Kahneman's book and his framework for thinking are quite interesting, even to the laity who, naturally, are convinced that they are always logical. He will be at Town Hall tonight presenting some of his research and sharing his depths of wisdom with interested Seattleites. more ›

SILENT SCREEN: Trader Joe's Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount is back and focusing on the speechless girls of black-and-white. Words fail you when discussing Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl anyway--Judith and Bob are young atheists who naturally end up in a reform school run by sadists. This is an ur-Girls Gone Wild visual text and will count for credit if you are a student of this kind of counter-history. The important thing is, Judith and Bob learn that those fires of hell are real and they burn, thus making Christianity something more than an academic choice. more ›

IF RAP GETS JEALOUS: Somalian-American hiphop artist K'naan brings his passionate, political flavor of hiphop to the city tonight, and you should be there to experience it if that sounds up your alley. He's phenomenal, you should know, if that helps to sway you towards heading to Neumos tonight. Opening for him is Ethiopian-American local emcee Gabriel Teodros, who never ever fails to convincingly call us towards a better life with his sincere and listenable rhyme, and the gorgeous and talented YZE. Get there. more ›

You would think, from reading bulletins about the stock market's drop today--about how the Dow Jones decline rate mimics the Great Depression--that Western civilization was on the brink of extinction. To someone who hasn't bought stock or mutual funds (securities of any kind, for that matter) for at least a decade, this doesn't make sense. The closely followed Dow is an average of the prices of thirty stodgy, old-line industrial companies (out of tens of thousands of publicly traded enterprises). An artificial indicator like that is bound to fluctuate, and consider this: No one is forcing anyone at gunpoint to buy or sell anything; for every seller, there's a willing buyer. The Market goes up, the Market goes down. Don't let it get in your head. more ›

Over the weekend we walked into the cash-only Than Bros. pho restaurant on Broadway, ordered a small bowl, and were charged $5.42, a price increase as yet unreflected on their online menu. We don't remember the specific passage in Revelations where the high price of pho is called out, but we're sure it's there. A friend of ours was just reminiscing about the days of the $3.87 small bowl with tears in his eyes. At these prices, we're likely to start expecting broth instead of that watery brownish stuff we use as a base for the plum sauce. Tomorrow night we're going to hear Paul Krugman speak at Town Hall on "The Return of Depression Economics"--we'll ask what pho used to cost in '33 and report back. more ›

With only a couple weeks till election day, it's nice to see that the Reichert–Burner race has become downright pissy. The latest skirmish is over Darcy Burner's academic credentials. This morning, reporter Emily Heffter took the Republican bait and wrote a piece questioning the veracity of Burner's claim—made during the debate on Oct. 10—that she has a degree in economics from Harvard. more ›

While we were in Iceland last week, we had the thrill of paying $7.50/gal for diesel, which means a half tank for our Land Cruiser rental pegged the needle at $75. That helps us keep this news from AAA in perspective: the average price of a gallon of gas in Washington is $3.13. It's dropped 63 cents the past month, thanks in part to people not buying the stuff because it costs too much. But Sightline's Clark Williams-Derry has just put up a post talking about how this volatility in price isn't helping us set a firm course away from oil addiction. more ›