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Articles by Mike Wold

Book review: ‘Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir’

Silence to violence

By Mike Wold | July 8, 2020

Rebecca Solnit’s memoir documents early life in San Francisco and rampant violence against women

Reading feminist author Rebecca Solnit after reading some contemporary writers can be like eating a gourmet dinner after living on fast food; her sometimes elliptical prose is evocative and precise, rather than the straightforward, “no-frills” prose that tends to be in fashion. That’s certainly true of her memoir, “Recollections of My Nonexistence,” about her coming of age and coming to awareness of how sexism erases women as individuals in society. ...

The Boeing factory along the Duwamish in 1928. The river was added as a Superfund site in 2001 because of extremely high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were banned in the U.S. in 1979.

History runs through it

By Mike Wold | June 17, 2020

BJ Cummings traces Seattle’s beginnings to the headwaters of the Duwamish

Newcomers to Seattle might have a hard time naming the wide river that runs from the Cascades to Elliott Bay. They might not even know it’s there, even having crossed it on the First Avenue South or West Seattle Bridges — when the latter was operational. Unlike Lake Washington or Puget Sound, the Duwamish River is not a place many people visit if they don’t have to. Opportunities for kayaking, swimming or paddle boarding are limited. Fishing is chancy; signs warn that consumption of fish from the river should be limited because of bottom contamination. ...

School or prison?

By Mike Wold | May 20, 2020

Colson Whitehead’s ‘The Nickel Boys’ is based on an infamous Florida reform school, where life is brutal and death is too common

In some novels, it’s the situation — not the plot, not the characters — that moves the story. That’s the case with “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead, which just won the Pulitzer Prize. Whitehead bases his story on a now-notorious boys’ “reform school” in Florida that operated from 1900 to 2011, where brutal floggings and sometimes deaths were common enough to fill a mostly unmarked graveyard on the school grounds, and sexual molestation was common. ...

Jane McAlevey’s ‘A Collective Bargain’ lays out a union organizing plan that could save democracy

Can America be great again?

By Mike Wold | May 13, 2020

Book review: ‘A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy’

American democracy is in trouble. Yet in all the discussion about how to save it, pundits almost never mention the most effective way to counteract corporate power: strong unions. ...

BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can’

Is the answer blowin’ in the wind?

By Mike Wold | April 29, 2020

According to Stan Cox’s ‘The Green New Deal,’ it’s complicated

In 2019, progressive members of the U.S. House of Representatives offered a resolution to frame sweeping legislation to deal with the approaching climate emergency. The resolution called for a “Green New Deal” — a massive effort to invest in renewable energy to replace fossil fuels. ...

The Central District’s original landscape

By Mike Wold | April 15, 2020

Book review: ‘We Lived Here: Stories from Seattle’s Central Area’

Seattle’s historically diverse Central Area (also called the Central District or the CD) is being transformed by development and an influx of wealthier people — predominantly white people. Appropriately, there’s increasing effort to document what is being lost in our city, both in terms of history and community. “We Lived Here” is one of those efforts. It is mostly a straightforward collection of interviews of longtime CD residents, including Blacks, whites and Asian Americans, many of whom grew up there, some as long ago as the 1930s or 1940s. ...

Three generations of Trumps show how real estate is dependent on government support

Wealth and the city

By Mike Wold | April 1, 2020

Three generations of Trumps show how real estate is dependent on government support

Cities in the United States — including Seattle — have been rapidly changing in the past decade or two. Industrial areas with well-paying jobs have been redeveloped for high-end housing or technology companies; affordable residential areas have disappeared. Mainstream economists see this as a natural process, guided by the invisible hand of the market. ...

A carved bird stands in front of the Suquamish Longhouse.

Two facets of tribal justice

By Mike Wold | March 25, 2020

In August 1973, Suquamish tribal police were called to break up a fight during the annual Chief Seattle Days on the reservation on the Kitsap peninsula; one of the combatants slugged a deputy, so the tribal police arrested him. A local lawyer challenged the authority of the tribe to arrest a non-Indian on the reservation, which is only a ferry ride and a short drive from Seattle. In 1978, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled, in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, that the tribe only had the power to police its own members on the reservation. ...

Whaling conflict

By Mike Wold | March 11, 2020

‘Contesting Leviathan’ documents the dispute between a Native culture and protecting a species

Just over 20 years ago, the Makah Indian Tribe asserted its treaty rights by hunting a gray whale off the Washington coast. Although the whale hunt was successful, it was followed by an unsuccessful hunt the next year, and by a “rogue” (federally unauthorized) hunt in 2007, which led to arrest and jail terms for Makahs who were involved. Approval of another authorized hunt has been tied up in the courts and the environmental permit process since then. ...