Imagine the uproar if Barack Obama put artists to work documenting life in America. That's what the government did in 1934, and you can see the impressive results in a newly opened exhibition in Bellingham.
Teachers are seriously underpaid, but the public won't support paying the good teachers more without tools to evaluate them. Teachers ought to be leading the way in designing fair evaluation systems.
Washington's governor is wining, dining, and selling apples in China. But will she be inspired, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, to bring a world's fair back home?
Media often imply Baby Boomers are the source of all problems. They're resented in America, feared in Canada, and are better off fleeing to Mexico. It's time they retired and let a new generation be the demographic pinata.
Our Vancouver correspondent: When you have a lot of hydro energy, complacency can obscure the need for much more dramatic steps toward sustainable energy.
The Puget Sound Partnership is broken, but the Sound really needs better eco-monitoring and new land-use patterns. And that will require the hardest change of all: cultural change.
The history museum, which is moving to South Lake Union to make way for the new 520 bridge, finds itself in a fight with Mayor McGinn over more than $40 million in state mitigation money.
Our Vancouver correspondent: B.C. arts groups, facing deep budget cuts, are in an uproar over a plan to spend $30 million on post-Olympic 'Spirit Festivals.'
The state expects the UW to be both "racehorse and workhorse," and on a starvation diet. The university's only recourse: lowering educational quality and privatizing.
Smart communities, including some in the Salt Lake City area, are using the economic doldrums as a chance to lay groundwork for future initiatives such as light rail.
The region needs a jolt, which comes from daring strategic thinking to take us past the recession and to transcend our political impasses. A suggestion: tap the game-changers in our midst.
The city of Seattle has been losing jobs while neighboring King County gains. And the city is resisting the kind of tighter budget practices that would help it live within its growing (yes, growing) general fund revenues.
YouTube is expected to announce a new plan to allow some content creators to charge a monthly subscription for their videos. Children's channels, entertainment and music are among the genres expected to use the subscription option. But, a vast majority of YouTube's videos will remain free.
Will Marshall writes: "What if progressives made expanding production rather than consumption the organising principle of their economic policy? What if they tackled the imperatives of economic investment, innovation and wealth creation with the same passion they normally reserve for fairness and wealth distribution? Stronger economic growth by itself may not be sufficient to reverse the disturbing rise of economic inequality. But it is the necessary precondition for progressive success in getting people back to work, lifting the middle class, allaying class friction and nativism, and restoring the allure of market democracy."