I think anyone who has read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights can agree that it’s a challenging read. Perspectives change chapter to chapter, Joseph the servant’s dialogue is basically unreadable, and most of Heathcliff and Cathy’s love story is played out through the next generation after—spoiler alert—Cathy dies during childbirth. In Emerald Fennell’s adaptation, she focuses on the most engaging elements of the book: Heathcliff and Cathy’s love, passion, and mutual destruction. 

The film never claimed to be a perfect mirror of the book. Fennell herself said, when explaining the quotes around the title of her adaption: “What I can say is I'm making a version of [the book]. There's a version that I remembered reading that isn't quite real. And there's a version [where] I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn't.” 

With this in mind, she was successful. Each character felt like a doll Fennell uses to play out her version of the story—the obsessive childhood bond between Heathcliff and Cathy at Wuthering Heights (Cathy’s family home), Cathy’s eventual choice of social status over love, her early death, and Heathcliff’s lifelong spiral into revenge. A literal doll motif continuously shows up in the film, too, beginning with a young Cathy, who watches a man being hanged while tightly clutching her doll. Again, when Cathy marries the wealthy suitor Linton (Shazad Latif), and her new sister-in-law, Isabella (Alison Oliver), gifts her a handmade doll made using Cathy’s own collected hair. And, most notably, in the large dollhouse replica of Thrushcross Grange, the Linton estate, that stands looming behind the dining-room table. So, who better to play the starring role than Barbie herself, Margot Robbie? 

At first, I was highly skeptical of the casting choices. Jacob Elordi was not at all how I imagined the scrappy, tortured, and probably-not-white orphan boy Heathcliff. But the longer I sit with the film, the more I can accept that he’s one of the only actors who could make this complex character work on screen. Brontë’s Heathcliff is cruel, insensitive, and brooding, and throughout the novel, I thought, why in the world are these women lusting after such an unlikable brute? But Elordi as Heathcliff—sweaty, grinning, and aroused—makes it make sense. You, too, would fold under the spell of his dark eyes with his fingers in your mouth. And, although Fennell’s interpretation of Linton is far more likable than Brontë’s, the choice is clear: Heathcliff eats Cathy out and licks the tears from her cheeks. Linton rails her in missionary while she dissociates.

Perhaps the most surprising element (and what I anticipate being the most controversial) is the innocent Isabella’s consent to Heathcliff’s cruel treatment of her. In the film, Heathcliff seduces Isabella (and later asks for her hand in marriage) only to punish Cathy, which he says explicitly. “Do you want me to stop?” he asks, several times, while taking off her nightgown. Isabella shakes her head no. After they marry, Nelly (Cathy’s companion, played by Hong Chau) stops by to see the newlyweds, only to find Isabella sporting a dog collar and chained up on her hands and knees, literally eating out of Heathcliff's hands. Nelly, horrified, attempts to free her, only to realize that the chains are not attached to anything—Isabella is a willing participant in this sadistic relationship. (Believe it or not, this is not how things go in Brontë’s 1847 novel.)

Elordi has managed to become the internet’s boyfriend through playing frightening men (see: Euphoria, Priscilla, Frankenstein). I would absolutely let that man be mean to me, and that’s what makes this film an alluring dollhouse to play inside. 

Many people, including myself, were outraged upon the trailer’s release due to the not-period-accurate costumes. How silly I feel about that now! While living at Wuthering Heights, Cathy dresses in tattered cotton skirts and billowing linen blouses. Once she marries Linton, everything turns synthetic—iridescent lamé dresses, tight corsets, gaudy costume jewelry, and rhinestones glued to her cheeks—essentially, the wardrobe I would have dreamed up for myself as a 5-year-old who was obsessed with princesses and pop stars. The costuming plays a larger role in the film to show that Cathy is actually restricted by Linton, despite his wealth and status, and can only breathe in the arms of Heathcliff. To sum it up, the costumes are, as Aretha Franklin once said so eloquently: “great gowns, beautiful gowns.” Fun to look at, but not so fun to be trapped inside of.

This contrast between organic and synthetic is also present in Charli XCX’s soundtrack, which is equal parts epic string score and moody electronic pop. It isn’t as jarring in this period piece as you might imagine it to be. 

As other critics have already noted, this is an extremely wet movie, soaked in uncooked egg, blood, spit, tears, snail slime, cooking oil, and rain, which adds a visceral quality to the film. Its lush, tactile visuals evoke whimsical movies of the past like the arthouse pornography of Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, surrealist stop-motion master Jan Švankmajer, the later films of Ingmar Bergman (Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander), and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. All things I suggest watching if you find yourself enjoying this decadently horny movie. 

Look, I didn’t want to like it. I walked into the theater as a skeptic, but left feeling enraptured by Fennell's vision. I give it four out of five broken eggs (see the movie and you’ll understand). 

There's lots to love in our weekend guide, with festive events from Sound Off! 2026 to Tết in Seattle and from the Petit Troll Mardi Gras Parade to Sweetheart Book Fair. Plus, if the urge for new ink strikes, go get a Friday the 13th flash tattoo!

Slumber Party: Dalaine, Henry Mansfield
A concert in an artisanal chocolate shop that encourages wearing pajamas? Sign me up. Owned and operated by Seattle musician and chocolatier Aaron Lindstrom, Cocoa Legato hosts a few intimate shows each week, befitting of the shop's name—"legato" is an Italian musical term used to describe music played in a smooth and flowing way. This Friday's show features two incredible local acts: queer indie pop artist Henry Mansfield with a string ensemble and folk singer-songwriter Dalaine, whose 2023 NPR Tiny Desk entry was highlighted as one of their "Entries We Love." Bring your crush, your kids, your blankets and stuffies, and get ready for a Valentine's eve that's sweet in more ways than one. SHANNON LUBETICH
(Cocoa Legato, Greenwood, $15)

Impeding ICE with the combined powers of the city, county and the port. by Hannah Murphy Winter

This morning, Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck announced legislation to bar new or expanded detention facilities from being built within city limits. At the same time, Seattle Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa announced an order that would bar any expansion of immigration activity on Port land, and a second that provides civil rights education to anyone working on Port property.

Their announcement follows an anti-ICE-filled week. On Tuesday, City Council’s public safety committee passed a bill from Councilmember Maritza Rivera that struck dated language from the Municipal Code requiring city employees to “cooperate with, not hinder” immigration enforcement. On the same day, the Port Commission unanimously passed an order requiring that Port police clearly identify themselves so the public is less likely to confuse them with immigration enforcement. And yesterday, the County took action: County Executive Girmay Zahilay signed an executive order barring ICE from non-public spaces on King County-owned properties (like Mayor Katie Wilson did in Seattle last month), and County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda introduced a bill to codify his order into law. 

None of this can stop ICE from operating in Seattle. But it can impede the agency.

The Detention Moratorium 

As of last month, ICE was holding more than 73,000 people in detention across the country—a record high—and they expanded into 104 new detention facilities, almost doubling from the previous year. ICE is not releasing people on bail, so that number will continue to multiply. So, too, will the number of detention facilities. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill accounted for that. He set aside $45 billion, enough funding to to imprison another 135,000 people in new facilities by 2029, according to the American Immigration Council.

The closest ICE detention facility to Seattle is the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma. But in December, the federal government posted a pre-solicitation notice from the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, putting local contractors on notice that they were looking to build a facility about the same size as the NWDC, able to detain 1,600 people. 

Rinck’s emergency legislation would block the construction of that facility or any other within city limits for the next year, giving City Council time to explore more permanent restrictions on ICE expansion. SeaTac actually beat her to the punch, passing their own detention moratorium this week.

The bill treats the threat of an ICE detention center as a bureaucratic land use issue, arguing that the city needs time to address any “mitigation measures" needed to build a facility in “Seattle’s dense urban environment." 

“We need to be using every tool at our disposal to be really ensuring that we're not eating this administration's unconstitutional work and lawless agenda, and even if that means looking to land use as a tool,” Rinck tells The Stranger.

Rinck says she plans to share her bill with the Local Progress network, so other cities can copy her homework. 

Rinck’s office says that Council President Joy Hollingsworth has agreed to allow the bill to skip the Land Use Committee, and instead be heard by the full council on Tuesday. Council could pass the bill as soon as February 24. 

The Port’s Anti-ICE Agenda

Earlier this week, the Port Commission passed an order that helps make ICE clearly identifiable to the public—requiring that Port police are clearly identifiable, and can’t be confused with immigration enforcement. 

Port Commissioner Hasegawa also plans to introduce two orders to regulate how ICE can interact with the Port, both of which will be introduced on February 24. The first order provides Know Your Rights education to anyone that’s working in the airport or other Port property, like the shops and restaurants at SeaTac. Immigration enforcement unavoidably operates in those areas, Hasegawa told The Stranger, and this order gives those workers the best chance to protect themselves and their colleagues. 

The second mirrors the orders from Mayor Wilson and County Executive Zahilay: banning immigration enforcement from expanding their use of Port land for their operations. The presence of immigration at the Port is, again, unavoidable, Hasegawa acknowledges, but “the use of Port properties is narrow, and that it has to have an industrial purpose for one of our industries, our industry is not the prison industrial complex,” she says. 

The commission could vote on both orders the day they're introduced, and Hasegawa says she's confident they'll pass. 

The Ban from County Property

Mosqueda’s bill would lock Zahilay’s executive order into law, blocking ICE from entering (without a warrant) non-public areas of buildings, parking lots, garages, and vacant lots. They also can’t be used as an ICE staging area, or to process detainees. The bill would also require that County Executive Zahilay identify properties that ICE is likely to try to commandeer, and to preemptively plan for better security measures. 

Mosqueda also accounted for private land. One whole section of the bill is dedicated to designing a template that reads: 

"This property is a Stand Together King County partner.  No agent of the federal government, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), may enter these premises for purposes of civil immigration enforcement, absent a valid judicial warrant or court order.  This property may not be used for civil immigration enforcement operations, including as a staging area, processing location, or operations base."

You can also just write that on your door with some printer paper and a Sharpie, as we saw all over Minneapolis in the last few weeks. 

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Nathalie Graham

Protect and Serve? Last summer's May Day USA event, the right-wing Christian extremist event held in Cal Anderson, was a clusterfuck largely because of the Seattle Police Department's biases against the people of this city, a new report found. SPD apparently didn't see what the big deal was about holding an anti-LGBT rally in the park—they "weren't familiar with the neighborhood's history," according to PubliCola. They viewed May Day USA as a "church group" and the counterprotesters as "antifa." They entered the event with a "anticipatory defensiveness" toward the counterprotesters—who they started referring to as "transtifa" after hearing May Day USA security use the term. SPD—which is largely made up of people who do not live in Seattle—also shared information with May Day USA security. This big mess of bias and animosity toward the people SPD is supposed to protect caused an aggressive police response and 23 arrests of counterprotesters. 

Impeached: The Federal Way City Council voted 4-3 to remove Martin Moore from his post as council president. Moore posted on his official Facebook page in support of the anti-ICE student walkouts. The rest of the council did not like this. Despite public commenters speaking largely in favor of Moore's actions at a meeting Tuesday, the council sided against him. He'll still stay on council, but he's lost his presidential role. 

The Weather: Say goodbye to dry skies. The rain is back. In case you're wondering if we'll get any more wintery weather, the Seattle Times has the answer: There is no hope for Seattle snow this year. 

Well, what about ICE? In his first executive order, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay banned Immigration and Customs Enforcement from doing anything on nonpublic county-owned land. This includes "parking lots, vacant lots, buildings, and garages and prevents them from being used for staging areas, processing or operations bases." The executive order won't stop ICE if those gooners have a judicial warrant. Zahilay's order also directs $2 million to immigrant communities for "emergency food, housing, and legal aid" and steers the King County Sheriff's Department to make a plan for dealing with ICE, including how to identify undercover agents and how to respond if ICE and the public get into conflict.  

Hey, get off of there! A person in Spokane hitched a ride on an ambulance, clinging to the back of the emergency vehicle on eastbound Interstate 90. That's not the suggested way to get to the hospital. 

The EPA Is Done Regulating Greenhouse Gases: Hahaha. We are so boned. On Thursday, Donald Trump repealed the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger human life, thus ending our government's capacity to legally control pollution. This sweeping move means the Environmental Protection Agency can no longer regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. It's a rejection of science and an absolutely dismal backslide as the US faces the realities of climate change: more intense storms, wildfires, droughts, and natural disasters. This, of course, is only good for "billionaire polluters," reports The Guardian.

"Jayapal Pramila Search History": Attorney General Pam Bondi had a piece of paper titled "Jayapal Pramila Search History" detailing the un-redacted Epstein files Washington state Rep. Pramila Jayapal accessed in her review of the documents. This outraged House members since it showcased the Department of Justice's alleged betrayal of the separation of powers. The DOJ confirmed it is keeping tabs on what searches lawmakers are doing in the disgusting pit that is the trove of Epstein files."It is an outrage that [the justice department] is tracking members’ investigative steps,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin. He plans to open an inquiry into this "abuse of power." 

Antitrust Dust Up: Gail Slater, the head of the Justice Department's antitrust unit, announced her resignation. This shake-up comes as the DOJ is set to deal with corporate mergers like the tug-of-war battle between Netflix and Paramount Skydance over ownership of Warner Bros. Discovery. Slater's deputy in the antitrust unit also left this week. 

DHS Shutdown Imminent: With Democrats saying they won't approve more funding for DHS, funding for the department is expected to run out on Saturday. Democrats are holding out until Republicans agree to implement more stringent restrictions on ICE. Agencies under DHS like ICE and TSA could be affected. Will the Gestappo work for free?

Honoring the Dead Is Politics: Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from the Winter Olympics because he insisted on wearing a helmet honoring the athletes killed during Russia's war in Ukraine. His tribute apparently violated the Olympics' athlete expression guidelines. "I believe I am right in this case," Heraskevych told NBC News. "For me to back down is betraying [the people pictured on the helmet]."

Ukrainian skeleton slider withdrawn from Olympics after insisting on wearing helmet honoring dead athletes killed in Ukraine https://cnn.it/3ZtrjXN

[image or embed]

— CNN (@cnn.com) February 12, 2026 at 12:47 AM

Blood Moon on the Rise: A big, red Blood Moon—which is not just a fun way of saying having your period—will gush all over Washington night skies on March 3. 

Oh Deer: The Michigan town of Iron Mountain has a deer problem. One of its parks has had a deer enclosure for 75 years. This is an odd choice since wild deer are prevalent. It's not like these people are lacking access to deer. Anyway, the enclosure is in dire need of upgrades. Like, $22,000 in one-time fixes and $16,000 in annual upkeep. The city council voted to close the pen. But, what to do with the deer? They are inbred, stupid, and diseased. They cannot be freed. So, they must be shot and killed. The people do not like this. Can't they save the deer? Probably not. 

Good for Them: The Winter Olympic village ran out of condoms in three days. More are on the way. 

A Long Read for Your Friday: You liked that Atlantic deep dive on Attorney General Pam Bondi? Then you'll love this Wall Street Journal story about what craven ghouls Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisor Corey Lewandowski are. A tidbit: Noem fired a US Coast Guard pilot after he left her blanket on a plane, but reinstated him when she realized there was no one else to fly her home. Plus, Lewandowski has been really trying to get someone to issue him a gun. 

Happy Almost Valentine's Day: Here is a date idea. If you're looking for gifts, or a gesture, I recommend heading to Salmonberry Goods Green Grocer in Crown Heights and buying some of their handmade Valentine's Day pastries. Also, buy a bouquet while you're there. 

A Song for All You Lovers: 

Cities and counties are begging for more progressive revenue tools. And it just so happens there's this progressive revenue tool in the Leg right now.... by Teresa Mosqueda

As the federal government continues to sow chaos and force unprecedented cuts that threaten our communities in need, the work we do at the local level to provide stability and support is more critical than ever. But with limited local revenue tools, our county and city resources are already failing to keep up with growing community needs. 

We cannot keep our communities housed, fed, and safe without new tools for revenue at the state and local level—and we cannot possibly fill the gaps left by looming federal funding cuts, which will leave cities and counties like ours (and its population of 2.4 million) without the money for  basic community and infrastructure needs, like roads, sidewalks, childcare, food assistance, affordable housing, and other critical services. That is why state and local elected officials have been desperately asking the state legislature for new revenue options. 

Furthermore, despite our state having among the highest concentrations of wealthy individuals and corporations in the country, our notoriously upside-down tax policies place an unfair burden on the backs of working families who have the least. This was true even before the Trump tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy were passed last year. This fundamental inequity is reflected in our local economic reality: massive wealth among a few and thriving large corporations alongside an affordability crisis and widening disparities between the haves and have-nots.

I join faith leaders, social service and housing providers, small businesses, and union members in calling for a Millionaires Tax. Senate Bill 6346, currently under consideration in Olympia, is a 9.9% tax on the few wealthy individuals earning $1 million or more that would take effect in 2028; with revenue coming in 2029, it would bring in over $3 billion for schools, child care, community colleges and higher education, health care and other essential services. It would also expand the Working Families Tax Credit and dedicate funding to county public defense services, a vital component of our justice system. This will help add balance to our regressive tax code and create a long-term funding source for community needs we know will only become more acute under the current federal administration. It is past time to pass this law. 

It’s a critical step now in fixing our upside-down tax code and finding sustainable and equitable revenue sources for state and local services. 

We are a region of abundance, rich in resources, with remarkable workers, small businesses and communities. We resist and reject federal attacks on fundamental rights and essential federal funding. We believe in shared responsibility, opportunity for all, and a level playing field. We believe in everyone doing their part. And this bill is one part of how we fight back and act locally to protect Washington residents.  

Teresa Mosqueda is a King County Councilmember representing District 8, from Downtown Seattle to Vashon Island and beyond. Mosqueda has led on housing, health and worker protections in her time on King County and previously Seattle City Council, along with passing JumpStart in Seattle in 2020 to respond to growing needs and the pandemic.

Unfortunately, nothing in government is simple. While police are regulated under state law, local law, and department policy, there’s still a conflict between city code and state law Rivera’s bill does not address. by Micah Yip

Councilmember Maritza Rivera has done something right. 

This morning, the Public Safety Committee passed her bill that protects immigrants from our own municipal code. It strikes language that says city employees (including police) must “cooperate with, not hinder” federal immigration enforcement, and adds a section clarifying that they are not to share personal information with federal immigration agencies, either.

Yay! Thanks, Rivera!

Unfortunately, nothing in government is that simple. While police are regulated under state law, local law, and department policy, there’s still a conflict between city code and state law Rivera’s bill does not address.

Let’s start with the language repeal. Rivera’s bill removes that “cooperation” line, which originated in 1986 from an initiative passed by Seattle voters (what the hell, ’80s Seattle voters!). Excellent first step. Rivera’s bill also creates a new section in the Seattle Municipal Code (SMC) blocking city employees and officers from sharing personal information—like someone’s address, phone number or social media handle—for immigration enforcement, except if required by a court order. Good second step. 

Both changes align city code with state laws like the 2019 Keep Washington Working (KWW) Act and the 2020 Courts Open to All (COTA) Act, which place information collection and sharing restrictions on local law enforcement, judges, court personnel and prosecutors. The bill also aligns the city code with the city code. In 2003, a “don’t ask” policy was added to the SMC—city employees can’t ask about someone’s immigration status.

Except officers if they have “reasonable suspicion” that (1) a person has been previously deported, (2) that person is again in the United States and (3) they’ve committed or are committing a felony. 

SPD has its own policies separate from, but governed by, city and state law. According to Council Central Staff, the department has “chosen to enact a policy” for immigration situations that is “quite a bit narrower and does not contemplate any of the criteria” described in current city or state law. Even though there is a discrepancy, SPD tells its officers, “Just don’t ask.”

It’s unclear enough that Councilmember Eddie Lin abstained. 

“I don’t want to hold up the important bill and good work that you brought forward, Councilmember Rivera,” he said. “But it just seems like there’s still a bit of confusion, at least in my mind.”

Rivera acknowledged the shortfalls. She said KWW likely overrides the SMC code, but said they’d need to do further legal analysis before amending that section. She was adamant—passionate, even—that the bill should still be passed. 

“One doesn’t preclude the other, so we can move this bill forward,” Rivera said. “[We can] take this what I deem to be an important step, all while then having the conversations about what else.”

The bill passed, with Rivera, Committee Chair Bob Kettle and Vice Chair Rob Saka voting yes. Councilmember Debora Juarez was absent. It’ll go before the full City Council at the February 17 meeting.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated that SPD policies undermine Rivera’s bill. The language of SPD policy, the Seattle Municipal Code, and Washington State Law conflict, but SPD policy will be expected to conform to changes in the municipal code. 

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opens in wide release on Friday, February 13. by Dom Sinacola

This story was originally published by our sister paper, Portland Mercury.

For nearly 20 years, Torontonian best friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have chronicled the everyday existences of Torontonian best friends Matt (Johnson) and Jay (McCarrol) as they attempt to book a show for their band, Nirvanna the Band, at local venue the Rivoli.

Granted, they've never acknowledged that their band name might be a huge distraction for potential audiences, nor have they ever really contacted Rivoli management to ask about the venue’s scheduling process. In two decades, they’ve never even played a public show. Still, their mission abides; sometimes it means skydiving from the Canadian National (CN) Tower for some good old-fashioned viral marketing.

Nirvanna the Band the Show is that 20-year chronicle—a seemingly never-ending autobiographical narrative, like Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume My Struggle—that details their daily, repetitive, and sometimes dangerous schemes to score a show at the Rivoli.

What began as a baby-faced web series in 2007 and eventually graduated into a Viceland sitcom in 2017, is now Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. It's tantamount to their lives’ work. Distributed by Neon, recent Oscar-darlings who brought us The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value, the release of this film is second only to getting a gig at the Rivoli.

The movie is exceptionally funny, especially with an audience. Dopey gags, painful stunts, and mean-mugging abound as our protagonists accidentally transform their RV into a time machine, using Back to the Future as a blueprint to hatch a plan to, of course, get a show at the Rivoli.

Finding themselves in 2008, they’re confronted by achingly specific allusions from the first Obama administration. (Remember the original lyrics to Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started”?) So Matt and Jay must follow Doc Brown rules to get back to their future without changing their past.

Convinced by pop figureheads like Robert Zemeckis and shows like Entourage that the elemental tides of storytelling, fueled by farce and nostalgia, will allow them to accomplish all they put their minds to—which in this case is headlining a show at the Rivoli—Matt and Jay of Nirvanna the Band are slightly fictionalized versions of the real-life Matt and Jay. They’re two normal-ish elder millennials who have siphoned themselves through movie and TV tropes into timeless, innocent weirdos.

Thus, at the heart of Nirvanna the Band, meticulous parody and avoidance of copyright infringement rubs up against the bleak reality of urban life, creating a giddy friction between the bracing stupidity to which Matt and Jay devote themselves and the drudgery experienced by everyone else.

In fact, much of the anxious hilarity of the Nirvanna the Band the Show came from wondering, often aloud, what exactly was real and what was scripted. With cinematographers Jared Raab and Rich Williamson following Matt and Jay everywhere, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie also wavers, like its episodic predecessor, between faux documentary and hidden camera prank extravaganza.

But rather than exploiting cringe humor or just messing with unsuspecting normies, Matt and Jay discover a kind of freedom to be themselves while indulging their deeply cinematic impulses.

Once furnished with a studio budget, these impulses lead to some of the most dumbfounding scenes I’ve had the good fortune of witnessing in a theater. Yet, beneath the shock and awe, the Movie is the careful craft of dedicated artists. When Matt and Jay encounter their 2008 selves, the project doesn’t rely on de-aging CGI, but hundreds of hours of work from editors Robert Upchurch and Curt Lobb, who picked through old footage from the show’s initial web run. Behind Jay and Matt’s mania is a team quietly dedicated to unearthing miraculous material.

Similarly, outside of the thinly veiled facsimile of his life in Nirvanna the Band, Johnson has been a prolific filmmaker. After cutting his teeth on Nirvanna the Band the Show, he followed up his feature debut The Dirties (2011) with Operation Avalanche (2016), a comedy thriller about faking the Moon landing in 1969, which involved Johnson’s crew bluffing their way into NASA offices to surreptitiously film whole scenes on a shoestring budget.

In 2023, Johnson made Blackberry, a partly fabricated “true story” of the founding of the titular company, featuring a squealing, baldpated Glen Howerton. The next year, Johnson starred in Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara, in which he played an over-talkative guy named Matt, likely riffing on himself as much as he is in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Instead of inhabiting a character, he piles on layers of pop cultural patinas.

Whether it’s the aforementioned skydiving incident or sneaking onto a crime scene outside of Drake’s mansion, the hint of reality in the movie’s every moment is more than enough to sustain the spectacle. Even now, I can feel my stomach churn knowing that when Matt is standing on top of the CN Tower, trilby staying on his head by sheer will, there is more of a chance than not that Johnson actually did that.

Laughing, sometimes, is just what happens when your brain doesn’t know what else to do with the information being presented. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a tribute to the unbelievable shit you can pull off with your best friend and a few professional-looking cameras.

Do Matt and Jay make it back to the present? They have to, because Nirvanna the Band must go on, and more importantly, must play at the Rivoli. Someday. They have no other choice. For the real-life Johnson and McCarrol, this is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Existence, the stuff of crazed movie magic.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opens in wide release on Friday, February 13.

The millionaire's tax seems good, but is it great? by Nathalie Graham

Who will weep for the millionaires? 

A 9.9 percent tax on annual earnings upward of $1 million could become reality in Washington state. A Senate bill is up for a full vote as soon as next week, and its companion in the House is still in committee. If either bill reaches Gov. Bob Ferguson’s desk with enough tax relief for small businesses and low-income households, he’s likely to sign it. With his pen stroke, we’ll join the ranks of futuristic societies such as New Jersey and Minnesota that have achieved the impossible: taxing income, perhaps fairly.

This is a good thing. The state needs new revenue. Over the next two years, we’ll have a $2 billion budget deficit. Across the next four years, we’re seeing double that. If the Leg hadn’t passed the biggest tax increase in state history and cut spending (even in areas they really shouldn’t have, like behavioral health, higher education, and healthcare) last session, we’d be dealing with a $16 billion deficit. When people complain that our ass tax code is the second most regressive in the nation behind Florida (a state that cannot decide if disease is bad), this is why that matters. We don’t have enough money for the basics and are still in a hole.

The millionaire’s tax will help dig us out. Democrats project it to siphon $3.5 billion from Scrooge McDuck-esque pools of money each year. The state will use that cashflow to expand the eligibility criteria for a low-income tax credit (basically, a sales tax rebate), fund public defenders (we’ve got a shortage), and extra padding for the scrawny general fund. It also cuts taxes on hygiene products, much to the amusement of esteemed doofus Danny Westneat. But is it enough? 

With President Trump picking our state pocket book, maybe not. His Big Beautiful Bill, HR-1, will cut at least $3 billion in federal funds annually starting next year ($3.5 billion - $3 billion = goddamn it). And the millionaire’s tax won’t begin to offset that until 2029, the year we see our first payments. 

The millionaire’s tax also comes with sweet savings for the Business Community—a juicy $600 million we’d otherwise collect. Similar to the Seattle Shield Tax passed last year, the millionaire’s tax would exempt thousands of small businesses from paying state Business & Occupation (B&O) taxes. To appease big business, the bill ends a B&O surcharge a year earlier than planned, unspooling work the Legislature did last session. A lot of people are not happy about this. But, we might not have been able to get a millionaire’s tax without this penance. 

Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle), sponsor of the Senate bill, says the millionaires tax is our only option. 

“It’s the proposal in front of us that we actually can have the votes to get out of the legislature,” he says. Plus, it’s broadly supported by 60 percent of voters, according to public opinion pollsters GBAO and DHM Research (which conducted polling for The Stranger last year). Their enthusiasm could make all the difference when the referendum enthusiasts, hedge fund millionaire Brian Heywood and anti-tax goblin Tim Eyman, come begging for signatures.

The people aren’t as jazzed about the business-friendly cuts. Pedersen says they’re “necessary” to dissuade big business from going to war with the bill. Last session, the People for an Affordable Washington PAC, which was made up of businesses not people, accumulated nearly $2.7 million to warp public opinion on new taxes. Behind the scenes, the businesses were “girding for battle” last session and preparing “to take the legislature’s tax increases to the ballot.” As he put it, “some deal" stopped them from doing that. 

For years, Pedersen has sponsored or co-sponsored bills for progressive taxation—solutions that give Washington another revenue source other than sales taxes, business taxes, or property taxes. Pedersen has attempted to get some version of an income tax passed for years. The partial capital gains tax, which passed in 2021 was the closest he’s gotten. Last year, he  sponsored bills for a wealth tax and a payroll tax, and they died tragically from a lack of votes. It’ll be the same fate for other progressive revenue taxes proposed this year, Pedersen says, pointing to Rep. Shaun Scott’s proposed state payroll tax, the Well Washington Fund. Pedersen, who shares a district with Scott, did not support the bill, modeled after Seattle’s JumpStart tax, because “it’s politically not feasible in the legislature” right now. 

Scott, who must have wronged the Pedersens in a past life, says that’s “too bad, because people of our district deserve leaders who believe in collaboration.” He signed onto the House version of Pedersen’s bill, even though he didn’t like the B&O cuts, and he saw other shortcomings.

“Senator Pedersen’s income tax bill would barely skim the reductions we’ll be seeing to K–12 schools, housing, healthcare, and higher education,” says Scott. 

He says the Well Washington Fund would prevent cuts to those essential services while making big companies pay their fare share and begin to fill the budget holes in 2027, two years before the millionaire’s tax kicks in.

“If Senate Majority Leader Pedersen had chosen to engage in the discussion around [the payroll tax bill] he would know that the Employment Security Department (ESD) has confirmed that my payroll tax could start being assessed by 2027, perhaps as soon as late 2026,” Scott wrote in an email. 

“That is not true,” says Pedersen. “He either has not interacted with the agency or he’s not representing that correctly.”

Except it is true. The ESD confirmed Scott’s payroll tax could be up and running by August 2027.

As it stands now, the payroll tax is stalling out, but as Eli Goss from the Budget and Policy center says, bills aren’t truly dead until the session is over. The millionaires tax, meanwhile, is moving to the full Senate next week. The millionaires are unhappy. The Republicans are bristling. Tim Eyman keeps sending emails with AI images of mud-splattered pooches to represent the “Godless dirty dog Democrats.” 

Pedersen isn’t counting it as a win yet. Not until it passes the legislature, survives the inevitable referendum campaign and Supreme Court challenge. “Those are the three big gates to pass through, before we can actually start to make a significant change in the second worst tax system in the country,” he says. 

Get ready to *add to cart*. R&B-influenced pop star Zayn embarks on his first solo headline arena tour this year, arriving in Seattle this September. Rapper and producer Baby Keem will support his sophomore album, Casino, on tour. Plus, blues rock duo The Black Keys supports their forthcoming album, Peaches!, with two nights at Remlinger Farms. Read on for details on those and other newly announced events, plus some news you can use.

Tickets go on sale at 10 am unless otherwise noted.

MUSIC

Baby Keem: The Ca$ino Tour
WaMu Theater (Wed May 13)
On sale at noon

Bilmuri - Kinda Hard Tour
Paramount Theatre (Wed Sept 30)

The Black Keys: Peaches 'n Kream
Remlinger Farms (May 29–30)

Although I didn’t observe Dry January myself, I absolutely respect the game, just as I understand that the liver wants what it wants (and doesn’t what it doesn’t). I’m also always nosy about what drinks my friends order, even if they’re teetotal. So at West Seattle’s Lady Jaye last month, when my NA pal was raving about their tasty mango shrub, I did something I normally wouldn’t. I took a peek at the mocktails. Er, fauxtails. Foxtails. Whatever we’re calling them now.

One drink had three things I love and one I’d never even heard of. The Live and Let Dry consists of Three Spirit Livener, Lyre’s Amaretti, lime, ginger, and Casamara Club Alta. I’m an old friend and lover of the Casamara pantheon, so that was enough by itself to make the sale, frankly. But what in the fuck is Three Spirit Livener? Plus ginger AND amaretti? “If you want, I can add gin to it,” bartender Nick consoled me as he put the drink together. “It’s really good both ways.” Tempting, but I had him hold off. Let’s taste it in its purest form first.

If you don’t know the Casamara Club line of botanical sodas, they’re all very leafy and horticultural-flavored, like drinking trees. These alcohol-free takes on amari-based cocktails come in six different flaves, and while there’s one that tastes exactly like the smell of the hand soap in my mom’s bathroom, the Alta soda is fuckin’ elite. Inspired by the Negroni cocktail, it’s made of chinotto—a bitter orange that grows along the Calabrian coast—as well as allspice berries, mandarin, lemon, clove, anise, juniper, and orris root, which is the root of the Dalmatian iris. Warm spice, sharp citrus. It’s like piney Christmas lemonade.

Then there’s a drop of virgin amaretto from UK-based Lyre’s, which styles their booze-free version as “amaretti,” after the cookie. It’s peachy-vanilla, toasty and nutty, kind of marzipan-tastical. Lyre’s is less sweet than the boozy stuff, too (and it’s lovely over ice cream, by the way).

Finally, the dark horse: the Livener by Three Spirit. Its base is the dried leaves of the ilex guayusa, a caffeinated tree that grows in the Amazon rainforest; a strong guayusa tea is served at South American convivencias (social gatherings) as a pick-me-up. To this, Three Spirit adds watermelon, pomegranate, and schisandra berries, which are distantly related to star anise. This elixir also packs some heat, from both ginger and cayenne, and astringent tartness from hibiscus extract. They add extra caffeine to it, too, and a little punch of apple cider vinegar. It’s super complex and bright and reminds me a little bit of those fruit teas from boba shops, but with chili and extra herbs, and without the big sugary slap in the face.

Lady Jaye owner Sara Rosales says she was eager to work with this stuff specifically for its mood-enhancing ingredients. “In theory,” she says, “this cocktail actually makes you feel revived!” Damn, it’s like the opposite of a cocktail—in more ways than one.

The effect is at once delicious and fascinating. In the end, I drank up the whole glass before I remembered to ask Nick to add gin, then came back later to try the ginned-up version. Both ways are fabulous, of course. I’ll try it with bourbon next time.

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Micah Yip

Thank Fuck: After two months of federal officers terrorizing, brutalizing, arresting, and killing people in Minneapolis, the Trump administration will end its “largest immigration enforcement operation ever,” border czar Tom Homan announced today. Homan touted the whole operation as a win that leaves Minnesota safer, “less of a sanctuary state for criminals.” A win? After two months of arresting more than 4,000 people, killing Alex Pretti and Renee Good, causing mass protests? The surge leaves Minnesota shaken, not safer. And though that operation is ending, immigration enforcement will continue, Homan pledged.

A Big-Ass Parade: I don’t give a fuck about football. But I have to say, the Seahawks’ massive party downtown yesterday sounded pretty sick. The team was paraded down Fourth Avenue in big military transport trucks, starting near Lumen Field and ending near the Space Needle, as an estimated 750,000 to 1 million cheered them on. People of all ages came from all over the state, with some claiming spots on the street the night before.

We Posted Some Rad Photos on Our Instagram Yesterday: Check ‘em out.

          View this post on Instagram                      

A post shared by The Stranger 🗞 (@thestrangerseattle)

DwTF (Down With the Fence): Remember when the city fenced off Seven Hills Park in September due to homeless encampments? That park will finally reopen on February 26, park department officials said at a community meeting Tuesday night. There are plans for a new sign, “human and hound fitness installations” (which sound suspiciously furry-coded), and a little facelift, fixing infrastructure and trimming trees. Why they couldn’t do that while keeping the space open is a mystery. It’s not like the fence kept people out, meeting attendees said.

Gallup Gallops Away: From tracking presidential approval ratings, that is. Gallup announced yesterday that after 88 years, it will no longer measure presidential approval. The switch comes as President Donald Trump continues throwing temper tantrums over any media outlet/poll/person/anything that’s less than fawning, reality be damned (Trump’s Gallup approval rating fell to 36 percent in December). Still, Gallup insisted its decision was “solely based on Gallup’s research goals and priorities.” It sucks though — the Gallup Presidential Approval Rating is one of the most cited measurements of public opinion on presidents since Harry Truman was in office, The Guardian reported.

Gallup Has Scaled Back for Trump Before: In 2017, Gallup went from daily to weekly presidential approval tracking. A year later, they went down to monthly. 

If you saw today's headline that Gallup will stop measuring presidential approval, they did the same thing in 2018. They do it whenever Trump is president.

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— Brandon Friedman (@brandonfriedman.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 11:27 AM

Two Actors Died: James Van Der Beek, known for his roles in Dawson’s Creek and Varsity Blues, died yesterday morning after battling stage 3 colorectal cancer. He was 48. Bud Cort, known for starring in Harold and Maude, also died yesterday after a long illness. He was 77.

Weather: Mostly cloudy with a high of 53. The sun will slowly break through as the day progresses. Tonight, temps will drop to a low of 43. There’s a 30 percent chance of rain.

Pam Bondi’s Testimony: Attorney General Pam Bondi hurled insults and dodged questions at yesterday’s House Judiciary hearing on her mishandling of the Epstein files. The stand out moment was when Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked Epstein’s victims in the audience to stand and raise their hands if they had not been able to get an appointment with the DOJ. All of them did.

This photo of Attorney General Pam Bondi looking down after the Epstein survivors in the room were asked to raise their hands if the current Justice Department has failed to speak with them is some fine photojournalism.

AP Photo by Tom Brenner.

Story: www.mississippifreepress.org/bondi-clashe...

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— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman.bsky.social) February 12, 2026 at 8:11 AM

What I Learned About Bondi from The Atlantic’s New Article: (1) Earlier in life, she was allegedly once so kindhearted she earned the nickname “Pambi,” like “Bambi.” (2) Foreshadowing  her transformation from Pambi to MAGA ghoul, she once refused to return a dog she adopted to its rightful family, even after the four-year-old grandson begged her to. She instead hired a lawyer and accused the family of abusing the dog. (3) She has called reporters crying and begging them not to publish stories about her. There’s a lot more you should read.

This is some genuinely psycho shit...

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— brian pillion (@anaphoristand.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 12:02 PM

Amtrak Death: An Amtrak train on route from Portland to Seattle struck and killed a person  south of Tukwila at about 9 p.m. Wednesday evening. Nobody on the train was injured. 

Jaahnavi Kandula: The city will pay a $29 million settlement to the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, the 23-year-old graduate student from India struck and killed by a speeding Seattle officer Kevin Dave at a South Lake Union crosswalk in 2023. Dave was going 50 miles over the speed limit. He was cited for negligent driving, paid a $5,000 fine, and subsequently fired from the department, but was never criminally charged. The Seattle Times has the story.

False Alarm: Or should I say “False Package”? Yesterday, the 1 Line’s Lynnwood City Center Station closed around 5 p.m. while authorities responded to a report of a “suspicious package.” Riders were asked to leave the station and the King County Sheriff’s Office dispatched its K-9 bomb detection unit to the scene. But they didn’t find anything, and the station reopened about an hour later. 

To the woman I saw belting “Pink Pony Club” on a Lime scooter late Sunday night in Capitol Hill, this one’s for you:

After three years, two ballot measures and Tuesday’s City Council vote, Seattle is one step closer to being a more affordable city. by Micah Yip

After three years, two ballot measures and Tuesday’s City Council vote, Seattle is one step closer to being a more affordable city.

On Tuesday night, Seattle Social Housing (SSHD) hosted an event featuring Mayor Katie Wilson, announcing the organization will be receiving $115 million through a voter-approved tax to build and buy buildings for affordable public housing. Rent is tied to the resident’s income. And because the buildings are mixed income, wealthier residents subsidize the cost. Earlier that day, City Council voted to turn on the tap, unanimously passing the interlocal agreement for the collection and disbursement of the funds between the city and SSHD.

“There is a lot of wealth in the city, and we continue to have one of the most regressive tax systems in the country, in the state,” said Wilson. “And it is very gratifying to know that we’re going to be able to use a little bit of that wealth and put it to work building housing.”

February must be a lucky month for housing in Seattle. In February 2023, Seattle voters passed I-135, which basically asked Seattle voters, “Hey, do you want us to form a social housing developer?” and Seattle said “yes.”

Then, in February last year, the city presented voters with two options to fund social housing: Prop 1A, a 5 percent tax on companies for each employee making more than $1 million per year; or Prop 1B, which wouldn’t create a new tax, but siphon $10 million per year from the Jumpstart payroll tax for only five years. Seattle passed Prop 1A.

SSHD’s interim CEO Tiffani McCoy announced that an estimated 170 companies in the city are subject to the tax, $115 million in the 2025 fiscal year—a figure far greater than the original estimate of $50 million.  

Social housing is a new concept in Seattle, deviating from our profit-driven housing market that’s widely inaccessible for low- and middle-income people. Rents are meant to remain permanently affordable, with a target goal of around 30 percent of a person’s income. And it’s been successfully implemented in places like Vienna, Austria, Finland and Singapore. In the United States, only Seattle and Montgomery County, Maryland have taken the leap.

“Our main objective isn’t profit and we’re not determined by the markets that other, private landlords are,” SSHD spokesperson Lilly Fowler told The Stranger.

Maybe you’re wondering if you can be one of those hundreds benefitting from social housing this year. You could be, if you make anywhere up to 120 percent of the area’s median income (AMI). Fowler says they estimate the first building will open in about six months. You can register to stay updated here.

“In a moment when housing costs continue to rise and displacement pressures remain real, social housing is going to give us a tool that can match the scale of the problem,” Wilson said.

Correction: This article has been updated since publication. We incorrectly stated that the city had collected $115 million in the last month of 2025. It had begun collecting funds from the 2025 tax year last month (January 2026). We also inaccurately stated that rent for these buildings would be capped at 30 percent. The target is around 30 percent of a tenant's income, but it's not legally mandated. We regret the errors.

Olivia Waite is a Seattle-based romance, sci-fi, and fantasy author, New York Times romance columnist, Jeopardy! champion, and accomplished fiber artist. I was introduced to her via her novel The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, which is not only a beguiling sapphic love story, but also a brilliant ode to the art of science and the science of art. Her latest book, Murder by Memory, a cozy sci-fi mystery set aboard an interstellar passenger liner and the first installment in her Dorothy Gentleman series, came out last March, and the sequel Nobody’s Baby comes out next month. (She’s also currently working on releasing a knitting pattern for the fern shawl that makes a cameo in Murder by Memory.) The Stranger caught up with her about Heated Rivalry, falling in love at karaoke, and how fish-scaling can be surprisingly romantic.

How did you first fall in love with the romance genre?
I stole my first romance novel from my mom when I was 5. It was a Johanna Lindsey sci-fi romance, so imagine Jupiter Ascending, but with orgasms, and my mom took it away, because nobody wants to explain that kind of thing to a toddler. I picked it up because the cover looked like Star Wars, which also tracks—the whole slave Leia bikini thing was absolutely in the marketing. And I wanted to see how it ended, so as soon as I was old enough to get a library card, I tracked down a copy and managed to finish it. I’ve been hooked ever since. It’s funny, because that’s both the first romance and the first sci-fi novel that I read.

As a romance author, what is it like to witness the Heated Rivalry craze erupt into the mainstream right now?
The audience reaction has been really gratifying, and then the nonstop bad takes have been deeply irritating. I’ve read the book [series Game Changers by Rachel Reid, from which the show is adapted] before, and I was also a fan of [director Jacob Tierney’s previous show] Letterkenny, so in that slim little Venn diagram of those two things, there were, like, five of us, and we were all so excited. People [were] like, romance adaptations are never good, and I’m like, No, you don’t understand this! Man will point a camera at a dude in a flannel shirt, and you have 18 feelings about it! I think one of the best things about it is that a lot of the conversations, even the difficult ones, have been very productive. People in very closeted industries who can’t come out are finding ways to talk about that with people that they know.

What adaptations would you like to see follow in the wake of its success?
I want the Alyssa Cole and Beverly Jenkins books, American historical romances specifically set around the experience of Black Americans. Beverly Jenkins has one called Forbidden that is set in a mining town where the machinery never stops whirring, and the hero is a Black man who can pass as white, which means he has access to bank accounts, so he’s helping the Black residents of the town gain credit and build up savings in a way that the bank wouldn’t let them. But in order to live as the authentic Black man he actually is, he has to give that up, and decide whether the job he’s doing is more important than his need to be acknowledged as someone with a family connection, rather than just a good ally. There’s part of himself that he’s had to keep very locked down. It’s gorgeous. There’s an old-timey baseball game, and there’s the heroine carrying her stove as she treks across the desert. It’s the book that made me say, God, fish-scaling is so romantic! And no, it’s not. Beverly Jenkins, what witchcraft is this?! I would love a big, splashy, Yellowstone-level adaptation.

What lessons can romance teach us during this difficult time in history?
Romance has lessons both positive and negative. I’ve read too much about romance history to pretend it’s all sunshine and rainbows. You get a lot of people saying, well, romance is by women, for women, therefore it’s automatically feminist, and, no. There are terrible and repressive romances being written, and it’s silly to pretend that’s not happening. But the thing that keeps me coming back to this genre as a source of optimism and strength and resilience is that sense that it’s an optimistic genre at its heart—it assumes that the world is improvable, and people can learn. People are worth keeping. They can learn better. Love is possible, and it just might not look like what you intended.

What is one romance book you think everyone should read?
After Hours at Dooryard Books by Cat Sebastian. It’s set in New York, 1968. It’s about a used bookstore owner and a down-on-his-luck mystery man. It’s also about the protests that are happening in the Civil Rights Movement and labor issues and queer issues in New York, and it’s an entire book list on its own. It is so sad and so good. It feels like somebody wrote you a love letter from 60 years ago to tell you it’s okay and we’ve been through this before.

You mentioned over email that you’ve submitted some Stranger valentines in the past; can you tell us about that?
They were actually for the man I ended up marrying. I can confirm that I met him singing Peter Gabriel in an Irish dive bar in Fremont. It was this absolute karaoke romance, and this guy gets up and starts screaming, and I go, “There he is. That’s what I’ve been waiting for.” We were dating about three months after that, and then we were engaged within the year. Then we spent like two and a half years planning the wedding. For those two and a half years, when I was still in that little Fremont apartment and just about to graduate from grad school and going to this karaoke bar down the corner every Monday night, February would come around, and we would send each other little notes in The Stranger, and it was fantastic.

Nobody’s Baby is out March 10 on Tor Publishing.

Signed, a former New Yorker, just trying to get home. by Anonymous

Seattle, I know you are relatively new to the public transit game, but I am BEGGING YOU to learn some basics about rush hour travel. You're relatively okay at standing to the right so people can walk by on the left on escalators, but for god's sakes, TAKE OFF YOUR BACKPACKS ON THE TRAIN!!

Picture this: It's 5 p.m., you're leaving the office. The train is packed full of tired, overworked, and underpaid people. You manage to squeeze on, only to get whacked by someone's backpack, while they are oblivious to the fact that by turning, they've turned their backpack into a weapon. You shift to the right, BAM! another backpack. You're being crushed in the doorway because you have nowhere to go. You look to the right, down the aisle, and see it looks relatively empty because everyone has their backpacks on! Each person takes up the space of two people: one space for their body and one space for their backpack.

Come on, y'all. We all want to get home. Take your backpacks off so we can fit more people on the train and not get clotheslined by a rogue backpack.

Signed,

A former New Yorker, just trying to get home 

Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we'll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty.

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Megan Seling

Today, Seattle Celebrates: It’s parade day for the Seattle Seahawks, who defeated the New England Patriots 29–13 in Sunday’s Bad Bunny Bowl. The morning begins with a trophy ceremony at Lumen Field at 10 a.m., and the parade will start at Fourth Avenue and Washington Street at 11 a.m. Officials say it should take approximately two hours for the parade to make its way down Fourth Avenue to Cedar Street. SPD is expecting about a million people, and they started closing roads at 6:30 a.m. It’s gonna be nuts. Either rush down there now and embrace madness, or avoid the area completely. There is no in between. Just stay off the pergola! 

Mass Shooting in Canada: Ten people are dead, and more than 25 are wounded after a shooting at a small school in northern British Columbia. Police say the alleged shooter died by suicide. Two of the victims were found at a home believed to be connected to the incident. It’s the deadliest mass shooting in Canada since a shooter killed 13 people in Nova Scotia in 2020, and, as AP reports, “Canada’s government has responded to previous mass shootings with gun control measures, including a recently broadened ban on all guns it considers assault weapons.” 

Meanwhile, in America: According to massshootingtracker.site, which is a real website, there have already been 45 mass shootings in the US this year (we’re on day 42), with a total of 62 people killed and 137 wounded. Your thoughts and prayers are bullshit. 

Trump Administration Shuts Down El Paso Airport: Or not. Hard to say! On Tuesday night, Real World Boston star and the Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy claimed Mexican cartel drones breached US airspace, so he grounded all flights for 10 days. This morning, though, the Federal Aviation Administration rescinded that order and said the shutdown was “prompted by the Defense Department’s use of new counter-drone technology.” America: We’re doing a great job!

Tax the Rich! Hundreds of union members rallied at the Capitol in Olympia yesterday to demand that local lawmakers pass the millionaires tax, which “calls for a 9.9% tax on Washington residents making more than $1 million a year beginning in 2028.” Why wait until 2028? Tax those fuckers now, I say! Unfortunately, I am not in charge. Our own Nathalie Graham will have more about this Senate bill later at the stranger dot com. Stay tuned.

In Other Lawmaker News: Gov. Bob Ferguson is working with state lawmakers to add "mental health safeguards to AI chatbots.” The policy would “require companion chatbots to notify users they are interacting with AI and not a human at the beginning of the interaction and every three hours,” according to the Seattle Times. But why just every three hours? Make the robots say it every 30 minutes! Every three minutes, even! In fact, melt the robots! Burn OpenAI to the ground! Hack the planet! I have had too much coffee!

If You’re Wondering Why People Turn to Robots for Help: It’s because our city (our state, our country, our world) is terrible at offering people meaningful mental health support when they reach out for help, and a new report on King County’s lack of mental health referrals proves it. The King County sheriff’s 911 center has zero standard procedures to help people in crisis, and apparently don't refer them to the 988 suicide hotline either. Instead, they just send officers and hope it works out?

Strange Case Gets Stranger: Last night, police announced that they detained a person of interest in Rio Rico, Arizona, in connection with Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance. This morning, that person was released. Nancy, the 84-year-old mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie, has been missing for more than a week, and for several days, Savannah and her siblings have been releasing videos to Nancy’s believed captors, who allegedly asked for $6 million in Bitcoin. 

And Stranger Still: Kash Patel and the Go Get ‘Em Kids released video footage yesterday of a masked person captured on a doorbell camera outside Nancy Guthrie’s home on the same night she went missing. According to one expert CNN interviewed, this person’s behavior is “impressive,” and they clearly did a “certain amount of planning.” What? Are we watching the same video? Dude looks like a bumbling idiot, rolling up to the house with a gun holstered directly above his crotch like someone said, “Put this on,” and he was like, “Okay, yeah, because I have definitely worn a gun before. I will just point it directly at my dick.” Then, guy was so ill-prepared for the presence of a very common doorbell camera that he paused to grab some weeds from the garden and attempted to fashion them into some kind of curtain, all the while staring directly into the camera lens at close range. And you want me to believe this is the same brilliant criminal mind capable of kidnapping the 84-year-old mother of a high-profile journalist and leading the FBI on a nationwide goose chase for more than a week? Sure, Jan. 

Speaking of Kidnappings: ICE is still at it! Locals in Minneapolis shared this scene after the fact. 

This is the aftermath of an ICE kidnapping a few blocks from my home in St. Paul—an hour ago. A quiet street full of broken glass and at least three wrecked cars. The target of the kidnapping was taken away by ambulance. He was on a stretcher and covered by a sheet, though a cop said he was alive.

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— Andrew Karre (@andrewkarre.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 8:46 AM

In Local Film News: Yesterday, The Stranger reported that the Boeing IMAX theater (the biggest IMAX theater in the state) is expected to be sold to the Space Needle Corporation. The theater is closed for now for a “brief renovation focused on improving the concessions and arrival experiences, scheduled to end in May.”

And now, I leave you with some of my favorite things to happen at the Olympics so far: 

🥌 Commentators constantly referring to the US mixed doubles curling teammates as Girl Cory and Boy Korey. (Congrats on the silver, buddies!)

🏒 The US women’s hockey team allowing their opponents exactly one goal in four games, including a 5–0 victory over Team Canada. Even better, it’s the Torrent players who are leading the team in points! Hilary Knight has two goals and three assists, Alex Carpenter has three goals and two assists, and Hannah Bilka has three goals and one assist. (Britta Curl has zero goals, which is what she deserves, because she’s a transphobic asshole.)

😭 Ilia Malinin skating to the sound of his own voice in the ultimate masturbatory figure skating performance, which I actually hated very much but had a lot of fun laughing at. Just some of the lines the 21-year-old recites during his program: “The only true wisdom / Is in knowing you know nothing.” “You are something / But not nothing.” lol ok quad god

Unfortunately, nothing in government is that simple, and the Seattle Police Department (SPD) exists. by Micah Yip

Councilmember Maritza Rivera has done something right. 

This morning, the Public Safety Committee passed her bill that protects immigrants from our own municipal code. It strikes language that says city employees (including police) must “cooperate with, not hinder” federal immigration enforcement, and adds a section clarifying that they are not to collect or share personal information for immigration agencies, either.

Yay! Thanks, Rivera!

Unfortunately, nothing in government is that simple, and the Seattle Police Department (SPD) exists. And once again, it is preventing us from having nice things. While police are technically regulated under Rivera’s bill, SPD policies give them a pass. 

Let’s start with the language repeal. Rivera’s bill removes that “cooperation” line, which originated in 1986 from an initiative passed by Seattle voters (what the hell, ’80s Seattle voters!). Excellent first step. Rivera’s bill also creates a new section in the Seattle Municipal Code (SMC) blocking city employees and officers from sharing personal information—like someone’s address, phone number or social media handle—for immigration enforcement, except if required by a court order. Good second step. 

Both changes align city code with state laws like the 2019 Keep Washington Working (KWW) Act and the 2020 Courts Open to All (COTA) Act, which place information collection and sharing restrictions on local law enforcement, judges, court personnel and prosecutors. The bill also aligns the city code with the city code. In 2003, a “don’t ask” policy was added to the SMC—city employees can’t ask about someone’s immigration status.

Except officers if they have “reasonable suspicion” that (1) a person has been previously deported, (2) that person is again in the United States and (3) they’ve committed or are committing a felony. 

On top of that, SPD has their own policies independent of city and state law. According to Council Central Staff, the department has “chosen to enact a policy” for immigration situations that is “quite a bit narrower and does not contemplate any of the criteria” described in current city or state law. 

It’s a whole mess: SPD policy generally prohibits collecting immigration info. But the Chief can make exceptions. But Keep Washington Working keeps law enforcement from data collection and sharing for immigration enforcement. But officers are also regulated under the 2003 SMC amendment. But they’re also given a pass under the same amendment.

It’s convoluted enough that Councilmember Eddie Lin abstained. 

“I don’t want to hold up the important bill and good work that you brought forward, Councilmember Rivera,” he said. “But it just seems like there’s still a bit of confusion, at least in my mind.”

Rivera acknowledged the shortfalls. She said KWW likely overrides the SMC code , but said they’d need to do further legal analysis before amending that section. She was adamant—passionate, even—that the bill should still be passed. 

“One doesn’t preclude the other, so we can move this bill forward,” Rivera said. “[We can] take this what I deem to be an important step, all while then having the conversations about what else.”

The bill passed, with Rivera, Committee Chair Bob Kettle and Vice Chair Rob Saka voting yes. Councilmember Debora Juarez was absent. It’ll go before the full City Council at the February 17 meeting.

The question of what that “IMAX experience” entails will now be top of mind for Seattle movie lovers. Many consider the Boeing IMAX to be one of the best places to go see the biggest releases of the year, but staff who spoke to The Stranger are concerned that this new buyer isn’t interested in screening first-run releases of Hollywood films, like Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey. by Chase Hutchinson

The Boeing IMAX theater, the biggest IMAX theatre in the state, has been closed since Feb. 1 and will be sold to a new owner: the Space Needle Corporation, the Pacific Science Center confirmed in an email Tuesday. 

“PacSci will not resume operations in that theater,” the spokesperson said. “Once the transaction concludes, we anticipate that the buyer will make some renovations and reopen the theater as an IMAX experience later this spring.”

The question of what that “IMAX experience” entails will now be top of mind for Seattle movie lovers. Many consider the Boeing IMAX to be one of the best places to go see the biggest releases of the year, but staff who spoke to The Stranger are concerned that this new buyer isn’t interested in screening first-run releases of Hollywood films, like Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey. A spokesperson for PacSci said they will be showing Nolan’s film at their smaller theater, the PACCAR, but deferred questions about the future of film programming at the Boeing IMAX to the Space Needle Corporation. 

In a statement shared with The Seattle Times, Space Needle CEO Ron Sevart said “we’re excited to partner with Pacific Science Center in continuing the availability of two IMAX theaters on the Seattle Center Campus” and that it will continue to operate as a movie theater following a "brief renovation focused on improving the concessions and arrival experiences, scheduled to end in May." However, he didn’t specify what movies or programming will be shown there, only saying “we haven’t explored any use other than as an IMAX theater.”

“While continued operation of the Boeing IMAX Theater is our short-term focus, we can’t wait to explore other partnership opportunities that support the future of Pacific Science Center and the Seattle Center,” Sevart said in a release. 

Also speaking to the Times, PacSci President and CEO Will Daugherty said, “the economics of operating a movie theater have become increasingly challenging. It made sense for PacSci to include the Boeing IMAX Theater in this transaction.” 

Can our movie theaters catch a break already? SIFF ended its lease at the Egyptian last year, the Varsity Theatre closed just last month, and the Grand Illusion is still looking for a new home. However, the Boeing IMAX is something different. It’s the region’s “only true IMAX,” as the theater’s website once referred to it, with a 1.42:1 aspect ratio AKA a massive screen. When Ryan Coogler’s stellar vampire horror Sinners swept the nation last year, it was one of only a handful of places in the country where you could see the film as the filmmaker intended. (Having seen the film, I can’t overstate how much of an impact this makes.) 

Now, it’s an open question whether they’ll be able to experience anything like that again anytime soon at the Boeing IMAX. As for the impact the sale could have on employees, a spokesperson for PacSci said “we have not yet determined the impact on PacSci staffing.”

Editor's Note: A previous version of this story said that the sale was final. Since publication, the Pacific Science Center has clarified that the sale has not yet gone through, but is expected to. 

Shapiro’s journey through the art world is a storied one. by Amanda Manitach

Somewhere in Manhattan, sometime in the mid 1980s: a friend invited Ann Leda Shapiro to a clandestine gathering of nameless, faceless women at an artist’s loft. “Come to this meeting,” she was told. “We’re pissed off. We’re going to do something.” It turned out to be the beginning of the Guerrilla Girls.

Shapiro kept the secret of her involvement for 40 years; she will still only say so much. But there is one story about the time The Washington Post was sending people up to conduct a photoshoot. This posed a problem, as one of the primary commitments of the group was anonymity. Shapiro, taking notes for their meeting, was scribbling down ideas as fast as they came, when she committed a misspelling that would make art history: instead of guerrilla, she wrote gorilla. It was an a-ha moment, and their solution—the now-iconic gorilla mask—was born.

Shapiro’s journey through the art world is a storied one, her intersection with the Guerilla Girls just one of many tantalizing threads that could be spun into a volume. As she (selectively) spills the lore, our conversation is lubricated by multiple cups of coffee served in the artist’s Vashon Island living room. It’s a well-loved and lived-in house just up the road from a rocky slip of beach. Sun glitters off the face of the water, flooding the space with dappled light that dances across the ceiling with each break in the clouds. An acupuncturist’s table—not an easel or drawing desk—takes primary place in the room.

She’s lived here for 30 years, tucked away from the limelight.

Like the majority of female artists who achieve renown, it’s only been later in life that she’s been getting her flowers. (Shapiro turns 80 this August, though age feels like a preposterous abstraction here; she moves and speaks with the vivacity of someone 80 going on 18.) Last spring her solo exhibit, Interconnected Worlds, debuted in Antwerp. Another solo, Body Is Landscape, is currently hanging in Hong Kong. This January, Shapiro received the Betty Bowen Award—one of the region’s most coveted—which comes with a hefty cash prize and an exhibition at Seattle Art Museum. (Hers is scheduled for 2027.)

Categorizing Shapiro’s work is no easy feat. Watercolor and gouache paintings with an energetic, illustrative quality that plumb the esoteric, autobiographical, cosmic cartographies of the body. The body is ever-present in her work. Bodies that serve as landscapes. Bodies that swim in celestial storms and electric seas. Bodies as fine as stardust. Bodies that turn into trees that turn into something much deeper and primal. Detail so minute it seems physically impossible. Humor that is by turns brash, vulnerable, and grotesque mingles with sacred rage throughout earlier work; later imagery unfolds labyrinthine (self)portraiture that could keep a psychoanalyst busy for years.

It’s the kind of work the world is hungry for now. But it wasn’t always like this.

Shapiro grew up a “red diaper baby,” the daughter of card-carrying, working-class Communist parents who lived in a housing project in Queens. They were “neglectful, but had fabulous values,” she notes. Shapiro’s mother encouraged her artistic tendencies (which included being allowed to paint on the walls). On Saturdays, they took the train into the city so Shapiro could take classes at the MoMA’s art school, where she learned to “paint with sponges and throw paint at paper.” When the family eventually relocated to Manhattan, they moved into an apartment directly across from the American Museum of Natural History—a proximity that contributed to the development of Shapiro’s approach to close observation of the natural world. There was never going to be any other way but art for Shapiro; in her free time after high school she haunted the museum across the street, filling sketchbooks with intricate drawings of its curiosities while inquisitive museum guards looked on.

After high school, Shapiro rented a walk-up on the Lower East Side—the kind with a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet down the hall. She worked at a library, then an advertising agency (where, to assuage boredom, she typed out entire chapters of Moby Dick, one page at a time). She saved enough cash to catch a hippie bus to San Francisco, where she rented a room under a staircase and enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute. She modeled and painted murals for money. She marched with Allen Ginsberg and made low-tech, psychedelic oil-and-paint visuals for the first Kool-Aid Acid Test concert (Shapiro was perhaps the only person present not tripping on drugs).

She attended the University of California, Davis, for grad school, where the critiques were performed exclusively by mustached men. When they brought her to tears during her first review (her paintings were too “primitive,” they berated), Shapiro resolved to never let such a thing happen again. At the next review, she arrived with a rubber penis strapped to her face. She nearly asphyxiated (she forgot to poke holes in the tip), but the stunt was so off-putting it worked; from that day on, the mustaches kept mum and she earned an MFA without further incident.

After graduating, Shapiro traded oil paints for watercolors, scaling to a more intimate style that reflected the inspirations of her youth: Little Lulu comics and the delicate nature drawings of her museum sketchbooks. When a curator from the Whitney Museum of American Art paid Shapiro a studio visit, they offered her a solo show of works on paper—an honor for any artist, let alone a recent graduate. But when the exhibit opened in the fall of 1973, Shapiro was appalled to find they had pulled three of her best paintings at the last minute. “I was shocked,” she says. “I had no idea I was doing anything that was controversial.”

The censored works in question—three watercolors completed in 1971—seem disparate at first glance, but each is threaded with the same provocative humor as Shapiro’s rubber dick that doubled as a mask. One of the paintings, Two Sides of Self, depicts a pair of hermaphroditic mermaids whose bodies appear to conjoin at the breasts, lips, and (male) genitalia. The central figure in Woman Landing on Man in the Moon is a female astronaut in a NASA spacesuit; three American flag patches placed across the uniform reveal slits through which breasts and a penis protrude. Across the inky void in the background, a fleet of tiny airplanes skywrites: one needs a cock to get by.

“I was just asking questions innocently, like, what is male and what is female?” says Shapiro. “There was no multiplicity of pronouns then, or anything like that. I was asking, do you have to be male—or act like a male—to be able to move ahead in the world, to be visible?”

The Whitney wasn’t having it.

Happily, Two Sides of Self and Woman Landing on Man in the Moon were both eventually acquired by the Seattle Art Museum in 2015—part of the Deed of Gift spearheaded by artist Matthew Offenbacher and his partner Jennifer Nemhauser after he won the Neddy Artist Award. Offenbacher used around $20,000 of the award funds to purchase works by women and queer artists, which were then gifted to SAM as a gesture of solidarity to the community and an attempt to help rectify the dearth of work by minorities in the museum’s collection.

That would be far in the future, however.

Following the ’73 exhibit, Shapiro withdrew from the art world. She would continue to paint, but she would not be censored, nor self-censor. Going forward, she exhibited only in underground spaces and spent the next two decades as a self-described “academic vagabond woman.” She taught criticism and art at universities across the country. She spent a semester in a boat sailing the world. In her six years of undergrad and graduate school, Shapiro had never had a woman teacher, not once; while teaching, she found herself the sole woman in every department. The token female academic, with a strap-on cock for a nose.

Or a gorilla mask. It was around this time that Shapiro found herself amid a group of like-minded artists who were pissed. It was also around this time that a close friend was diagnosed with AIDS, an event that would indirectly shift the trajectory of her life. Shapiro took up volunteering at a clinic in Austin that treated people with the disease. The clinic happened to specialize in acupuncture.

“When I started reading about the theory and history and philosophy of Chinese medicine, it was like falling in love,” she says. The definition of qi is not merely energy, Shapiro explains: “It is matter on the verge of becoming. It’s that moment when you’re living and dying simultaneously. And that’s what I’m trying to paint about, the dichotomies—that things aren’t in opposition, but they’re in interconnectivity.”

Shapiro left her university job to study acupuncture in Seattle. Just for a year (she thought). She fell for the practice as much as the theory—and she was really good at it.

To say Shapiro’s work/life amounts to something approximating Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art, in which everything merges into a cohesive whole—is far from a stretch, as art and acupuncture melded on the island she made home. During this time she published multiple books, including a picture book about Vashon, My Island, and a graphic novel, Art Notes of an Acupuncturist. In the latter, she outlines a pictorial history of the synaesthetic cosmologies contained within the human body. With bursts of grotesque humor and poetic wit, Shapiro illustrates the interconnections at play in orifices and organs, tracing the invisible threads between elements and colors, emotions and smells. It reads like a legend to unlock the symbolism of her later work.

Because the demand for Shapiro’s art has increased, there’s less time for acupuncture lately; almost all her hours are committed to the studio, where she’s currently working on six pieces for her upcoming exhibit at SAM. As she leads the way into her workspace—a standalone building behind her house, where soft island light pours through skylights—she explains a piece she is working on, about the ginkgo trees she recently encountered in Japan. “They’re the oldest trees in existence, living fossils,” Shapiro muses. “They survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb.”

But, of course, it’s about more than just that. If you look closely, you can trace the nervous system of the universe in the wood and roots of those trees.

Hey, we’re hosting the World Cup, and not far from the immigrant rich Chinatown-International District. And since this is the “World” Cup, tens of thousands of people from around the world will be here. That's a problem! by Vivian McCall

While defending Trump’s mass deportation program before Congress today, ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons told Rep. Nellie Pou of New Jersey that the agency would be a “key part of the overall security apparatus” of the FIFA World Cup this year.

Hey, we’re hosting the World Cup, and not far from the immigrant rich Chinatown-International District. And since this is the “World” Cup, the world will be here.

That’s a problem. Not only for us, but for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Pou’s East Rutherford, New Jersey, and all the other host cities that’ve promised to protect their immigrants from this violent, unpopular agency.

I asked Mayor Katie Wilson’s office if A) this is the first they’ve heard of this B) whether the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, Customs and Border Protection, or the Trump Administration informed the city of its “security apparatus” C) if they suspected this would happen, given ICE’s vague security role at the Winter Olympics and D) what it can do to protect Seattle if ICE does come here for the World Cup.

The office did not return my request for comment.

Lyons didn’t pull this plan out of thin air. Last summer, Border Patrol posted and then deleted a statement on Facebook saying that they would be “suited and booted ready to provide security for the first round of games.” And yesterday, radio station KTTH wrote that Seattle will “be protected by a unified, multi-agency security operation” as it prepares to host the matches.

“What you have when you have U.S. government agencies thinking about the defense and the security of U.S. national security and citizens is pulling together our top resources and the most experienced folks from the U.S. government who have worked on these major events,” Mignon Houston, the deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, told conservative radio host Jason Rantz.

Record your question for the Savage Lovecast at savage.love/askdan! by Dan Savage I had a great time at Mr. Mid-Atlantic Leather last month in Washington D.C. For those who don’t know, MAL is an annual fetish event for gay men. There is a lot of socializing in the lobby of the host hotel and a lot of kinky play in the rooms. One of the highlights for me was a mummification party. However, things got awkward when I had to explain to my friends that my husband thought I was on a business trip. We’ve been together for 25 years, living a happy life in a very blue college town in a very red state. Early in the relationship, he discovered that I am into BDSM when he found some Polaroids and some bondage gear in a duffel bag in the back of the closet. I had planned to tell him, just not at the very beginning of our relationship. Instead of…

[ Read more ]

The Stranger's Morning News Roundup by Vivian McCall

Senate Committee Passes Millionaire’s Tax: The 9.9 percent income tax on people making more than $1 million a year is moving forward with a tax break for small businesses. Businesses making $300,000 or less won’t have to pay a dime of the state’s business and occupation (B&O) tax, while those making below $600,000 will see limited relief. The state Senate could vote on the bill as early as next week.

Party Fouls: Police arrested several people after the Seahawks won the Superbowl Sunday night. For having a good time? No, for DUI, assault, and weapons violations.

Not the Olympic Marmot! Our local whistling rodent isn’t on the endangered species list yet, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service has determined a petition to list them warrants further review. As temperatures warm, trees are advancing up the mountain, destroying the alpine meadows they call home. There’s no place else for them to go.

Fortunately, climate change is not real. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency will revoke the “endangerment finding” this week, an Obama-era policy that determined that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide threaten public health. The finding is the legal basis for nearly all regulations under the Clean Air Act.

At least we have our health? Roughly 19,000 fewer Washingtonians signed up for health insurance through the state’s online marketplace this year. The drop isn’t as bad as the state predicted (80,000), but decidedly not good either. The state’s Cascade Care Savings plan for people who make up to 250 percent of the federal poverty line helped mitigate the loss of federal subsidies this year, but it won’t last.

At least we have … capitalism? Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has largely stopped protecting us, a decision that has cost Americans about $19 billion in the last year. The report says in the last year the CFPB has abandoned major consumer protections, stalled investigations, and dismissed lawsuits. Last year, Trump announced that he wanted to essentially pull the plug on the agency, reducing staff from 1,689 to 207, a move mercifully blocked in the courts.

Um, chat? Next month, default gamer messaging app Discord will automatically set user accounts to “teen-appropriate” experience, unless they can verify their age with a government ID or an AI face scan. This is the same company that exposed the government IDs of 70,000 users when a third party service it used for age verification was hacked.

Hostage Situation: Trump posted that he won’t open the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Winsor, Canada until Canada has “fully compensated” the US for “everything we have given them.” “With all we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least half of this asset.” Trump also said that if Canada made a trade deal with China, “the first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.” What?

Rare W: The Republican Governor of New Hampshire vetoed her party’s anti-trans bathroom bill for a third time. Here’s the state’s motto: Live Free or Die. 

ICYMI: If you miss rooting for the home team, you could watch Seattle drag queen Jane Don’t compete on Drag Race. Stranger contributor Mike Kohfeld has another RuPaul recap.

Phone … wallet … keys, and OH NO! A Louisiana National Guard soldier left his AR-15 in a hotel bathroom on Bourbon Street while on patrol in the French Quarter. “I kind of feel bad for him because that's one of the main rules of being in the Army I would think is you're always supposed to have your weapon in your hands and not in somebody else’s,” said French Quarter performer Nervous Dwayne.

I know nothing gets past you. But the less observant people in your life will appreciate this explainer of the political and cultural references in Bad Bunny’s Superbowl performance.

I believe many, many things get past this guy:

It literally had a heterosexual wedding, dude

[image or embed]

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) February 10, 2026 at 5:21 AM

Liar: Trump has maintained he knew nothing of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes. But in 2006, he told the then-chief of the Palm Beach police department Micahel Reiter that Epstein’s “activities” with teenage girls were well known in New York and Palm Beach. “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Reiter recalled Trump saying in a 2019 FBI interview released in the Epstein case files.

A song for Trump: