As the quality and diversity of cancer care soars, it's unsurprising that the cost of the treatments goes with it. But even with incredible medical advancements, making critical decisions regarding cancer care can be nearly impossible--especially when factoring in the cost of the care itself is enough to literally put survivors into bankruptcy, according to a study released today by local researchers, cancer care is driving many patients to bankruptcy. more ›

Today NPR posted a story called "5 Artists You Should Have Known In 2010". Guess who's on there? I bet you're not surprised, but two Seattle groups made it on the list. Granted, Kevin Cole of our very own KEXP is the one to produce this list. Though, no favoritism is needed to choose both Macklemore and Head and the Heart for the top 5. more ›

CLOWNING AROUND: In the recent past, Cirque du Soleil leaned more toward show than cirque, entertaining still, but not in the way that people have loved and raved about for two decades. Yet Kooza, one of the company's three touring shows, is Cirque in traditional form, centering on acrobatic performance and the fine art of clowning. Kooza, the story of “The Innocent, a melancholy loner in search of his place in the world,” spotlights ten acrobatic acts, seven characters, and music that draws on both 70s funk and traditional Indian. Looking to impress a date? Need some light heartedness to balance out the early June gloom? Really into well-dressed clowns? Look no further. more ›

OLD-TIMEY MONEY-SAVING TECHNIQUES: Channel your great-grandmother and learn how to use old-timey techniques to get more for your buck at the Redmond Whole Foods class on breaking down whole chickens. It's really not that hard, and home-made chicken stock tastes lip-smackingly bright and delicious. Knowing how to handle a whole bird will boost your sex appeal by 300 percent, we can attest. But don't take our word for it: go to Redmond tonight and see for yourselves. Call (425) 881-2600, ext 3, to reserve your spot. more ›

Portland-based Blind Pilot were not only chosen as Starbucks' "Pick of the Week" for the week of January 3rd, they're also loved by NPR and KEXP, and now, by us. more ›

Just in from the Twitterverse: American Public Media is pulling the plug on John Moe's public radio show Weekend America. Per Moe himself: "Weekend America is ending as of 1/31/09. It's a hell of a show with brilliant people. For reasons, see: economy. I'll still be employed." The show charmed two voices off our local NPR affiliate: Current host Moe, now living in St. Paul, and founding host Bill Radke, now in Los Angeles. (Can we have a Moe-ful The Works back? No? Bummer.) No news yet on what KUOW will put in its place noon to 2:00 on Saturdays. more ›

Dawdy over at Seattle's mental health blog Furious Seasons has been critical of Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman pretty much since he started his site, labeling him the leader of the "Harvard bipolar kid mafia." But even he didn't know Biederman was strong-arming pharmaceutical companies for dollars in exchange for moving "forward the commercial goals of J&J" (Johnson & Johnson being the makers of Risperdal, which Biederman was touting for use with children and adolescents). This comes on the heels of NPR yanking the Infinite Mind show after host Fred Goodwin was revealed to have accepted pharmaceutical dollars without mentioning his conflict of interest. More, no doubt, to come. more ›

Are you so, so antsy at this point? Are you clicking F5 F5 F5 on CNN.com while simultaneously instant messaging about the ludicrous statements from McCain supporters you're hearing on NPR? Some polling locations have closed (parts of Indiana, Kentucky, New Hampshire), and you might as well just close the analysis websites and skip straight forward to what's most important: Is Obama President Yet? more ›

Seattlest, like many of you, has to be at the office today instead of in the living room in front of the TV, which is where we want to be right now. We're following the election news on KUOW/NPR (94.9 FM) and keeping an eye on CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and King County Votes (which also has a helpful Twitter feed). If you're not watching tv today and you're trying to keep up on the news, what sites are you reading/obsessively refreshing? more ›

We're not sure when KUOW started running Marketplace Morning Report at 8:50 every morning instead of the last 10 minutes of Morning Edition. But we heartily approve, since American Public Media's economic coverage knocks the stuffing out of NPR's in-house efforts. We're used to hearing Scott Jagow or Tess Vigeland host the morning version, but the last couple of days we've heard the velvet voice former Seattleite Bill Radke, who last we checked had dropped off the face of the earth since leaving Weekend America. We're not sure if he's a temporary fill-in or a new permanent host--the Marketplace website doesn't list him among the cast and crew. But we're happy to hear him back on the air, even if it's temporary. more ›

This American Life-r Sarah Vowell has written a new book, The Wordy Shipmates, which is the most readable history of New England Puritan thought you're likely to come across in your lifetime. It's a bit like reading the journal of a grad student who's doing their thesis on Puritan rhetoric--with all the marginal asides and musings left poignantly in. We emailed her a few questions, and she wrote back, double-spacing after periods, which extra space we edited out to save on pixels. If you have better questions, super-genius, she's in town on Monday, October 13, at Town Hall. Hie thee hence, why doncha. more ›

Two years ago NPR did a story on Sicilian singer/songwriter Carmen Consoli trying to break into the U.S. music charts; we don't know if that happened, but last night at the Triple Door there was an appreciative audience clad in stylish wool sweaters and hand-tooled leather footwear, and who evidently needed no subtitles. She's a bit like Italy's Ani DiFranco, known for her feminist indie-rock sensibility--but she's also Italian enough to play a concert in black 4-inch stiletto heels. Meanwhile her songs feature a parade of female characters--the woman addicted to plastic surgery, the woman ditched at the altar, the woman hounded by small town gossips. It's a bit like The Nails' "88 Lines About 44 Women," except with Consoli, it's more like 88 songs about 88 women. Her 2006 album Eva Contro Eva continued that trend. We knew her from 2000's Stato di necessità, which included "Parole Di Burro," (sung last night slowed to crawl, sadly), "In Bianco E Nero," and "Ultimo Bacio." She read Emily Dickinson's "Wild Nights" to us, and told us about the dubious U.S. customs officials looking over a shin-based instrument of hers made of chain and rattles that, combined with the stilettos, gave off air of workmanlike BDSM. At the end of each song, people put down their merlot and applauded like crazy. more ›

"Quite a few people in the world have seen my penis. So that's kinda cool." We've known for a while (thanks to Kirsten Anderson) that the naked baby on the cover of Nevermind is all grown up and basically normal. But last night, NPR's All Things Considered aired an interview with the now-17-year-old Spencer Elden, sharing his story with comfortable liberals nationwide. Spencer still seems like a normal high school kid, and, as seen above, is perfectly willing to deploy the best conversational icebreaker we can imagine. (Seattlest Clint's alternate suggestion: "The penis that gave international rise to the Seattle Sound.") He's officially eclipsed Dolores Erickson (the woman slathered in whipped cream on Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream and Other Delights) as the northwest's most famous album cover model, even if he is from California. more ›

NPR's quiz show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! hasn't taped an episode in Seattle since 2001, but last night at the Paramount, they had a sold-out venue full of Seattleites dressed up in their best fleeces eager to clap and guffaw on cue. Apparently, a radio show that runs about forty-five minutes on the air takes more than twice that live, including a humorously eerie segment at the end of the night where the cast quickly records disembodied do-overs of the lines they flubbed the first time around. more ›

NPR IN DA HOUSE: Seattlest was kind of surprised to hear that tickets are still available for NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me live show at the Paramount tonight. We've never personally been to a live radio show before, but we do love the N to the PR, and we're guessing this'll be well worth your time. In case you don't mack on the NPR, it's the silly quiz show that takes a humorous look at current events. Good stuff. more ›

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Every once in a while at a Town Hall reading, we have to pinch ourselves to make sure we're awake. Is this really true? Did over 150 people just pay $5 to hear a lecture on behavioral economics? Obviously it helps to be interviewed on NPR. Or maybe it was the New Yorker story by Elizabeth Kolbert. more ›

If you heard only the NPR news blip on jazz pianist Oscar Peterson's death, you heard that he was "well known for having won many prizes." Not sure what skeleton holiday crew came up with that dismal description. Prizes were hardly the source of Peterson's fame. more ›

Jonah Lehrer, editor of Seed Magazine and author of the blog The Frontal Cortex has written a terrific book centered around this thesis: Creative people discovered truths about how our mind works well before scientists did. more ›

If you saw the film Once, you know that one day Irishman Glenn Hansard met Czechwoman Marketa Irglova and they made beautiful music together. Actually, there's a whole backstory there. Martha Wainwright opens for them tonight at the Moore. more ›

The first thing to know about Devra Davis is that she's not speaking from the sidelines: she's director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is an environmental health expert, professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. more ›

Whether you're a fan of melodic noise-rock (not always a contradiction in terms) or just never got over a childhood obsession with dinosaurs, Pterodactyl is the band for you--especially if you like post-rock that doesn't take itself too seriously. They'll be playing at the Sunset tonight with two awesomely named bands we know absolutely nothing about: Nudity and Same Sex Dictator. more ›

Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote entirely, but it was something to the effect of characterizing "world music" as "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, a peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he become a "world musician," performing traditional Balkans music in restaurants for disinterested diners under the name Kultur Shock. While he admitted the original incarnation of Kultur Shock could have done well, it's easy to see why he rebelled against the entire world-music cachet by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys." more ›

--By a--if you can believe this-- vote of the Seattle School Board, Maria Goodloe-Johnson is the new superintendent. more ›

FANTASTIC FICTION SALON: Novelist, nonfiction author, and short story writer Terry Bisson has swept every honor in the science fiction field as well as France's Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. He joins Hugo House's Writing Fantastic Fiction workshop series, where he will teach "Who Likes Short Shorts? We Like Short Shorts!" more ›

Seattle Rep’s 2007-2008 season in the Bagley Wright Theatre begins with Shakespeare’s beloved comedy, Twelfth Night, followed by a powerful play about the Cuban revolution, The Cook by Eduardo Machado. A new play, The Breach about Hurricane Katrina comes next, then the classic Molière comedy, The Imaginary Invalid, and finally Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney brings his skills to a classic Greek adventure in The Cure at Troy. more ›

Dorkbot, we've missed you. If our attendance record for the monthly technology and art event has been spotty at best recently --we've only been to one meeting since it lost the CoCA digs-- it's not because of the scheduled themes. They've all been awesome: Multimedia Performance at the Abbey, Innovation in Games back at CoCA, remote aerial photography at CHAC (actually we did get to that one)... New curator whatshisname (can't find it on the website--someone help) has done great things. Please, though, find a permanent home. Last night was at the 911 Media Arts Center and that seems like it could work. Make it work, Dorkbot. more ›

Jesse Thorn, member of sketch comedy group Prank the Dean, produces his public radio show from his own living room in Los Angeles. At first, Seattlest thought that was code for "I am unemployed and play a lot of XBox" but it turns out he actually does have a radio show (this is still ambiguous on the "unemployed" detail), and even more to the point: it is very good. more ›