We were moderately aware and awake during the heyday of the riot grrrl movement. We dated, then married, and now have a family with a woman who would have been labeled a "grrrl" due to her politics and her taste in music and dress. Albeit, this was all in Boston, not Seattle. But how could Loh, who is paid to be a keen observer of our culture, get grrrls so wrong? Her take on it is not unlike our younger brother's in 1993: "Bunch-uh-dykes." more ›

The October issue of the Atlantic Monthly is on newsstands now and on its cover are the words "America's Smartest Cities." Please, nothing draws a Seattleite to a magazine faster than a tagline that indicates his intellectual ego is about to receive some much needed stroking. On the other hand, we've seen articles with this kind of headline on the internet and they're generally disappointing. Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of college graduates and bookstores - Give us our World's Smartest ranking and go away. more ›

Bernard-Henri Levy occupies a position in France roughly comparable to...well, we don't have anyone like him. Rock star Bono comes close. Jon Stewart, maybe, except that BHL writes his own material. Sporting an unruly haircut, clad in the requisite uniform (black shirt, black blazer), he's a familiar figure on French TV, the embodiment of the Public Intellectual. Atlantic Monthly sent him on a year-long assignment to retrace the intellectual journey taken by de Tocqueville; the resulting tome, American Vertigo, has just been published, and BHL came to Seattle as part of the book tour. more ›

What is the newcomer visitor's impression of our fair city? To get an idealistic, naive, oddly balanced, yet sentimentally contemplative exposition on what and how Seattle impresses the self aware and unrushed foreign visitor, you've got to read the opening section of this piece** in the Atlantic Monthly (June 2005). more ›