Without going too deep into the details, it is fair to say that life today in these United States occasionally has me casting longing glances toward Canada. Sure, our neighbors to the north are dealing with their fair share of problems—a once-dreamy prime minister that has become a sentient oil pipeline comes to mind, not to mention the steep price of milk—but on certain days, the grass really does look greener just across the border.

While the socialized medicine, access to education,…

William Shakespeare never had a Twitter account, but there’s no doubt he’s trending—at least in Whatcom and Skagit counties, where his words and his works are set to sparkle on stages throughout much of the summer.

For Shakespeare Northwest’s 18th annual Skagit River Shakespeare Festival, that stage will once again be the natural environs of the Rexville-Blackrock Amphitheater. This will be the ninth year the company with the motto of performing “outdoors and under the stars, the way…

Mark Boyle is no stranger to remaking himself. In the fall of 2008, he embarked on an experiment in living without money, documenting the experience with the publication of The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living (2010) and a follow-up guide, The Moneyless Manifesto: Live Well, Live Rich, Live Free.

He has been a vegan and a hunter; a business school graduate and an organic food company manager. In 2007, he set out to walk from southwest England to the birthplace of Gandhi in…

I don’t know how they did it. But Disney’s pristine, photorealistic rendering of the animated smash The Lion King trades one style of animation for another, marking a simultaneous advance and retreat for modern filmmaking.

It’s a step forward technologically and three steps back every other way. It represents a new high and a new low in Disney’s ongoing recycling program.

It’s persuasive, meticulous work within its chosen visual landscape, as far as it goes.

And for me it…

Practically overnight, our backyard raspberry canes went from “I think the fruit is getting close to being ripe” to “oh my lord, what are we gonna do with all of these lovely red raspberries?”

Last weekend, my fella and I attempted to answer that question by throwing freshly picked handfuls in bowls of cereal, muddling them with a mortar and pestle to add to vodka spritzers, baking some in a pie along with strawberries and rhubarb, freezing them on top of parchment paper on a baking…

The two exhibits currently on display at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner reveal different perspectives of Washington painting in the last century. 

On the main floor, “continuum…continued” includes selections from the museum’s collection that illustrate the best of the Northwest “mystic” artists.

A 1953 Life magazine article introduced Americans to Seattle painters Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Anderson, and Morris Graves, proclaiming “They translate reality into…

“Is the Tour de Whatcom a race or a ride?” is the first FAQ query on the website promoting the outing happening Sat., Jul 20, and the distinction is an important one for those contemplating whether they want to don a helmet and hop on their two-wheeled conveyance to take part.

“The Tour de Whatcom is a bicycle ride and although the course is marked, the START/FINISH line is the only street along the route that is completely shut down,” Whatcom Events explains. “Riders are expected to…

They touched the shore of the Olympic Peninsula on the weekend and were greeted in the Klallam language. Coastal tribes from Washington and British Columbia were welcomed to the revitalized estuary of the Elwah by youth of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe for the first time since 2005.

Growing in numbers as they travel, tribes paddle to Port Townsend, and on to Port Gamble, greeting and merging with other tribes as they travel the Salish Sea to Lummi. They’re expected to arrive July…

By now it should be clear that we underestimate Jesse Eisenberg at our own peril. His characters are often walking demonstrations of this principle: Think of the Harvard elites who scorned his young Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, or the assassins who made the mistake of taking on his stoner Jason Bourne in American Ultra. Eisenberg excels at playing an easily dismissible type—the nebbish, the misanthrope, the loner—but within that type he often discovers a startling range of…

Skagit is a land of wild rivers, soaring glacier peaks, fertile valleys and forested dots of islands sprinkling an inland sea. Powerful predatory whales live in these waters and feed on the tastiest wild fish on earth, the Chinook. Ours is as exotic as any landscape on the planet, and perhaps it is more threatened than many.

Those whales—the southern resident orcas—aren’t especially shy and can be viewed almost daily, although their numbers are in precipitous decline. Deaths in their pods have exceeded live births, threatening a spiral to extinction. They’re sick, and they’re starving. The cause? Increased human activity around the Puget Sound, as a region that is loved too much and too recklessly.

Alarmed by the decline of these iconic creatures, the Washington Legislature this session passed sweeping protections for the Salish Sea’s ailing orca population. Championed by lawmakers who represent Skagit and the San Juans, a quartet of bills cover a variety of measures, including whale watching, pollution and more. Yet budgets passed by the House and Senate so far contain no funding to continue the governor’s task force on orca recovery. There’s no agreement on plans to increase Chinook runs. And revenue measures to help pay for everything, from increasing hatchery production to enforcement of habitat protections, have yet to be decided.

As we dedicate this issue to celebrate all the best our region has to offer in scenic beauty, in recreation, in menus and samplings that are unique to who we are, let us acknowledge how fragile it is and how fierce we must be in its protection.