“Café Sketches,” a lighthearted selection of artists’ travel drawings and paintings, is showing until the end of the month at Perry and Carlson Gallery in Mount Vernon.

The exhibit features line drawing, which since the Renaissance has been acknowledged as the foundation of all visual arts. Gallery co-owner Christian Carlson, an architect himself, selected a number of elegant works by fellow architects as well as other artists. 

Five pencil drawings by Anita Lehmann reveal…

The road is obscure. It is little-traveled, but by and large is not in bad shape. Along the upper reaches the sides were lined with alpine wildflowers—columbine, lupine, tiger lily, paintbrush, phlox. Glacial ice gleamed blue-green across the plunging valley, its bottom clad in dark conifers. Somewhere down there, invisible from this elevation, a cold, clear creek rushed through the trees.

When the rain stopped, we packed our backpacks and headed up a sort-of-trail that exists on no…

Author, blogger and activist Cory Doctorow described himself as a “pulp science-fiction writer” while in Bellingham for his latest book tour.

Before turning to writing full time in 2006, Doctorow worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international digital rights group that provides guidance to governments and courts on issues regarding Internet civil liberties. The EFF has been successful in influencing legislation relating to encryption and email privacy.

All this is…

I grew beets for years without realizing the greens atop the blood-red root vegetable could be cooked and consumed, and were in fact rich with vitamins C, A, and E.

These days, I’m apt to add them to everything from stir-fries to pasta sauces and omelets, and have even been known to contribute a few leaves to bulk up various pesto concoctions—something else I’ve learned can be made not just with basil, but also with various garden goods such as chives, garlic scapes, arugula and…

The 1907 episode in a seaside timber town in Washington came to be known as the Bellingham Riots. Really, though, there were no riots.

There was a pogrom.

At the time, the United States was suffering through deep economic distress, a panic-filled recession that had begun the year before. Angry anti-immigrant sentiment was ascendant. And hundreds of Sikh men who had traveled from India to Bellingham to toil in the lumber mills paid the price.

Some 500 white men, many of them members…

The members of Asperger’s Are Us appreciate it when people enjoy their shows, but they’d also like it to be known that the sketch comedy they’ve been generating together off and on since meeting in 2010 isn’t designed to do anything other than make themselves—and other people—laugh.

“It’s about improving people’s standards for comedy,” cast member Noah Britton says of the group that formed after he met New Michael Ingemi, Jack Hanke, and Ethan Finlan at a summer camp for kids on…

Like all of you, I have spent the past several weeks ingesting the bulk of my musical intake in the great outdoors. From parks to fields to beer gardens to amphitheaters to the streets themselves, no al fresco spot has been safe from the seasonal sonic onslaught.

I’m certainly not complaining. The ability to wander into a concert at many of my favorite outdoor haunts is one of the things I remember fondly and wistfully during the dark days of winter.

But after the orgy of outdoor…

Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky is a high-spirited, lowdown blast. It’s a let’s-rob-the-racetrack heist comedy set in that all-American place that even rednecks would have no problem calling redneck country: the land of NASCAR and child beauty pageants, spangly long fingernails and roadside biker-bar brawls, and—these days being what they are—chronic unemployment and spiritual stagnation. The script, by Rebecca Blunt (it’s her first, and it’s a beauty), exploits the Southern…