Recent Stories with tag town hall

Showdown! Just got notice that Mayor Mike McGinn sent a letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer "saying that he would welcome the opportunity to discuss plans regarding the 520 bridge replacement project." The Mayor suggests a town campus hall with Ballmer and Microsoft employees in Redmond. See the full text of the letter after the jump.

Steve Ballmer
CEO Microsoft Corporation

Steve,

The current 520 bridge is unsafe and its congestion is a serious regional problem. I believe the thousands of Microsoft employees who spend far too much time away from their families stalled on that bridge deserve better.

The proposed A+ 520 bridge replacement plan will delay replacement given its divisiveness, likelihood for a lawsuit, and failure to address the reality of climate change.

The Coalition for a Sustainable 520, House Speaker Frank Chopp (D-43), Senator Ed Murray (D-43), Representative Jamie Pedersen (D-43), Seattle Councilmembers Nick Licata and Mike O’Brien, the Sierra Club, the Cascade Bicycle Club and I support a 520 bridge replacement that maintains its current auto-capacity and features light rail from the start. We are encouraged by a recent poll showing that 69
percent of those living in affected Seattle neighborhoods and 71 percent of those living in affected Eastside neighborhoods support light rail across the 520 bridge.

Bill Gates demonstrated tremendous leadership in addressing climate change during his speech at the recent TED Conference:
“Until we get near to zero [carbon emissions] the temperature will continue to rise. That’s a big challenge. It’s very different from saying we’re a 12-foot high truck trying to get under a 10-foot bridge and we can sort of just squeeze under. This is something that has to get to zero…

We have to go from rapidly rising, to falling and falling all the way to zero.”

I appreciate your efforts to inform Microsoft employees of this issue and encouraging them to participate in the discussion over how to build the best replacement of the 520 bridge. In that spirit, I would ask that you share my response below with your employees as well. I would also welcome the opportunity to discuss this important project in a town hall with you and fellow Microsoft employees on your campus in Redmond.

Sincerely,
Mayor Mike McGinn

The male portion of The Magnetic Fields. Photo by joshc.

It's hard to know what to make of these Magnetic Fields. They are a completely non-dynamic band who somehow have a strong stage presence. Singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt is at times downright captivating, though he is also dour and morose. Sure, at Town Hall last night he had a cold, but when I saw him five years ago, he also had a cold then. I think it's safe to say he officially has the consumption. That would make me a little grumpy too.

They're all Stephin's songs, of course. He's got twenty-three or so albums under a variety of monikers (among them Future Bible Heroes, The 6ths, and The Gothic Archies), nine as The Magnetic Fields. Assuredly, at the second Seattle show tonight (some tix still available on Craigslist), he will have a completely different set list.  Last night's crowd got a few from 69 Love Songs, some from i, and plenty from the latest album Realism, the companion to 2008's Distortion. But we also got the b-sides and varieties: one of his Lemony Snicket songs, one of his Hans Christian Andersen songs, two Pieces of April songs, and "100,000 Fireflies," the band's first single. ...

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Atul Gawande speaks Sunday, January 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall, 8th & Seneca. Advance tickets are $5 [brownpapertickets].

Atul Gawande, the Checklist Manifesto. At Town Hall on Sunday.

One of the most passed-around, must-read articles this summer among those interested in the future of health care was Atul Gawande's examination of McAllen, Texas, which has the distinction of being one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. [New Yorker].

Comparing the town's health care delivery system to that of its less pricey neighbor El Paso and to the Mayo Clinic, he revealed how entrepaneurial spirit, affinity for procedures, and reimbursement structures contribute to the county's extreme medical expenditures.

His conclusions were reassuringly frustrating (more doctor-patient time, less testing, and a centralized responsibility for the totality of patient care results in lower costs and better outcomes) and ominous (this model seems to be winning, nationally).

The article is emblematic of the lucid, evidence-based writing that Gwande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard associate professor, has regularly contributed during his decade-long tenure as a staff writer for The New Yorker. He appears as part of Town Hall's Future of Health Lecture Series tomorrow in support of his latest book, The Checklist Manifesto [amazon], a simple and effective response to the enormous strains resulting from the demands to make sense of the increasing complexity of scientific discovery.

Opening with surgical anecdotes sure to grab the attention of lovers of grisly medical mysteries and spanning beyond the operating theater to other fields, he aims to show the pivotal role of the checklist. The topic, while perhaps not the most riveting on its surface, has powerful and wide-ranging implications and seems especially timely in this month of resolutions for self-improvement.

I walked into the rehearsal space next to Tougo Coffee and there were four musicians setting up, which was not quite the ensemble size I was expecting. "It looks like we're gonna start at jazz two o'clock," said Andrew Boscardin, checking his watch and grinning. In a few minutes, eight more musicians filtered in and sat down, and there it was: a big band. I thought these things were extinct.

Actually, there's a coast-and-coast flowering of big jazz bands that prize innovation, excitement, and new compositional voices. A recent New Yorker listing mentions three exemplars: the steampunk jazz of Secret Society, not-industrial "avant-garde party music" of Industrial Jazz Group, and Bjork-inspired concoctions of Bjorkestra. Secret Society is led by Darcy James Argue, who lives in New York. Portland's Andrew Durkin composes for the Industrial Jazz Orchestra. Another New Yorker, Travis Sullivan, leads Bjorkestra, with arrangements also from Kevin Schmidt, and Kelly Pratt.

Seattle is not lagging. WACO (Washington...

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David Byrne says "much of Seattle" is "vibrant and full of life." He wrote it down in black-and-white in his new book, Bicycle Diaries. But there is another paragraph that summons up Seattle, too.

There is often a highway along the waterfront in many towns. Before these highways were built, the waterfronts, already dead zones, were seen as the most logical places from which to usurp land for conversion into a concrete artery. Inevitably, little by little, the citizens of these towns become walled off from their own waterfronts, and the waterfronts become dead zones of yet a different kin--concrete dead zones of clean, swooping flyovers and access ramps that soon were filled with whizzing cars. Under these were abandoned shopping carts, homeless people, and piles of toxic waste. [...]

Much of  the time it turns out the cars are merely using these highways not to have access to businesses and residences in the nearby city, as might have been originally proposed, but to bypass that city entirely.

The book itself...

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Tonight, author and Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank, of What's the Matter With Kansas? fame, is giving a talk at Town Hall at 7:30, about the legacy of the Republicans' mismanagement of government. Tickets are $5 advance or at the door starting at 6:30.

Frank's last book, The Wrecking Crew, about Republican mismanagement of government, isn't as good as What's the Matter With Kansas?, but it's better than most critics gave it credit for. A historian by training, Frank drafts a history of the Republican Revolution from the 1980s to the present that's all tactics and no ideology. He follows dozens of little-known political organizations with important direct mail lists, which fueled public resentment of government while ensuring a steady revenue stream for dedicated Republican loyalists. He details the internal power struggles of the College Republicans, which, in the Eighties, produced some of the Right's most notable power brokers (Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff among them). And he traces how the... (more)