I've been so busy this month that it feels like it's almost over. Alas. Here are a few things I enjoyed reading this month.

On Quality, by Keyana Sapp

A short essay on the undefinable word "quality" and how we all still know what that means.

A good object is a fossil record of care. Thousands of small selections made by people who could tell the good facts from the bad ones and picked the good, even when not doing so was cheaper or easier. The extra ounce of brass, the second coat of lacquer and the tolerance held a hair tighter than the drawing demanded. Every one of those selections survives for exactly one reason, which is that somebody with power over the object gave a shit.

Before You Decide, Decide How You'll Decide, by DeEtta Jones

Y'all know I love writing and reading about decision-making. This straightforward essay shows us why it's so important to create a sandbox for each decision we make together.

Decision criteria are an agreement — the short list of standards every option gets measured against. Set them deliberately, and in advance, and the decision becomes defensible, repeatable, and shared. Leave them implicit, and something else decides for you: the loudest voice in the room, the newest worry, or simply the most polished case.

My Corvid Friends-to-Be, by Jennifer S. Holland

Most people don't think about corvids as songbirds except to hate on their singing. But corvidae is a family: from the crows in my region, to the grackles of my hometown, to the ravens of the east, and so many more. I think corvids are in the running for most intelligent beings on earth. I'm not about to get on their bad side.

Not just because they can talk, crows and their ilk, including ravens and magpies, are known to be super intelligent. From a long-term study done at the University of Washington in the 2000s, we know they recognize human faces and even remember for years the faces of those who treated them badly early on. The results were hard to dismiss: While banding birds for research, students wore a particular rubber mask that the birds learned to associate with the irritation of being caught. For years after, the banded birds would punish people in the “bad guy” mask, forming small mobs and loudly scolding, and ignore people wearing other kinds of masks. Remarkably, the offspring of those original birds learned to dislike the same masked face and would join their elders in shaming the wearer.

Mexico City's Utopias, by Ashwin Ravikumar

Jamie shared this article with me about the incredible community centers, called UTOPIAs, that dot the borough of Iztapalapa. The Units for Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony cost relatively nothing to run, but they exceed most people's idea of what public works could be. But why shouldn't a planetarium, a zoo—an animatronic dinosaur park??—occupy the commons? I'd suggest it's a better use of land than a golf course.

Imagine that in the poorest neighborhoods of Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago, you could find a public park with glistening swimming pools, world-class sports and recreation facilities, and spectacular landscape architecture rather than vacant lots. If you are a single mother, rather than being forced to lug your clothes blocks away to pay to wash your clothes, you can come to a public, well-maintained, space to do your laundry for free while you eat delicious food grown at the agroecological garden nearby. Meanwhile, your children can learn how to swim, attend workshops on how to grow food in the city, hit up the planetarium to learn how Mayan Cosmology relates to the Big Bang, hang out at the skate park, or take a guitar lesson.

Wild Oysters Make a Comeback in Maine, by Kirsten Lie-Nielsen

Oysters: one of my all-time favorite proteins. They are the filter-feeding keystone of the coastal ecosystem. The most I've eaten in an evening is 52. One Maine oyster farmer in particular was in the news for not-great reasons. Perhaps, like me, you think an essay about oysters heading back home to Maine sounds like a fun read. Enjoy!

Pickers can be salty characters, some of the last true foragers of the coast. They spend long days on the mud flats at low tide, bent over holes that they dig with specialized rakes, seeking out soft-shell clams, the most commonly harvested shellfish in Maine. They often gather wild oysters too; the stationary creatures can be a relief to find as they only need to be pried off the rocks exposed at low tide, rather than dug out of the thick mud.

Twenty-three years ago, I found myself next to a hospital bed. My mother was on it and on life support. The doctor entered the room and painted a bleak picture; and I said to him: I know, I know, it’s serious. After hours of sitting by the bed, watching my mother and the machine that kept her alive, a nurse recommended that I take a break and give my mind a little distraction. I decided to watch a movie. I left the hospital, walked down to the Egyptian Theater, bought a ticket, took a seat, and the movie, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams, opened with Sean Penn in a hospital room and on life support. I did not know whether to laugh or cry. Wherever you are, death is always there. 

I bring this little story up because it expresses how closely my life is tied to the Egyptian, which temporarily closed its doors in 2024 after a pipe broke and flooded the theater. It then permanently closed in 2025 when SIFF decided not to renew its 10-year lease of the space. Though a few events have occurred at the Egyptian since its closure, it’s been mostly dead: closed doors, dark windows, empty displays for movie posters. But that might change in the near future.

A group called WFLM Seattle is in the process of closing a deal with Seattle College, the owners of the Egyptian Theater, that would bring it back to life, back to reality. A member of this group, Ben Redder, says they are on the verge of finalizing the lease. (Seattle College informed me that it will make the deal public as soon as it is signed by both parties.)

“We’ve been in talks with Seattle College since mid-February,” says Redder over the phone. “We started WFLM for the purpose of taking over the Egyptian. We made a plan. Got supporters. But we’ve already screened a documentary there about Lenny Wilkins, three-time NBA Hall of Famer, at the theater. It was a big success. His family was in attendance. There were several NBA Hall of Famers there, too. This happened in August, and it sold out. So it was only natural to take the next big step. Get a lease and program shows.” 

When the deal is done, WFLM, which includes Elias Savage, Scotty Wright, and Lenna Hed, plans to model the new Egyptian’s programming along the lines of Santa Ana’s Frida Cinema, which basically screens the best of the best and the best of the worst films. WFLM will not, like Tasveer Film Center, which replaced Columbia City’s Ark Lodge Cinema earlier this year, show first-run movies, but stick to repertory flicks, crowd pleasers, and forgotten gems. WFLM also wants to bring back midnight movies, which were once a key component of Capitol Hill nightlife.   

“The theater is nearly in immaculate shape,” says Redder, who was assistant manager at the Cinerama until 2020 (when it closed due to Covid). After working at Scarecrow Video for two years, he became the general manager of Cinerama when SIFF took over the theater in 2023, but he was laid off in June 2025. “[The Egyptian] just needs some touch-ups here and there. Maybe some paint on a few walls. So, we’ll need a little time to make some improvements, make sure the equipment is working. If all goes well, we hope to be up and running by the end of the year.” And so it is. Life does sometimes conquer death.

The post Seattle Group Finalizing Deal to Reopen the Egyptian Theater  appeared first on The Stranger.

Maybe you have heard of Roko's Basilisk. This is a thought experiment, for lack of a better term, popular among a certain set: hyper-rationalists, futurists, effective altruists. Tech-industry guys. You get the idea. The most exhausting humans who ever lived, that is to say. People who at present happen to command a critical share of the world economy.

If you're not familiar with it, Roko's Basilisk, in broad terms, supposes that at some point in the future a sentient and omnipotent artificial intelligence could arise, and that this intelligence could then decide to punish all those who had anticipated its possible arrival and either worked to prevent it or refused to participate in its development. In that case, the wise course of action for people now, who are aware of even the theoretical possibility of this scenario, would be to work in good faith to bring this AI into existence, lest they put themselves or their descendants in its future crosshairs.

I have been thinking about Roko's Basilisk this week. The occasion was a pair of engineers at the Anthropic artificial intelligence company using Twitter, as AI exponents regularly, exhaustingly do, to warn, as one of them put it, that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." The other guy was even more strenuous about it: "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

Were 19th century European visitors to the United States inclined to be super critical about the food they ate in restaurants and hotels? It’s hard to know the answer, but they were often negative. An example was a woman from Scotland who grew so used to bad food that she was surprised to find a good breakfast in La Junta, Colorado, in the 1880s. She bonded with the proprietor, a German who had been trained in Paris, agreeing that Americans were mainly interested in quantity, not quality. [Note: old images were impossible to find, so I have used a variety of some I have collected over time, all from the latter 20th century.]

Delmonico’s in New York was, of course, a glowing exception. Outside of New York, however, the Delmonico name lost its majesty. A typical example was the Delmonico restaurant in Walla Walla WA. The local newspaper advised the new owner to change the name, noting that it had been eagerly adopted “by so many inferior restaurants and hotels about the country.”

Most Boston restaurants were judged bad. A Boston paper declared in the 1890s that “in no city of the same size are there such inferior restaurants, so little tavern life, and so little appreciation of good cookery . . .”

Widespread criticism continued into the 20th century when keeping fresh food in cold storage for extended periods was targeted as a major culprit, added to the fact that Americans didn’t know how to order in a restaurant and bolted down their food.

In a 1920s essay, food writer Elizabeth Robins Pennell viewed cafeterias and the automats as proof that Americans cared little for food. The automat was perfect for those who didn’t want to waste time eating, she declared, “since after you put your money in the slot, the sandwich or salad, the coffee or chocolate that comes out may be swallowed as you stand – not one fraction of a second lost in a hunt for a seat.” She judged that “The man who first wrote ‘Eats’ above his restaurant door spoke the truth better than he knew, in one word pointing out to us the depths to which we have sunk.”

Duncan Hines criticized the nation’s restaurant mercilessly in the 1940s. He felt it was more dangerous to eat your way across the country than to drive across it. He admitted that he “would like to be food dictator of the U.S.A. just long enough to padlock two thirds of the places that call themselves cafes or restaurants.” He was expressing a common view of the food available to highway travelers, as also expressed in a 1951 Life magazine article which concluded that “In whatever region he is traveling, the American tourist soon finds that good simple American cooking is an elusive myth.”

But it wasn’t as though the dining public was necessarily going to fare better in cities. Occasionally restaurant reviewers revealed how unenthusiastic they were about a restaurant, without exactly trashing it. In a review a San Antonio oyster restaurant’s food, decor, and service were branded in turn as okay, inoffensive, and not exciting or depressing. The conclusion was that “You can pay a lot more for a lot less, and that’s the most exciting news of this review.”

In 1968 a columnist summed up restaurants of that time by agreeing with an experienced professional that mediocre restaurant food had become the norm. As examples he mentioned ‘The drive-in eatery, the Ma-and-Pa hash-house, the roadside ‘Stop-and-Eat’ wagon, the Main Street ‘Greasy Spoon.’ Hamburger. Ham-and-eggs. Canned fruit salad. Buns and coffee, and suggested diners might as well just “Take what they put before you. Slather it with ketchup. Eat and hurry on.’

By the 1980s, chain restaurants had become omnipresent across the nation. Two Chicago Tribune critics ranked 15 chains. They agreed that overall the quality of food in them was “mediocre.” The bottom five, which included the Ground Round (fatty, flavorless, and overcooked beef), Howard Johnson’s (rubbery clams, over-breaded shrimp, too much fried food), the International House of Pancakes (nothing-special crepes, old toppings, tough steak, plain lettuce salads), Shakey’s (substandard pizza, starchy buffet), and Wag’s (withered salad greens, chili tasting like canned), came in for heavy criticism.

However much patrons might complain about food (or service) in a restaurant, they tended to make their peace and accept less than perfection at restaurants that they frequently patronized. They kept their criticisms to themselves – even though restaurateurs say they would have preferred to hear them.

In 1993 columnist Kevin Cowherd described a fantasy eruption of anger that might occur after taking a bite of bad food in a restaurant: “. . . it’s so awful that you spit the food into your hand and fling it angrily at the ceiling and then stand up, backhand all the silverware and glasses off your table and scream . . .” He admits he never threw a fit like this but says, “Just once I want to react to lousy restaurant food with a major, king-hell tantrum that shakes the walls and peels the paint and makes everyone around me cringe.”

Whew!

© Jan Whitaker, 2026

Nearly four decades have passed since ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) started in New York in 1987 as a direct action activist group “united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” The 1980s were a time of mass death and government inaction, and ACT UP responded with confrontational protests that disrupted business as usual to force change.

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