The Crosscut Blog

Editor's note: Monte Enbysk, an experienced (but not elite) runner, was thrown off his Seattle Marathon training schedule by an injury last month. He's chronicling his comeback effort and — if he makes it — his race day for Crosscut. His previous installments are available here.

As I finish my second-to-last week of training for the Seattle Marathon, I’m thinking back on how and why I started running in the first place. It was more evolutionary than revolutionary, and not the stuff that legends are made of.

If I finish this marathon alive, as planned, it will be my ...

The tale of Seattle’s founding in the 1850s has not had much in the way of new scholarship lately. Like a Colorforms playset, the mostly two-dimensional characters have acted out a Thanksgiving pageant of sorts for much of living memory — pioneers, Indians, trappers, missionaries (along with Henry Yesler and his mill) tussled for awhile, and then all magically colluded to create the city we know and love today. The oft-told story even includes the military coming to the rescue, in the form of the USS Decatur firing on the Indians during the first Battle of Seattle back in January ...

The holidays are here and the city’s music community is getting into the spirit of the season with the benefit compilation album GIVE. The download-only record, which costs $7, is a showcase of some of the best music the Emerald City has to offer. The list of contributors includes Fleet Foxes, Champagne Champagne, The Saturday Knights, Fresh Espresso, Moondoggies, Common Market, and many, many others. But the music isn’t the best part about GIVE. The best part about the record is that 100 percent of sales will go to area food banks and Arts Corps, a local nonprofit ...

Another familiar voice has been stricken from the local airwaves, as KVI AM 570 let go morning talk show host Kirby Wilbur last week. Fisher Communications, owners of KVI (and KOMO AM-FM-TV, KPLZ, and other local stations), posted a statement on the KVI website acknowledging Wilbur’s 16 years with the station and announcing that the nationally syndicated Laura Ingraham Show would now be heard in the 6-9 a.m. weekday slot. The station also set up a voicemail box for listeners to leave their comments about the move, complete with ominously laudatory outgoing announcement.

It looked at first as ...

The cost of democracy in America is mind-boggling. As of Nov. 1, without even considering federal, state, and county elections, Seattle alone has campaigns that will spend over $5.3 million. Think about what that kind of money would do for some of our more egregious social, environmental, or infrastructure problems. Meanwhile, the argument for public funding for campaigns becomes more convincing every day.

The Supreme Court has decided that “money is speech.” That translates into, “we get what we pay for.” The result favors the rich, who make political contributions in hopes of getting even richer. In a fascinating ...

The Seattle Seahawks finally got a little better, just in time to play their way out of post-season contention. A club that last week couldn’t run well enough to catch a parked bus lost its nominal featured back early during the Sunday defeat against division-leading Arizona then put up better rushing numbers with subs than it had all season.

Here again, it wasn’t enough. The 31-20 finish means Seattle is stuck at 3-6. The Cardinals are 6-3 but even if the Seahawks were to find a miraculous means to tie Arizona with, say, a 9-7 record, their rival ...

It's best to avoid getting drawn into stories about political intrigue and rivalries and to focus on bottom-line policy results in judging presidencies and presidential candidacies. But two events over the past week in the Obama White House were symptoms of internal strain. They both involved the exits of highly professional and respected senior staff members.

Gregory Craig, Obama's White House counsel, was fired after enduring months of media rumors regarding his impending discharge. The rumors emanated from White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. I have known Craig since he left Yale Law School in the early ...

Life on an island can get lonely.

I thought I was prepared for that, but shortly after we moved in there came a day when my husband went to work and my daughter left for school and I felt like I’d slipped into an Ingmar Bergman film: Everything was pale sun and silent sky and trees waving in the wind.

I work at home, which was never a problem when we lived in the city. But now, in order not to go insane, I decided it was necessary to get myself into Seattle at least three or four days ...

Editor's note: Monte Enbysk, an experienced (but not elite) runner, was thrown off his Seattle Marathon training schedule by an injury last month. He's chronicling his comeback effort and — if he makes it — his race day for Crosscut. His previous installments appeared here and here.

I’m hungry all the time, I have trouble keeping my eyes open in the afternoon, and I am overwhelmed with things to do at work. That must mean it’s Peak Week.

What’s Peak Week? For me, it’s the week starting three weeks before the marathon I am training for ...

We now are at the early stages of the so-called Hot Stove League season when speculation about baseball trades and signings dominates the attention of diehard baseball fans. ("Hot Stove" derives from the early 20th century time when fans gathered in the off-season around hot stoves to exchange baseball lore and gossip).

Most local attention Wednesday was devoted to the Mariners' 2010 signing of Ken Griffey Jr., whose statistics last year were unimpressive but who helped restore morale and professionalism to a previously demoralized team. General manager Jack Zduriencik reportedly will sign or trade players in the weeks ahead so ...

The U.S. Board of Geographic Names approved the name Salish Sea today in a unanimous vote. The name is now officially accepted nationally, as well as in Washington State. It has been approved in British Columbia by the province's names board, and Canadian national approval is expected. The vote was confirmed by the board's executive secretary, Lou Yost.

Not everyone is thrilled with the idea. Pierce County goes its own way. It was the only county on the eastern shores of Pugetopolis to reject R-71, the gay partners rights referendum. Some say it is due to the ...

What a deep-sea downer to learn this morning that the Ivar’s underwater billboards were a hoax! I should have known better, but I have a history of falling for tall tales — Paul Bunyan, UFOs, Colin Powell at the U.N., to name just a few examples.

And I have a habit of getting too excited about anything old being dug up or raised from the bottom of the sea. Worse still, I’ve polluted the next generation of my family as well. When I woke my then 7-year-old daughter last year with news that an old parachute had been ...

It’s rare that I engage in hero worship. But for Sandra Day O’Connor, there is no amount of esteem that is too great.

She was, of course, the first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court. But I’m not so easily swayed. This impressed me; it did not inspire awe. What grabbed me was her graceful resignation from the bench in 2005 to care for her husband, John, who had Alzheimer’s. And — even more profoundly — her grace and extraordinary generosity, two years later, when she went public with the fact that her partner of ...