Last month, the Trump administration finalized its plan to exempt Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, opening our nation’s largest national forest to logging, mining, road construction and energy development.

The formal lifting of this protection will occur in the next 30 days, and timber sales and road construction could begin by the end of this year.

So why should we care here in Whatcom County? Those of us who live in and around…

While Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homecoming, was epic in scope, weaving together generations of voices covering 300 years of life in both Ghana and America, her recently released second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, turns to the intimate quarters of family, faith and the mother-daughter relationship.

Gifty is a sixth-year doctoral student working on a neuroscience degree at Stanford. She is most comfortable in the lab researching neural pathways by addicting her lab mice to Ensure and…

Maria Wickwire has become well known in the Skagit Valley since relocating from Portland, Oregon. Her cheerful personality is in striking contrast to the anguish on the faces of the sculptures she creates.

In her latest work—an exhibit dubbed “Contemplating the Nature of Things,” which can be viewed through October at Perry and Carlson Gallery in Mount Vernon—Wickwire offers 11 half-scale female torsos, each distinct in material and process, but all displaying excrescences,…

Even before the pandemic shuttered universities and theaters across the country last spring, Western Washington University’s College of Fine and Performing Arts had made a commitment to produce WWU Theatre alum j. chavez’s play how to clean your room (and remember all your trauma).

That news thrilled senior instructor and playwright Kamarie Chapman, who’s made it her mission to bring to light a diversity of voices both onstage and off in the decade she’s been teaching at WWU. The…

Rain had been in the forecast, but as my fella and I strolled from the Squalicum Harbor parking lot to Gate 5 shortly before noon last Saturday to attend the soft opening of the Bellingham Dockside Market, glimpses of blue sky belied the prediction of inclement weather.

As we joined a stream of other masked shoppers eager to support the new hub that makes it possible for local fisher-folks to collectively sell their catch directly from their boats or adjacent to the dock, I observed…

Because I live in a town in which every adult treats Halloween like Christmas, their birthday, and Fourth of July combined—but with 100 percent more costumes—I tend to forget that in most places Oct. 31 is typically a day set aside for children. Probably this oversight would not happen if I had children or regularly interacted with them, but people don’t tend to let me near their offspring, which might have something to do with the fact that I am a monster 365 days a year and not just…

Without venues in which to perform—but still harboring a strong desire to play for their friends and fans—musicians in groups of all sizes, from solo practitioners right on up to full orchestras, have had to be creative when it comes to not only their music, but also how they get it to the masses. Or as the Skagit Symphony Orchestra describes it, “dynamic” in creating “new ways to connect with each other and the community.”

Like so many others, they’ve turned to the internet…