Soundside

President Elect Donald Trump has promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on day one of his administration. Removing the approximately 11.7 million people living in the United States without authorization would take a massive operational effort -- and likely require cooperation from both state and local governments. Right now, most Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in t...

As the Trump administration prepares to take office, a fight is brewing over the future of homelessness in America. For about a decade now, the federal government has pushed a strategy called Housing First. It's designed to get people off the streets and into permanent homes... even when they have serious problems with mental illness or substance use. Seattle was one of the earliest adopters of th...

In an effort to curb gun crime, Tacoma announced last year that it was turning to a tool called ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter is a form of Gun Detection Technology (GDT), which uses a series of acoustic microphone sensors to track loud bangs, booms, and pops in a designated area. Once those "dynamic events" are triggered, a human classifier verifies the sound was a gunshot and alerts local police. The...

Amazon employees are back in the office five days a week, five years after Covid-19 shook up work as we know it; as the company’s so-called Return-To-Office policy took effect on Thursday, January 2nd.  Amazon is the largest private employer to roll back its pandemic-era work from home policy. So, what will this mean for both employees AND local businesses in the hubs where Amazon resid...

It’s been five years since Covid 19 began spreading around the world from its origin in Wuhan, China. In that emergent time of the pandemic, there was widespread concern about clusters of the virus, in Italy, then Iran, then an outbreak at a nursing home in the Pacific Northwest. By March of 2020, an unprecedented international phenomenon took place: countries began closing their borders. Wh...

Washington lawmakers are facing an estimated $12 billion dollar budget deficit as they prepare to go back to work next week. How to cover that gap is the big story heading into the session. Majority Democrats are already floating possibilities for new taxes to bridge the difference between spending and revenue. And while the budget is undoubtedly the biggest challenge – lawmakers are al...

2025 is officially here - and with that comes a whole lotta new: new resolutions, new goals, and a new page a day pull away calendar on your desk at work.  But even with all this new to look forward to - at least one thing will stay the same in 2025: we’ll be here to bring you the news coverage you rely on and trust every day. Soundside reached out to the KUOW newsroom to ask reporters...

He’s no longer rolling up to Franklin High School in a blue Oldsmobile Super 88 with homemade white wall tires, or knocking out accounting tests on the University of Washington campus, but Kenny G is still in touch with his Seattle roots -- even after selling more than 75 million records worldwide. The iconic sax-man played a run of sold-out shows at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley over the tur...

Soundside will be off the air on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. We will be back with some fresh new stories Jan. 2.  For today, we’ve revisiting a mix of some of Soundside producer Alec Cowan's favorite segments from this past year, including his patrol with a pair Seattle's "real-life superheroes" and the musicians keeping jazz music alive in Seattle.  We also have one new story...

The tabletop role playing game Dungeons & Dragons was first published in 1974. 5 decades later, there’s a new ‘edition’ of the game out, and D&D has changed dramatically from its origins in a little house in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The anniversary is happening at a delicate time for the company, Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro. Arguably the first modern table...

The Soundside team is taking the week off to rest and prepare for some upcoming shows we’re working on in the new year. So in the meantime, we're going to revisit two of Libby's segments from 2024. And to do that, we're going back in time, to the Seattle of the 1990s.  We’ll look back on the music of grunge band The Gits, and hear from the band’s former drummer about hi...

All this week, Soundside has heard from local sound artists about their quintessential sounds of the Pacific Northwest.  We’ve heard coyotes howling across the Methow Valley, the bygone squeak of a metro bus, and the rhythm of melting snow.  Along the way we’ve asked for your favorite Northwest sounds. You sent us some good ones – the sound of North Cascades rain on a t...

Are your music listening habits stuck in a rut? Did you open your Spotify Wrapped and realize you listened to the same five songs on an endless loop? Maybe you want to mix it up in 2025, and become more acoustically adventurous.  Soundside is here to help you out - we've rounded up a panel of local music experts to give you some fresh recommendations for albums to check out before we hea...

Soundside is about to take a long and well deserved break, we’ve got some best-of shows planned for the holiday week, and we’re just generally excited to go DO some fun STUFF! And in that spirit, here’s somebody who has ALL the stuff worth doing: producer Jason Megatron Burrows with a few sneak peeks of things to keep you occupied through Christmas Day! LINKS: The Jinkx & DeL...

After almost 20 years in public office, Derek Kilmer is stepping down from his role as U.S. Representative for WA's 6th district.  The Representative was chair of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress - sometimes called the “Fix Congress Committee” - from 2019 to 2023.  He’s also the former chair of the New Democrat Coalition - a caucus of centrist democ...

Around 3:00am today, a King County Metro driver was fatally stabbed near the 4100 block of University Way in Seattle’s U-District. At a press conference this morning, King County Executive Dow Constantine said that the loss is being felt by everyone in county transit.  "We are not always able to keep what's happening out on the streets away from the transit that operates on those street...

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has fired former Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz. The decision was announced Tuesday in a letter from the mayor to the Seattle City Council.  Ashley Hiruko is a KUOW investigative reporter who has been covering news about former Chief Diaz for the past year. She joined Soundside's Libby Denkmann to give a little more insight into what’s happening at Sea...

The light touch of tea glasses. Jasmine vines. Cigarette kisses. These are some of the images the Redmond-based poet, essayist, and translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha conjures of Palestine in her most recent poetry collection, Something About Living. Last month, the collection earned Tuffaha the National Book Award for poetry.  Through her poems, Tuffaha chronicles the legacy of violence and colo...

What does the Northwest sound like to you? It’s a question we’ve asked local sound artists. And this week, we’ve been sharing some of their  sound choices.  Yesterday, Christopher DeLaurenti played a recording of the bygone squeak of a metro bus.  Our next piece of tape comes from Gordon Hempton.  Guest: Gordon Hempton , acoustic ecologist and Emmy Award winni...

What does the Northwest sound like to you? It’s a question we’re asking local sound artists. And, over the next week, we’ll be hearing some of those sounds. Yesterday, Perri Lynch Howard shared the sound of coyotes in the Methow Valley .  Today’s sound has a bit more of a metropolitan flare. This sound originally appeared on a compilation called phongraphy.org 1 on and...

Breakups are always hard. Especially when you’re two of the largest grocery mega-conglomerates in the country.  Last week two judges – including a federal judge in Oregon and a superior court judge based in Seattle – officially blocked a merger between grocery chains Kroger and Albertsons. The companies had argued they needed to unite to compete with the likes of Wal-Mart.&n...

Emily Randall has been a “person to watch” in Washington politics for a while now.  Randall’s first electoral victory was in 2018, when she flipped a Republican held state Senate seat in the 26th district.  Now, Randall is headed to Congress. Last month, she won the election to become the U.S. Representative-elect for Washington’s 6th district. That includes both...

What does the Northwest sound like to you? Is it light drizzle on you window? The sound of waves pushing against rocky beaches or dry grass blowing in the Palouse.  It’s a question that we’ve asked local sound artists in the area. And, over the next week, we’ll be hearing some of those sounds.  Today, we take you to the Methow Valley. Guest:  Perri Lynch Howard - I...

Washington State has a brand-new Superfund site: the Upper Columbia River. It’s the latest development in the federal government's attempts to force a Canadian company to pay for pollution that flowed down stream into U.S. waters. So what’s the next step for cleaning up the river? Well, it’s a long process, which Seattle-ites can see in their own backyard. Cleanup is also be...

For the first time in 24 years, Washington has a new state Insurance Commissioner stepping into the role. Patty Kuderer is currently a state senator representing the 48th district, which covers areas including Redmond, Bellevue, and Medina.  She’ll become Washington’s 9th insurance commissioner in January. It’s a big job - Kuderer will be in charge of licensing and regu...