA SCHMUCKLER

RICCI ARMANI

Describe your comedy in five words. Queer, ecstatic, playful, radiant, JOKES!

You perform as yourself and as a fundamentalist pastor. Can you tell us who we’ll be seeing at the showcase?

ANDREW FRANK

This set will be performed in character, as Pastor Frank. Last August, I went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and delivered my one-hour “sermon” for 25 consecutive nights. The creative journey of building this character and this show has been one of the greatest joys of my life, and it will be so fun and meaningful to share it with a packed theater in the city I love and call home.

I’d imagine your style of comedy, inspired by your upbringing in the Christian fundamentalist community, can be cathartic for people who’ve experienced that same trauma. Have you found that to be true?

Absolutely. There is healing and transformative power in storytelling, play, and the communal experience of humor. Especially humor that helps us untangle indoctrination, repression, and all the complicated feelings and memories of time spent in church and school.

Describe your comedy in five words.

Bodacious, bombastic, beautiful, buoyant, and humorous. You founded the Fun & Flirty comedy dating game. You’ve helped a lot of people hook up! Hopefully, that’s resulted in some good karma, but do you have a funny bad date story?

One time, on a date, I asked a guy who his celebrity crush was, and he said Anna from Frozen (FYI, not a celebrity). He also made me pay for everything and give him a ride to QFC afterward.

What’s a good joke or icebreaker people should tuck away for a first date if things start getting awkward?

Ask them who their celebrity crush is. Just kidding. Ask them: “If you could choose any movie where all of the characters would be replaced by muppets except ONE, which movie would it be?”

Describe your comedy in five words. Silly and punchy meets bawdy.

What’s the first thing you did when you found out you were chosen as a Champion of Comedy?

I’m embarassed to say I immediately checked with other comics to see if it was legit. When I found out it was, I TOLD EVERYONE! I was very excited! I am very grateful to be recognized. It means a lot to me.

MARY LOU GAMBA

You describe yourself as a rotisserie chicken enthusiast. Can you say, once and for all, who sells the best rotisserie chicken?

PCC’s Balsamic Herb rotisserie chicken.

Do you remember your first time doing stand-up?

I took a class a million years ago and the day of the big show, where we all performed in front of our friends and family, I could not stop laughing. I laughed all day. I had never experienced that before. It was so weird. I finally stopped laughing after I went up. It was really fun and the crowd was very supportive.

Describe your comedy in five words.

Very, very, very, very sensual. Just kidding! I don’t know, chaotic & weird? Technically, that last sentence is five words because I used an ampersand.

I love the concept of your podcast, Oops! All Franchises—you set out to find the best sequel. What is your least popular sequel take so far?

My hot take is that Alien: Resurrection absolutely fuckin’ rips. It’s directed by Amélie’s Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and he really brings a whimsical, kinda horny vibe to the party. Highlights include some very weird erotic tension between Sigourney Weaver and the Alien, some very weird erotic tension between Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder, and a human-xenomorph hybrid with incredibly kind eyes. It also features the greatest practical effect in the entire franchise! I laughed my ass off during the whole thing and then cried a little bit when (SPOILERS) the freaky little Alien/human baby got sucked out of a hole in the ship. Is it good? No! But it made me feel alive!

Describe your comedy in five words. Scary! Baby! Posh! Ginger! Sporty!

What’s the first thing you did when you found out you were chosen as one of The Stranger’s Champions of Comedy?

Immediately started a training montage.

Apologies for the obvious question, but I am a big snack fan, and I have to ask: What’s Snax the Bunny’s favorite snack?

That’s a tough one! I love anything in the marshmallow oeuvre, anything with dipping sauces, and most things that involve melted cheeses or cheese products.

Is it true that Simon Cowell gave you a thumbs-up when you auditioned for America’s Got Talent? That’s not nothing! He’s generally kind of a dick!

SNAX THE BUNNY

This is true! He was the only one, too! I really thought Heidi Klum and I would share a special connection, but she voted against me! So, she’s dead to me now. Your loss, Heidi!

Describe your comedy in five words. Relatable musings on the everyday.

What’s the first thing you did when you found out you were chosen as one of The Stranger’s Champions of Comedy? I said “Cowabunga” and ripped a sick 1080 on my Razor scooter.

Your Is This Normal? podcast co-host, Alyssa Yeoman, was in last year’s showcase! I have to ask you the same question I asked her: What quirk do you have that some people might not consider “normal”?

I have no idea where this comes from, but I regularly mix up the words “green” and “orange”—I can fully discern the two different colors, but I’ll be like “Could you pass me the green—I mean orange—marker?” No other colors, no other words, but those two, I swap sometimes accidentally. I have met one other person in my life that does this, and we are both deeply confused why it happens.

ERIN INGLE

ZAHNAE AQUINO

APRIL 19 - MAY 11 2025

Lilac Plant Sales • Gift Shop • Quilt Raffle Barn/Museum • Self-Guided Garden Tours Historic Klager Farmhouse

10am – 4pm Daily

$10 Gate Fee (children 12 & under free) 115 S. Pekin Rd, Woodland, WA 98674

The Best Sugar High on Capitol Hill

Meet the NYC Pastry Chef Serving Joy in Seattle

BY MICHAEL WONG

Maybe it’s the butter, the cream, the sugar, or the audacity of putting iconic Asian flavors like mango sticky rice into rice crispy treats and somehow making it work… Whatever it is, Kelly Miao, owner of Kemi Dessert Bar, seems to understand the alchemy and finesse of dessert craft better than most.

At her newly opened bakery, she’s taken everything she’s learned from a career in New York City fine dining and plated desserts and brought it to Capitol Hill in the form of Asian-inspired guilty pleasures verified to spark joy. The results are inventive, artful, and backed by the kind of technical skill that separates good from GOAT.

From the Cronut to Capitol Hill When most Asian kids her age were at Kumon, Miao was in the kitchen. It started in Long Island, where Ina Garten reruns evolved into experimenting with boxed cake mix, and eventually, Miao was baking anything and everything at every opportunity. Teachers, neighbors, and family alike all knew there was butter in Miao’s veins. Even still, Miao followed the traditional college path she felt was expected of her, pursuing hotel management at New York University. Something for her parents to gloat about at lunch.

But then she did something unconventional: took a gap year and got herself into Dominique Ansel’s kitchen, the same bakery of Cronut infamy. A place where the margin for error is thinner than a layer of mille-feuille, and the pastry must be consistently flawless. She not only survived the demanding work, she excelled. And from there, she built a career in some of New York’s best restaurants: Ai Fiori, Bar Boulud , Claudette —places where every gram of sugar and every degree of heat had to be exact.

In 2023, she abruptly left it all behind: New York, fine dining, home. She and her husband-to-be packed up and moved to Seattle. “We visited back in 2021 and instantly fell in love with it, and liked how Seattle is a good mix of crazy and peaceful,” Miao says with a smile. “We came here because we were watching Seattle food videos throughout the start of the pandemic, and it didn’t disappoint. The Lao burger at Ox Burger is still one of the greatest things we’ve ever eaten.” That’s a surreal compliment from an NYC fine dining chef. (A reminder that Seattle still has motion!) And while Seattle doesn’t

have a deep-rooted, high-end pastry culture like New York, maybe that’s a good thing. When a place doesn’t already have a story, you get to write it.

Betting on the Pop-Up

Before Kemi Dessert Bar had a storefront, it was a pop-up. Seattle’s café scene was the perfect playground—the right crowd, the right energy, and full of people who appreciated a well-executed dessert. Miao would set up at places like Atulea and Coffeeholic, neatly lining up her treats and sharing real-time inventory updates on Instagram Stories. I met Miao via email, at a time in my content creator journey when I would freak out over any message that wasn’t a verification code. The formality of her set-up, plus photos of her rice crispy treats that were dotted with chewy blobs of boba, made an impression. I had to pull up.

Kemi Dessert Bar grew from these moments—small but meaningful encounters where pastries weren’t just sold but shared. And as demand grew, so did the dream. Now, with a storefront in Capitol Hill, she’s got the space and the momentum. But opening a bakery in Seattle right now isn’t for the faint of heart. Minimum wage is through the roof, wholesale eggs require a mortgage, and even the most Instagram-worthy

spots aren’t guaranteed survival. But Miao knew she had something worth betting on. Serendipity was on her side. “I’m not always the most confident person,” she admits, “but I felt like I had something new and exciting to offer Seattle. So I figured— what better time than now?”

Desserts That Delight

For anyone who visits her new shop, imbued with her good taste, from the pink tiling to the brilliant pastry packaging, it’s impossible not to buy into the vision. At first glance, their menu might look like Asian-flavor Mad Libs. But these aren’t just random pairings; they’re epiphanies.

The Pandan Crumble Cookie tastes like someone reverse-engineered my Asian American childhood, toasty and buttery and exactly how you wish more things tasted. Her Matcha Banana Pudding is a new favorite, but the Brown Sugar Boba Rice Crispy Treat—a ridiculous, chewy, caramelized square studded with globs of glossy tapioca pearls—is my primary care doctor’s #1 opp.

punctuated by a self-mandate to make sure each dessert isn’t just interesting, but technically excellent, too.

Opening a bakery in Seattle right now isn’t for the faint of heart.

Take the Thai Tea Basque Cheesecake (yeah, you heard me). Burnt just right, cracking under your spoon before sinking into something impossibly creamy, almost custard-like, culminating in a Thai tea-flavored crescendo. Popular for a reason. Or the Miso Sesame Cookie—deep and contemplative flavors that seesaw with the simplicity of their vessel, the marriage feels forever known. A recipe Miao has developed for years. Or even the humble “Chocolate Chip Cookie,” not qualified by any Asian flavors other than Okinawa sea salt (because, of course). This is the “chicken tenders” item on her menu, and as a litmus test, it’s a stellar A+ with extra credit. You can taste the experience, and the premium Plugrà butter, in every bite.

Right now, there’s no shortage of pastry chefs bringing matcha and ube into their creations. But Kemi Dessert Bar’s ability to deftly navigate trends in order to produce something simultaneously familiar and new is what separates her from the pack. It’s all

At a time when demand for newness in the city is at a fever pitch, Kemi Dessert Bar is ready to not only fill in the blanks, but push us forward. Supporting small businesses that bring something special to our city is important work. If you want a fun, vibrant culinary scene, remember your efficacy in making it happen. Because one thing is clear: Kemi Dessert Bar is proof that a city is only as good as the risks people take on it. ■

Kelly Miao worked at popular New York spots such as Dominique Ansel Bakery and Ai Fiori before moving to Seattle.

BILLIE WINTER

BILLIE WINTER

We do our best for accuracy, but please check venue websites for updates and more information, as event details may have changed since press time!

Housekeeping note: We have ceased to include pricing information, unless the event is free or sliding scale. (This is mostly due to third-party ticket vendors, like Ticketmaster, who have a monopoly on pricing that is not only unfair, but also confusing, due to varying fee structures. We hate them, and so should you.)

MUSIC

Martha Wainwright, Brad Barr

APRIL 5

Martha Wainwright sprouted from the bountiful family tree of folk icons Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, which is evident from her dreamy vocal tone and knack for candid, playful songwriting. In honor of the 20th anniversary of her self-titled album, Martha will perform the seminal work in its entirety, after an opening set from indie folk artist Brad Barr (of the Barr Brothers). As for me, I’ll be the person sitting in the front row scream-singing along to “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.” (Fremont Abbey Arts Center, 8 pm, all ages) AUDREY VANN

Kraftwerk

APRIL 9

Kraftwerk’s 1974 album Autobahn is a potent antidepressant. I can always depend on the opening titular track to lift my spirits—the song’s slow-building electronics make me feel like a glossy ’70s BMW that’s powering on to follow the German lyrics “Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn” (which loosely translates to “We are driving on the highway.”) Lead singer and founding member Ralf Hütter will get back on the “autobahn” to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the band’s first US tour. This special multimedia concert

will bring together Kraftwerk’s pioneering electronic tunes with trippy futuristic visuals and performance art. (Moore Theatre, 8 pm, all ages) AUDREY VANN

Tomo Nakayama, Bryan John Appleby, Tiny Vipers

APRIL 12

On May 2 Tiny Vipers (Jesy Fortino) will release Illusionz Vol. 1 (1997-2004), her first album since 2009’s Weak Moments of the Shadows. She’s been prolific since, of course, with several EPs, an instrumental album in 2015, and collaborations with Grouper, the Sight Below, and Balmorhea. But it’s her stark, unapologetic solo material that stabs through my heart like a harpoon. Fortino recorded the songs between 1997 and 2004, and without obvious nods to the times, manages to pulse with that same energy—before 9/11 and after, during Bush and before Obama, when Seattle was still somewhat affordable and artists could still take risks. Each track feels like a time capsule. Sorry in advance for devolving into a blathering mess if

into her archives

play

Ichiko Aoba

APRIL 21

The word “ethereal” tends to be overused when describing music. That said, Ichiko Aoba’s music is actually ethereal. The Japanese singer-songwriter finds a sweet spot between folk, jazz, and classical

music, employing swirling strings, ocean waves, wind chimes, and delicate vocals to tell whimsical, and often fictional, stories. She will support her new album Luminescent Creatures, which serves as a sequel to her critically acclaimed 2020 album Windswept Adan. (Moore Theatre, 8 pm, all ages) AUDREY VANN

Space Is the Place Fest

APRIL 18–19

Seattle, this is the energy. Back in the day, the Naf warehouse was the go-to for raves/ early EDM, as well as a home to the ’90s underground music scene. Space Is the Place Fest is reviving that huge capacity venue to bring you two all-nighters full of music/ raving/performance. Astro-jazz legends the Sun Ra Arkestra and lo-fi synth queen the Space Lady will be in town; expect a multimedia spectacle from the Fabulous Downey Brothers, and instrumental noise offerings from Diminished Men. Don’t forget we’re going all night: DJs Donald Glaude, Slantooth, Sherman, Riz Rollins, and Space Otter are bringing the old-school house, drum & bass, and more. Rumor has it there will also be modular synth work, live glass-blowing, some circus action, and “all things cosmic and wild!” (Naf Studios, April 18: 8pm–4am; April 19: 8pm–6am, 18+) EMILY NOKES

she reaches

to

“Dreamer.” (Baba Yaga, 7 pm, 21+) MEGAN SELING

Kylie Minogue, Rita Ora

APRIL 25

If you haven’t heard about the cultural phenomenon that is Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam,” then I suggest that you catch up on your herstory STAT. During the summer of 2023, the song took the queer community by storm, echoing through Pride parades, clubs, and Sephoras around the globe. The sleeper hit came nearly four decades into her career, evidence of Minogue’s superstardom and staying power. The Princess of Pop will return to Seattle for the first time since 2002 to support her two-part album Tension. I am crossing my fingers that she’ll also sing some older tracks from her early-’00s nu-disco staple Fever and ’80s bubblegum-pop debut, Kylie. Oh yeah, and British pop phenom Rita Ora is opening—no big deal! (Climate Pledge Arena, 7:30 pm, all ages) AUDREY VANN

Yukimi

APRIL 30

Yukimi Nagano has fronted the Grammy-nominated Swedish electronic group Little Dragon for nearly three decades, but she steps into her own on the solo project For You. The songs feel more intimate, with a feminine energy that emanates strength, as she sings, “Nothing’s gonna break me down / Nothing’s gonna shake / No one’s gonna break me.” Without the confines of a band, she has the freedom to take risks and explore new approaches. The singles that have been released so far are emotional, jazzy, soul-filled, and just gorgeous. (The Crocodile, 8 pm, 21+) SHANNON LUBETICH

More

BEAK>, Litronix Neumos, 8 pm, 21+

Dolly: Seattle Men’s Chorus Salutes Dolly Parton April 5–6, Fifth Avenue Theatre, times vary, all ages Darkside, Pachyman April 6, Showbox, 8pm, all ages Youth Lagoon, Valley James April 6, Crocodile, 8 pm, all ages

Etran de L’Aïr, Maya Ongaku April 8, Neumos, 7 pm, 21+ (See preview, pg. 33)

Dean Johnson April 10, Tractor Tavern, 7:30 pm, 21+

Swamp Wife, OK Bucko, Fine April 11, Black Lodge, 7 pm, all ages

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Babehoven April 12, Crocodile, 9 pm, 21+

Dining Dead, Cat Valley, Sarah Not Sarah April 11, Sunset, 9 pm, 21+

Polyrhythmics, Megacat April 17, Crocodile, 8 pm, 21+

Pussy Riot: Riot Days April 17, Neumos, 7 pm, all ages

Fontaines D.C. April 17, Showbox SoDo, 8 pm, all ages

Iron Lung Records’ What We Like Fest April 18–20, Vera Project, Black Lodge, and Beacon Cinema, times vary, all ages

Cloud Nothings: ‘Here and Nowhere Else’ 10-Year Anniversary, Slow Fiction, Generación Suicida April 22, Crocodile, 8 pm, 21+

Juanita and Juan, Graveyard Of The Pacific April 22, Clock-Out Lounge, 8:30 pm, 21+

Laura Jane Grace & the Mississippi Medicals, Alex Lahey, Rodeo Boys April 24, Neumos, 7 pm, 21+

Deafheaven, Gatecreeper, Trauma Ray April 24, Showbox, 8:30 pm, all ages

The Young Fresh Fellows April 24–25, Sunset Tavern, 8 pm, 21+

Mogwai, Papa M April 25, Showbox, 8pm, all ages

Flesh Produce, Miscomings, Public Pleasure, Sleevies April 26, Baba Yaga, 8 pm, 21+

Clipping., Counterfeit Madison, Dead Channel Sky April 30, Neumos, 7 pm, all ages

Dead Bars, Rebuilder, Eep-Oop!, Diego Medrano April 26, Sunset Tavern, 8:30 pm, 21+

Sorry Mom May 2, Black Lodge, 7 pm, all ages

NNAMDÏ, Marcus Drake May 3, Black Lodge, 7 pm, all ages

Scott Yoder, Reverse Death, Sasha Bell May 3, Baba Yaga, 8 pm, 21+

Deerhoof, Ghost Ease, Kusikia May 4, Neumos, 7 pm, 21+

Early Warnings

Northwest Terror Fest May 8–10, Neumos, times vary, all ages

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds May 12, Paramount Theatre, 8 pm, all ages

Bartees Strange, Tré Burt May 13, Crocodile, 8 pm, all ages

Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory, Love Spells May 15–16, Crocodile, 8 pm, all ages

Suzzallo May 17, Madame Lou’s, 6:30 pm, 21+

Rilo Kiley May 24, Chateau Ste. Michelle, 7 pm, all ages

TOKiMONSTA June 6–7 Neumos, 7 pm, all ages

Pixies June 23–24 Paramount Theatre, 7:30 pm, all ages

Queer/Pride Festival 2025: Tinashe, Lil’ Kim, Rebecca Black, Countess Luanne, Heidi Montag, and more June 27–29, Capitol Hill, times vary, 21+

Halsey June 28, White River Amphitheatre, 7 pm, all ages

Wu-Tang Forever June 28, Climate Pledge Arena, 8 pm, all ages

Capitol Hill Block Party July 18–20, Capitol Hill, all ages

Of Montreal: ‘The Sunlandic Twins’ 20th Anniversary Tour, Bijoux Cone July 22, 7 pm, Neumos, 21+

Cap’n Jazz July 25, Neumos, 8 pm, 21+

Timber! Outdoor Music Festival July 24–26, Tolt-MacDonald Park (Carnation, WA)

Death Cab for Cutie: ‘Plans’ 20th Aniversary June 31 and Aug 2, Climate Pledge Arena, 8 pm, all ages

Pickathon July 31–Aug 3, Happy Valley, OR

Circuit des Yeux, LEYA

MAY 1

Chicago-based singer-songwriter Haley Fohr (aka Circuit des Yeux) is known for her four-octave vocal range and distinctive stylings on the 12-string guitar, which she molds into avantgarde pop music. She will play tracks from her most recent album, Halo on the Inside, which leans into harsh electronics and dark mythological lyrics. For fans of: Björk, ANOHNI, Depeche Mode. (Sunset Tavern, 8 pm, 21+) AUDREY VANN

Anne-Karin Furunes Through June 8, National Nordic Museuym

Dinosaur Jr., Snail Mail, Easy Action Aug 8, Chateau Ste. Michelle, 6:30 pm, all ages

Alabama Shakes Aug 16, Climate Pledge Arena, 7 pm, all ages

The Lumineers Aug 16, T-Mobile Park, 8 pm, all ages

Bumbershoot 2025: Arts and Music Festival Aug 30–31, Seattle Center, all ages

Japanese Breakfast, Ginger Root Sept 2–3, Woodland Park Zoo

Osees Sep 5–6, Nuemos, Sep 5 is all ages, Sep 6 is 21+

VISUAL ART

Anne-Karin Furunes: Illuminating Nordic Archives

EVERY WED–SUN, THROUGH JUNE 8

In Illuminating Nordic Archives, Norwegian artist Anne-Karin Furunes, known for her innovative technique of perforating canvas or metal, presents her first solo exhibition in the United States since 2010. The artist’s new paintings are inspired by botanist Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen’s icy autochrome photographs of Svalbard, a frigid Norwegian archipelago “situated between the North Pole and Norway.” With an eye toward the climate crisis, glacial recession, and ice calving, Furunes’ atmospheric compositions also echo the halftone printing process. (National Nordic Museum, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

Alex Katz: Theater and Dance

THROUGH JUNE 8

New Yorker Alex Katz is the 97-year-old painter who you might not have heard of, but whose works you’ll definitely recognize. His simplistic figurative forms and color palette bravery aren’t just associated with the Pop Art movement—they helped invent it. Alex Katz: Theater and Dance at the Frye highlights Katz’s collaborations with choreographers and avant-garde theater groups, shedding light on his overlooked impact on postmodern dance. The exhibition includes “rare archival materials, major sets, paintings, and never-before-seen sketches.” (Frye Art Museum, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

More

Thinking of Angels: Cappy Thompson Through April 19, studio e and then…: Ruth Marie Tomlinson Through April 26, the Vestibule, free

Anne-Karin Furunes: Illuminating Nordic Archives Through June 8, National Nordic Museum

Dawn Cerny: Portmeirion Through June 22, Frye Art Museum

ERRICK EASTERDAY

DANA TRIPPE

Josh Faught: Sanctuary Through Aug 3, Henry Art Gallery

Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Wi Weiwei Through Sep 7, Seattle Art Museum

Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form Through January 4, MoPOP

Ten Thousand Things Through Spring 2027, Wing Luke Museum

In Material: Jaq Chartier, Emily Gherard, and Katie Stone April 3–26, J. Rinehart Gallery, free

Jacob Lawrence: Prints April 3–May 17, Greg Kucera Gallery, free

Holly Ballard Martz: Past Perfect Future Tense April 3–May 17, Greg Kucera Gallery, free

Suchitra Mattai: she walked in reverse and found their songs April 9–July 20, Seattle Asian Art Museum

Early Warnings

Tariqa Waters: Venus Is Missing May 7–Jan 5, Seattle Art Museum, Wed–Sun, sliding scale

Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze) May 17, 2025–May 17, 2027, Olympic Sculpture Park, free

Anthony White May 22–June 28, Greg Kucera Gallery, free

FriendsWithYou: Little Cloud Sky Opens June 27, Seattle Art Museum

Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular June 28–Sep 28, Frye Art Museum, free

LITERATURE

Hanif Abdurraqib

APRIL 9

Last April, Hanif Abdurraqib spoke at Town Hall Seattle. He took to the stage wearing a Sue Bird jersey—on the same day it was announced that Bird joined the Seattle Storm ownership group—and passed out flowers. He read from his then-new release, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, which went on to land on the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction. But the true magic came during the generous Q&A session after his reading. Abdurraqib answered question after question about his process (he prefers to be curious over authoritative), his favorite Janet Jackson album (The Velvet Rope), and his 248 pairs of sneakers. He shared insight for writers just getting started, and talked about the importance of collaborating with others, including the young voices he mentors. And then he stuck around to sign hundreds of books, talking to each fan like a friend, far longer than the average author would. When Abdurraqib is in Seattle, all of Seattle should go. (Town Hall, 7:30 pm, all ages) MEGAN SELING

Seattle Independent Bookstore Day

APRIL 26–MAY 5

Seattle’s Independent Bookstore Day is more like Seattle’s Independent Bookstore 10 Days, because once again local lit retailers have banded together to present the Passport Challenge. It’s an invitation for bibliophiles to visit as many participating bookshops as they can between April 26 and May 5 and gather stamps from each location. If you fill your passport with all 29 participating shops, you earn a one-time 25-percent discount to use at every store, valid for a full year. Participants include Charlie’s Queer Books, Elliott Bay Book Company, Fantagraphics, Left Bank, Ada’s Technical Books, Secret Garden Bookshop, Book Larder, Paper Boat Booksellers, Queen Anne Book Company, and literally 20 others. Find the full details— and a helpful map!—on the Seattle Indie Bookstore Day app. (Various locations) MEGAN SELING

Cherdonna’s Favorite Things

APRIL 16–20

Malcolm Harris Presents ‘What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis’ April 27, Third Place Books Ravenna, 7 pm, free

Susan Lieu with Quynh Pham April 29, Town Hall, 7:30 pm

Early Warnings

Viet Thanh Nguyen and Shawn Wong May 7, Seattle Public Library–Central Branch, 7 pm

C Pam Zhang May 8, Town Hall, 7:30 pm

Rebecca Solnit May 11, Town Hall, 7:30 pm

Moira Macdonald with Bethany Jean Clement May 28, Seattle Public Library–Central Branch, 6:30 pm

Kevin Kwan May 29, Town Hall, 7:30 pm

Ira Glass June 7, Pantages Theater (Tacoma), 7:30 pm

PERFORMANCE

Cherdonna’s Favorite Things

APRIL 16–20

Self-described “movement artist who works in persona,” Stranger Genius Award winner and beloved Seattle drag-theater icon Cherdonna Shinatra is not one to be slept on. The dancer-slash-comedian-slash-chanteuse took the stage with the Bearded Ladies for last year’s Threesome and 2022’s Goodnight Cowboy delved into the myth of Western conquest, heroics, masculinity, and domination. This time around, Cherdonna will bless us with “run-on sentences, story derailments, and surprise audience gifts,” so expect to be bombarded with love, generosity, and something a touch more bizarre. (Erickson Theatre, times vary, 21+) LINDSAY COSTELLO

Ziwe’s America

APRIL 27

More

Tracy Rosenthal with Dean Spade April 11, Elliott Bay Book Company, 7 pm, free

Self-described “movement artist who works in persona,” Stranger Genius Award winner and beloved Seattle dragtheater icon Cherdonna Shinatra is not one to be slept on. The dancer-slash-comedian-slash-chanteuse took the stage with the Bearded Ladies for last year’s Threesome, and 2022’s Goodnight Cowboy delved into the myth of Western conquest, heroics, masculinity, and domination. This time around, Cherdonna will bless us with “run-on sentences, story derailments, and surprise audience gifts,” so expect to be bombarded with love, generosity, and something a touch more bizarre. (Erickson Theatre, times vary, 21+) LINDSAY COSTELLO

Alexandra Tanner presents ‘Worry: A Novel’ April 17, Third Place Books, 7 pm, free

Amanda Knox with Chris Ballew April 21, Elliott Bay Book Company, 7 pm, free

Melinda French Gates with Reese Witherspoon April 24, Paramount Theatre, 7:30 pm, all ages

Although Showtime tragically canceled her pinkhued, confrontation-as-comedy show in 2023 after a mere two seasons, Ziwe Fumudoh’s button-pressing 2022 interview with Chet Hanks is still the stuff of legend. The snazzy satirist and queen of discomfort has a gift for finding “iconic guests” (Fran Lebowitz, Gloria Steinem, Stacey Abrams) and bringing out cringe-inducing behavior in privileged people (Andrew Yang, Hannibal Buress, Adam Pally, Caroline Calloway). She tends to do it all in Cher Horowitz-chic outfits. What’s not to love (or be mildly nervous about)? She’ll drop by Seattle to remind us that Earth is in its flop era. (Neptune Theatre, 7:30 pm, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

Champions of Comedy April 5, Washington Hall, 7:30 pm, 21+ (See preview, pg. 38)

Scott Shoemaker’s :PROBED! April 10–13, Erickson Theatre, times vary, 21+ (See preview, pg. 35)

An Evening with Dan Carlin, Host of ‘Hardcore History’ April 11, Moore Theatre, 8 pm, all ages

Whitney Cummings April 12, Moore Theatre, 7 pm, all ages

Ahamefule J. Oluo: The Things Around Us April 24–May 4, Intiman Theatre, times vary, all ages

Miguel Gutierrez: Super Nothing May 1–3, On the Boards, 8 pm, all ages

Parade April 16–May 4, 5th Avenue Theatre, times vary, all ages

LOU DAPRILE

MYLES LOFTIN/SHOWTIME

Ziwe Fumudoh

CHAMPIONS

Early Warnings

House of Joy May 16–June 8, Seattle Public Theater, times vary, all ages

Juno Birch May 18, Neptune Theatre, 8 pm, all ages

Melissa Villaseñor May 29, the Crocodile, 7 pm, 21+

NW New Works Festival 2025 June 12–14, On the Boards, times vary, all ages

Ramy Youssef: Love Beam 7000 June 14, Moore Theatre, 7 pm, all ages

Alex Edelman: What Are You Going to Do? June 19, Neptune Theatre, 7 pm, all ages

Nikki Glaser Sep 12–13, McCaw Hall, 7 pm, all ages

Nate Bargatze Nov 6, Climate Pledge Arena, all ages

FILM

Bob Trevino Likes It

THROUGH APRIL 3

Bob Trevino Likes It is a heartwarming film about choosing your friends, your family, and ultimately, yourself. The vulnerability of Barbie Ferreira (Euphoria, Unpregnant) and John Leguizamo (John Wick, The Menu) in their roles as a young woman who befriends a man who fills the void left by her estranged father is both heartbreaking and uplifting. At last year’s Seattle International Film Festival, director Tracie Laymon said during a Q&A that she wants her films to have heart and challenge assumptions, and she definitely

succeeds here. Don’t forget the tissues! (SIFF Cinema Uptown, times vary) SHANNON LUBETICH

The Absurd Mystery of the Strange Forces of Existence: “Lynchian” Cinema

THROUGH MAY 5

Sure, you’ve probably heard the term “Lynchian” roughly a thousand times, but how did David Lynch’s singular, idiosyncratic language translate for Otto Preminger or Robert Altman, for example? The Beacon’s spring screenings of Lynch-inspired cinema attempts to answer that question. Explorations of liminality, melodrama, absurdism, and the surreal take center stage, with a screening of one of my all-time favorites (3 Women) alongside Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour, and Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating. Basically, point your finger at the lineup and you’ll find something incredible. (The Beacon) LINDSAY COSTELLO

More

30th Seattle Jewish Film Festival Through April 6, SIFF Cinema Uptown

‘The Magic Lantern’ of Ingmar Bergman Through April 30, SIFF Cinema Uptown

To Live Is To Dream: A Northwest Tribute To David Lynch Through Aug 10, multiple locations

Social Justice Film Festival April 9–13, NW Film Forum and more

National Film Festival for Talented Youth

DAILY, APRIL 3–6; FULL VIRTUAL FESTIVAL APRIL 3–13

The kids are all right: This forward-thinking film fest spotlights fresh work by emerging filmmakers, with a focus on films by young women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and others from traditionally marginalized communities. NFFTY bills itself as the “world’s largest, most influential film festival for emerging filmmakers 24 years old and younger,” and in-person and virtual viewing options make the screenings a no-brainer. Similar to past lineups, the youth will continue to hone in on society’s most critical issues—look out for flicks that grapple with racial equality, gender, Indigeneity, and more. (SIFF Uptown, Cornish Playhouse, and the Vera Project) LINDSAY COSTELLO

Author Talk: Lucinda Scala Quinn

May 6, Book Larder

Talking Pictures: Eric Barone presents ‘The Straight Story’ April 12, SIFF Cinema Uptown, 1:30 pm

Mourning Sickness with Miss Monday Mourning: ‘Mulholland Drive’ April 13, NW Film Forum, 8 pm Collide-O-Scope April 14, Here-After, 8 pm

‘Pride & Prejudice’ (20th Anniversary) April 18–24, various SIFF theaters

Seattle Black Film Festival April 24–27, Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute

Twisted Flicks: ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf April 26, UHeights Auditorium, 7:30 pm

Early Warnings

‘Lord of the Rings’ & ‘The Hobbit’ in Concert May 13, Neptune Theatre, 4 pm and 8 pm

Seattle International Film Festival May 15–25, multiple locations

‘Barbie’ the Movie: In Concert with the Seattle Symphony June 27–28, Benaroya Hall, times vary

FOOD

Book Signing: ‘Umma’ with Sarah Ahn of Ahnest Kitchen

APRIL 14

Mother-daughter duo Nam Soon Ahn and Sarah Ahn have captured the hearts of millions of viewers on Sarah’s TikTok account @ahnestkitchen, which offers a sweet, poignant glimpse at their relationship and mutual love of Korean cooking. Their debut cookbook Umma (“mom” in Korean) includes conversations between the two that range from funny to relatable to tear-jerking, plus gems of culinary wisdom gleaned from Nam Soon’s decades in the kitchen and recipes fine-tuned by America’s Test Kitchen. At this signing, you’ll get to meet Sarah and Nam Soon and get your cookbook personalized. (Book Larder, 6 pm) JULIANNE BELL

Author Talk: Nicole Rucker, ‘Fat & Flour’

APRIL 17

You may have spied Los Angeles-based “pastry queen,” James Beard semifinalist, and Fat + Flour chef/owner Nicole Rucker’s glorious baked goods in your Instagram feed or flipped through her debut cookbook Dappled (a paean to fruity desserts). Now, she’s unveiling her follow-up Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake, which celebrates the alchemical magic that happens when the two title ingredients collide. I, for one, can’t wait to recreate treats like lemon meringue chess pie, boozy banana snickerdoodles, and Abuelita milk chocolate brownies in my own home. Rucker also imparts secrets like her signature “Cold Butter Method,” a “low-effort technique for melding fat and flour that produces perfect cookies and the tenderest pie dough every time.” (Book Larder, 6:30 pm) JULIANNE BELL

Author Talk: Lucinda Scala Quinn, ‘Mother Sauce’

MAY 6

Seattle Restaurant Week

DAILY, THROUGH APRIL 12

This biannual event will help you break out of your takeout rut and find your new favorite restaurant. Here’s how it works: A slew of participating restaurants, bars, cafes, food trucks, caterers, and pop-ups across the greater Seattle area serve up to two special menus for $20, $35, $50, and $65 for lunch and/ or dinner, and many offer a “give a meal” option so diners can donate to their in-house community meal programs. This spring, there’s also an Eat Local First digital passport option—rack up points by checking in with a QR code at designated locations dedicated to serving locally sourced food, then redeem them for restaurant gift cards and earn a chance to win special prizes. (Various locations) JULIANNE BELL

In her newest book Mother Sauce: Italian American Family Recipes and the Story of the Women Who Created Them, home cook and author Lucinda Scala Quinn rightfully gives Italian American matriarchs their long-overdue flowers and credits them with founding the comforting cuisine we all know and love today. She shares over 100 classic recipes, including baked ziti, sausage and pepper hoagies, chicken marsala, and cannoli, and credits the women who created them, so you can cook like a nonna in your own kitchen. Quinn will discuss her book with local cookbook author HsiaoChing Chou. (Book Larder, 6:30 pm) JULIANNE BELL

More

Seattle Restaurant Week Through April 12, various locations

Author Talk & Demo: Lacey Ostermann April 7, Book Larder, 6:30 pm

JASON GRUBE

Feasts of Connections: Cooking, Cultivating + Community in the PNW April 8, National Nordic Museum, 5:30 pm

Spring Mead Festival April 13, Skål Beer Hall, 12 pm, 21+ Columbia City Night Market April 19, Columbia City, 6–10 pm, free

Author Signing: Mamrie Hart, ‘All I Think About Is Food’ April 24, Book Larder, 6 pm

Author Talk & Demo: Makenna Held, ‘Mostly French’ May 1, Book Larder, 6:30 pm

Early Warnings

Polish Food & Bazaar April 12, Polish Cultural Center

My Dinner with SAM: Guest Chef Rachel Yang April 24, Seattle Asian Art Museum

Panda Fest June 6–8, Fisher Pavilion

Gobble Up South Lake Union June 28, Lake Union Park

Bite of Seattle July 25–27, Seattle Center

THIS &THAT

Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

DAILY, THROUGH APRIL 30

As we speak, tulips are blooming in Skagit Valley and calling on you to come dance in their fields, take dating profile pics, and simply spend a moment stopping to smell the flowers. Towns in the area make the most of the floral festivities by hosting dozens of events ranging from the annual parade on Saturday, April 5 in La Conner to a nautical treasure hunt in Anacortes and street fair April 18–20 in Mount Vernon. Check out the festival’s comprehensive calendar for all the activities, art shows, performances, and tours, as well as suggestions for local restaurants. If you’re looking for a nighttime activity, Tulip Valley Farms hosts a “Black Light Garden” on Fridays and Saturdays with glowing lights and live music. (Various locations across Skagit Valley, all ages) SHANNON LUBETICH

‘The Splendid Table’ Live

APRIL 17

The weekly public radio program The Splendid Table has been an indispensable source of culinary guidance and food lore since its inception in 1997. I first fell in love with it when learning to cook in my early twenties, and then-host Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s comforting voice was like a trusted friend holding my hand in the kitchen. Now, the self-described “radio show for people who love to eat” is celebrating 30 years with this special live taping. Current host and award-winning food writer Francis Lam will discuss all things edible with several local guests: Pancita chef/ owner Janet Becerra, Musang chef/owner Melissa Miranda, Native Soul cuisine chef/owner Jeremy Thunderbird, Saint Bread owner Yasuaki Saito, Seattle Times food and drink writer and Seattle Eats podcast host Tan Vinh, and Tahoma Peaks Solutions founder and Muckleshoot Indian Tribe member Valerie Segrest. (KUOW Public Radio, 7:30 pm) JULIANNE BELL

Seattle Cherry Blossom & Japanese Cultural Festival

APRIL 11–13

I’ve been so stuck in the winter slog that when I come around a corner and see a tree erupting with tiny pink blossoms, I audibly gasp. The Japanese word for viewing cherry blossoms is hanami, an act described as “a reminder to celebrate life,” and I feel it every time. Learn more about these inspiring blooms and their connection to Japanese and Japanese American culture at this floral festival where you can enjoy tea

oxide-covered noses. Competing skiers and riders will be scored on three categories: style, speed, and how much liquid they can keep in the stein they’re required to carry throughout the race. Too intense for you? Enthusiastic fans of all ages are invited to cheer from the sidelines and celebrate spring with a post-race award ceremony and live music. (Crystal Mountain Resort) SHANNON LUBETICH

Sakura-Con 2025

APRIL 18–20

Sakura is the Japanese word for cherry blossom, but for a weekend in Seattle every year, it represents one the largest anime conventions in the country. Don’t miss cosplay chess, voice actor appearances, a live performance from Japanese alt-rock band Hitsujibungaku, and panels on topics ranging from furries to aging in cosplay. Entrance to the three-day con requires a membership through the nonprofit Asia Northwest Cultural Education Association, and grants you access to everything from the manga library to the mahjong room and masquerade ball. I’m in awe of the folks posting their three-day cosplay lineups on socials; I can barely come up with one Halloween costume. (Seattle Convention Center, all ages) SHANNON LUBETICH

More

Seattle Reign FC 2025 Home Games Through October 17, Lumen Field

Seattle Kraken 2024–2025 Home Games Through April 15, Climate Pledge Arena

Festival of Color April 5, Marymoor Park, 12 pm

WWE Friday Night SmackDown April 11, Climate Pledge Arena, 4:30 pm

Whale Festival April 12–13, Whidbey Island, various times

Washington State Spring Fair April 10–13 and 17–20, Washington State Fair Events Center

Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention April 17–20, DoubleTree Hotel Seattle Airport

Earth Day at the Arboretum April 19, volunteer to remove invasive weeds; pre-registration required, 9 am, 15+,

National Park Day April 19, all national parks, entry is free at Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks Earth Month Cleanup at Magnuson Park April 26, 10 am

Venice Is Sinking Masquerade Ball April 26, Seattle Design Center, 7pm

Punk Rock Flea Market April 25–27, Quality Flea Center 22nd Annual White Center Khmer New Year Street Festival April 26, White Center

Touch-A-Truck 2025 April 27, 9 am–2 pm, University of Washington

Early Warnings

Rock Stars on Ice May 15, Climate Pledge Arena

Seattle Storm’s Opening Night May 23, Climate Pledge Arena

Urban Craft Uprising Summer Show July 26–27

ceremonies, folktales, and sumo and taiko performances. (Seattle Center, all ages) SHANNON LUBETICH

Return of the Bikini Downhill

APRIL 12

I’ve skied my entire life, but never in a bikini. Maybe 2025 is the time (crazier things have already happened this year). Elysian Brewing and Crystal Mountain are bringing back the Bikini Downhill after a two-year hiatus for its 12th installment of ski racing in swimwear. Crystal always goes all out for its Pride celebration, so I’m imagining a day filled with colorful beach balls, oversized sunglasses, and campy zinc

JEFF GOULDEN/GETTY IMAGES