RANGE

Listen now | Hey y’all! Amazing conversation about cooperatives this week with Joel Williamson, one of the co-founders of LINC Foods and the Grain Shed. We talk about coops as an organizational and business structure that is not just inherently more ethical for the workers who work within that system, it also more effectively traps capital in our communities, building resiliency through the...

Listen now | Friend of the pod and Gonzaga professor Joan Braune — noted critical theorist and Nazi disliker — joins to talk about how language shapes the way we view reality and how the blanket usage of words like “terrorism” and “extremism” — even when explicitly describing right wing violence like last week’s attack on the Capitol building —...

This week on the pod we zig a little into our first film crit episode, and chat with local filmmaker Benji Wade about Hillbilly Elegy, a movie that has been on everyone’s lips since it came out in time for the election. It’s the not-so-riveting story of how a poor white kid from Southeast Ohio overcame generational trauma through nothing but his own pluck and grit (or so the film would...

Got some hot pod-on-pod action this week. We were joined for this very special Christmas-adjacent podcast by Chris Bovey and Bryce Neusse of the Broken podcast. We talk about how the dudes lost their respective churches but rediscovered their faith in the wake of George Floyd, and how they feel like their calling now is to slay the biggest hypocrisies in the evangelical faith while considering the...

This week, in the second part of our interview with Ben Stuckart — an hour of pure cask-strength righteous indignation about our housing crisis, cut with an effervescent spritzer of audio slapstick and other goofery. It’s real good. Further reading  Spokane City Council considers new sales tax to fund affordable housing (S-R) Council tentatively approves sales tax to fund affordab...

Morning everyone. Big energy on the pod this week. Speaking with former city council president, current public policy gadfly Ben Stuckart about the very-’90s named PHACTS — Public Health Action Coalition Team of Spokane — a group of dozens of professionals and organizations who have united in the face of Bob Lutz’ firing (covered extensively in RANGE, see below) to effectua...

Listen now (65 min) | EMERGENCY POD — Kinda As the pandemic enters its eighth month, the nation is subsumed by the biggest wave of coronavirus yet and Washington State grapples with new restrictions, we spoke with Meg Curtin Rey-Bear, LMHC, co-owner of Wellness Therapies Spokane Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe

HOUSEKEEPING: Had a lot of wild news roll through Spokane last week. If you haven't subscribed to the RANGE Newsletter , you really should.  SHOW NOTES Western States Center's Kate Bitz joins us to talk about the ever-percolating threat of white nationalism, it's roots stretching back to the founding of our nation and the settling of the Inland Northwest, why it's such a uniquely pernicious proble...

HOUSEKEEPING: I started a Patreon. If you love, like or even tolerate RANGE, please consider becoming a Patron! SHOW NOTES Profoundly happy to welcome Jess Walter on to talk about his brand new book, The Cold Millions, which you can buy starting TODAY from literally anywhere books are sold because the man is a damn phenomenon.  And while you CAN buy this book anywhere, I owe a tremendous debt of g...

Tenant organizer and Spokane DSA co-chair Jeremy Logan joins us to talk about his arrest at the hands of Spokane County Sheriff's Deputies on the way to a Black Lives Matter protest and the truly remarkable obsession Sheriff Ozzie seems to have now that national media took an interest in the arrest. Logan also shares the story of the last decade of his life and just how hard it is to pull yourself...

In what is sure to be a collectors item for real news heads, this ep features rare journo-nerd b-sides from The Spokesman Review's Shawn Vestal.  TOPICS DISCUSSED East-coast bias National correspondents helicoptering into protests (Lack of) newsroom diversity On believing the children young journalists are our future SUPPLEMENTS The Truth Does not Change According to Our Ability to Stomach It -- L...

This week’s guest is a big deal. How big? I’m just going to quote her bio in the New York frickin Times :  Leah Sottile is a writer based in Oregon whose work focuses on extremist ideologies, the anti-government movement and fringe cultures. She is the host and reporter for the podcast “Bundyville,” which has been nominated twice for a National Magazine Award. I should have outlined it better in m...

Hey y'all. Long time, no pod. Here's part one of an honest chat with Shawn Vestal about how white people can have tough conversations with themselves and others about the work we all need to do in this moment. Spurred by a column Shawn wrote about the backlash from a video posted by Catholic Charities CEO Rob McCann , which led to a sharp (and gross) rebuke from Thomas Daly, Spokane’s Catholic bis...

Hey! It's the second part of the conversation with Angelique Tomeo and Sabrina Ryan-Helton of the Bail Project. If episode one was about talking about the system and how it destroys people's lives and weakens the fabric of society itself, episode two is more about how we might fight back in the short term by helping bail as many folks as possible out so they can actually claim their rights and fig...

Hey y'all fascinating conversation -- part 1 of 2 -- with Angelique Tomeo and Sabrina Ryan-Helton of the Bail Project about how maybe America isn't really the land of the free after all, what with the absurd amounts of pre-trial detention going on all throughout America (and certainly in Spokane) and how, just maybe, we should totally dismantle and abolish such a horribly inhumane system all toget...

This week’s RANGE comes in two parts. PART 1 | A Letter to My City Council Members | Offers a little background on the soon to be voted-upon police contract as a warm up for a dramatic reading of a letter Luke wrote this week asking Spokane City Council to tear it up with extreme prejudice.  PART 2 | Our Borders, Ourselves | We reach the conclusion of the awesome interview with Yakima immigration...

Immigration lawyer Stephen Robbins dials in for a WIDE ranging chat about life in Yakima -- currently the unexpected epicenter (or in Governor Inslee's words, "Eh-pee-center") of Coronavirus in Washington State.  We cover the demographic and political environment in the county and how pre-existing sanitation and other abysmal conditions in the agricultural industry might be contributing to a publi...

  Jac Archer dials in to talk protest, big white supremacy (murder), little white supremacies (the gutting of EWU's gender and ethnic studies programs) and how you can't just support black liberation when it makes you comfortable. Oh, and Luke and Jac also talk Scandal (the show) and trade James Baldwin quotes like total badasses. This talk fired Luke the hell up, and he wanted to get it out in ti...

While much of America is on fire, and trust in police is shaken to the core, activists have discovered that Spokane law enforcement has invited Dave Grossman -- the inventor of "Killology," a widely discredited training technique -- to train our local police.  His ideas are flippant, callous and more concerned with making sure cops know how to beat a shooting than how to help those in need. These...

Good news Millennials: your life sucks exactly as much as you think it sucks! And that's according to journalism! Luke takes a deepish dive into a Washington Post article by Andrew Van Dam and a few other sources on income and wealth inequality and turns out -- yep! -- what we always suspected to be true is true: There is no generation more abjectly screwed than your friendly neighborhood millenni...

An interview with cook, writer, artist & activist Tunde Wey sends Luke down a rabbit hole thinking about the place of restaurants as one of the most accessible, understandable (and delicious!) places where capital from literally all over the world collides right in front of us, and how restaurateurs -- like all small business owners -- must take this moment of crisis to be an ally of workers, not...

Luke takes a trip down to nerd town and really digs into the data on predicted coronavirus deaths, national perceptions on how quickly to open back up, the interplay of fear of the virus and economic anxiety and finally how to win an argument against someone who calls you "sheeple" without coming off as a total cuck globalist! Then, at the end of the show (right as Luke was about to go to bed), Dr...

A bad editorial in our local newspaper demanding workers use their health to grease the economy inspires a brief history of newspaper editorial boards, a deep dive into the American concept of objective journalism, an attempt to reframe the value of human life (no big deal there). Oh, and our first old-timey radio skit! Housekeeping : Here's a link to the editorial in question .  Our badass theme...

Starting a podcast maybe isn't the first thing you'd imagine doing four-plus weeks into a nationwide lock down, but we're all working through this in our own way, okay? It's been an almost indescribably dark time for many people across the world, and there isn't currently an end in sight. But maybe there's something to be found in this utterly brutal but also unprecedented month that can give us s...