It's the Seattle podcastpalooza event of the season! You should join us on 𝐓𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 29𝐭𝐡 𝐚𝐭 6 𝐩𝐦 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐜 𝐌𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐮𝐦 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐁𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐂𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐁𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐮𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐰𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐝𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐭 to unpack the good, the bad and the ugly of how the rise of the tech economy has transformed San Francisco and Seattle in recent decades, and upended the two cities' political and power dynamics. A gusher of prosperity, yes, but at what cost? And how have the two cities differed in handling all the tech-driven change? Joining us on an all-star panel are: 𝐕𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐧 𝐒𝐅 𝐣𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐉𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐖𝐞𝐛𝐞𝐫, who has been covering the tech industry since he became the LA Times' first Silicon Valley reporter in 1990, and is now the author of a fantastic new book, 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘥𝘨𝘦: 𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺, 𝘗𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘍𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘢𝘯 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰; 𝐔𝐖 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐎'𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐚, author of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘥𝘦: 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘰𝘯 𝘝𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢, who has written extensively about how technology has reshaped culture and society in cosmopolitan America for the New York Times' opinion pages; And 𝐆𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐖𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐨-𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐉𝐨𝐡𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐨𝐤, who near as I can tell knows everything there is to know about Seattle's tech world. @hyded and I will moderate. It's going to be a fun, fascinating conversation. Tickets are available at the Nordic Museum website, or follow the link in the next tweet.

The latest BCB episode (link to follow) primarily consists of three aging Gen Xers yelling, “get off my lawn!” But in between our “kids today don’t know how rough we had it!” nostalgia trip with John Roderick, front man for legendary Seattle indie rock band The Long Winters and now host of the excellent (and omnivorous) @omnibusproject podcast (which John founded with Ken Jennings), we discuss what makes a city authentically cool. And we dissect how the cultural and economic conditions in America 30 plus years ago that made blue cities like Seattle, Portland and New York cool have shifted, and why Gen Z, rebelling against the simultaneously censorious and affirming culture of the Millennials, may be about to invent their own version of urban cool.

You can listen to our conversation with Kelsey Piper here, and if you're unfamiliar with her writing at The Argument, be sure to follow the links in the show notes: "Kelsey Piper on the Shameful Truth that Mississippi Beats Blue Cities on Educational Equity" podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

I knew there were big issues with the foster care system. But it wasn’t till I read Claudia @RoweReport’s excellent book (there’s a reason it was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction), Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, that I grokked how much the failures of the foster care system drives dysfunction and disorder on the streets of blue cities. The stats are staggering. There are about 400K kids in foster care at any given time. 59 percent of the kids who enter the foster care system will, by age 26, have been incarcerated at some point. Somewhere between a fifth and third of kids exiting the system to adulthood will become homeless. About 20 percent of the people in state prisons were foster kids. And so on. So @hyded and I invited Claudia (who’s day job is writing for @SeaTimesOpinion) onto Blue City Blues for an animated(!) conversation about how and why the foster care system is failing so many kids, what the downstream impacts of that failure means for the social functioning of blue cities, and what should be done about it. We went longer than usual with this episode because there was so much to talk about!

Now that Katie @wilsonformayor is the presumptive next mayor of Seattle, @hyded and my Blue City Blues conversation (taped over the weekend) with @seattletimes columnist Danny Westneat about why Seattle can't seem to make any headway on solving its problems, and whether Katie can actually deliver the change she is promising, seems very on point. Is she going to be the smart, thoughtful disruptor of an ossified status quo that Seattle needs, and that our yo-yoing voters are (perhaps?) pining for, or is she going to reinforce the paralysis and division that have come to define Seattle governance over the last decade? I genuinely don't know the answer to that question. But buckle your seatbelts, the next four years are going to be an interesting ride.

In the Seattle mayor's race the current trajectory is not as clear cut as @ronpdavis is making out below. Now, Ron is correct that if Katie Wilson's vote share follows the normal pattern, we should expect the counts today and Monday to push her to a narrow win. But... As my friend Mike Fong was pointing out to me this morning, Katie's vote trajectory is not following the normal pattern. For one thing, the Wednesday drop (contra the progressive spin on it) was really anomalous; I can't recall ever seeing such a strong shift (8 points) towards the centrist in the Wednesday drop. I'm not really a number crunchy data nerd so maybe I'm missing something here, but after confabbing and number crunching with Mike, the best way we came up with to elucidate the abnormality of Katie's results so far is as follows: Dionne Foster, in the more typically contested citywide Council race, came in at 57.9% on election night. In yesterday's batch, she got 66.1%, a left shift in her batch-to batch vote percentage of 8.2 points. Wilson on election night was at 46.2, and grabbed 51.6% of yesterday's count, a left shift in her percentage of 5.4 points. That's not just a confirmation of what we could already have assumed, which is that a significant number of late progressive voters are not voting as they typically do) a straight Stranger dittohead line. They are instead ticket splitting, voting for Dionne and Erika Evans (as you would expect) - both of whom are getting a big left shift bump - but then breaking ranks to vote for the mayor. Now we can quantify the extent of that movement left apostasy: 5.4/8.2 = .6585. IOW, if we're understanding the math correctly here, Katie is only getting just under two-thirds of the left shift she should be getting. Okay, as I pointed out in a previous tweet, we know the left shift in the last three mayoral races (this time, as measured by the shrink in the margin of victory) were 9, 10. and 12 points, respectively, so an average (being generous) of about 10.5 points. If Katie ends up only getting 65.8 percent of the average mayoral race left shift, her shift would be 6.9 points. Which is, of course, just below the 7.1 point lead the mayor had on election night. So that would suggest that if the current trajectory holds, the mayor would squeak it out by a truly razor thin margin. Now, this race is so close (at least so far) that if you tweak your assumptions even slightly it can produce an entirely different outcome. In the last mayoral election in '21, the left shift was 12 points (i.e., a little bigger than average). If that ends up being the full meal deal Dionne shift this time, Katie would still get a 7.9 percent shift, which would be enough to win. None of this is to say that I think the mayor is going to prevail in the end. The big takeaway here really is: I have NO CLUE WHO IS GOING TO WIN, and really, neither does anyone else 9at least until we get the next drop in a couple of hours). The assumptions are too squishy, the variables too many, and the race too freaking close to really be confident of any prediction of the final outcome. We're all just playing with the numbers, making interesting kaleidoscope patterns that give us a (false) sense that we know more than we do about what's going to happen in the remaining count. One point of clarity, though: we do know that Katie needs 55 percent of the remaining vote to catch up and win. So that's the current over/under: if she's thereabouts or higher in today's count, she's in a good position to win. If she's much below 55, Team Harrell will be high fiving.