Disney cruises into town, Glenn Beck gets out-FOXed, a local Ponzi scheme goes to court, ski news, and more sad updates from Spanaway. Yikes, Wednesday. more ›

Surely there are few hardships worse than being unfairly separated from your own flesh and blood. It sounds like plenty of families in Washington State have suffered that fate; a report [pdf] from the Office of the Family and Children's Ombudsman indicates that the local government authorities have too often given custody of children to the foster care system rather than to the kids' relatives without good reason. The office is in charge of investigating complaints about government agencies' actions involving children at risk for abuse or people involved with child protection and child welfare services. more ›

No one on Seattlest has yet touched this story about a 14-year-old girl from Carnation, Wash., whose parents starved her and severely restricted her water intake for over three years. That's because it's one of those horrifying, haunting stories that allows no room for snark; even platitudes like "horrifying" and "haunting" seem emptier than usual, because they don't even begin to touch what it must have been like for this girl to be so abused. It must have been a living nightmare. more ›

Joseph Campbell once pointed out that your real midlife crisis happens between the ages of 30 and 35, living past 70 being a relatively recent event. At 35 you have the accoutrements of home and family, community standing, and realize with a sudden sickening shock there's no way out of it: you've become your parents. (Okay, in theory. In reality, you're probably doing less well than your parents, comparatively.) more ›

After years of insisting that “good citizens” were the key to winning ballclubs, the Mariners have hired one of baseball’s notorious bad guys, Carl Everett. more ›

Behind perhaps only Andrew Sullivan (or Michael Musto if you live life through VH1) Dan Savage is our country's most prominent gay. From time to time in Seattle we may think of him merely as "that dude from The Stranger" but the guy is syndicated in a hell of lot of papers around the country, writes a decent book, and generally makes a lot of sense when he appears on television to discuss serious subjects. He's a National Voice, and we have precious few of those. Because of that, it is your civic duty as a bookish Seattleite to not only purchase Dan Savage's new book "The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family," but to attend his reading tomorrow night at Bailey/Coy Books. more ›