RANGE

If you or a loved one are experiencing domestic or sexual violence and would like help, the StrongHearts Helpline offers assistance from within an indigenous cultural context. This week we speak with Yakama tribal member Jenny Slagle about some brutal, vital topics: The disproportionality with which our indigenous neighbors go missing, experience sexual violence, and end up murdered The structural...

Hey y’all. A couple weeks ago the DC-based Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story from right in our backyard about a coordinated effort by Kootenai County Republicans to run for the ostensibly non-partisan North Idaho College Board of Trustees on explicitly conservative talking points. They leveraged the full power of the local Republican Central Committee, ended up winning a super majori...

This week we talk with State Rep. Marcus Riccelli about all the work our state legislature has been doing this session. Including: Public Health Reform Universal Health Care Capital Gains Tax This one isn’t through the house yet and has an opportunity to get better, see below. Just Cause Evictions And last but not least … wait for it … his controversial take on the downtown stadi...

This week on the pod we talk with reporter Daisy Zavala, who wrote our heartbreaking farmworker profile “ Essential, but Unprotected ” (there’s also a Spanish-language version ). This is still a hell of an interview regardless of whether you’ve read the story or not — much of the interview is discussing the pitfalls of being a young professional journalist of color &#...

Continuing our housing series with a dash of sprawl containment, farmland preservation, racial equity and environmental impact (not to mention crawdad fishing in Elk!), this week we talk with Kitty Klitzke, Spokane Program Director for Futurewise, an organization that works throughout Washington state to encourage healthy, equitable and opportunity-rich communities, and to protect our most valuabl...

Hey y’all, it’s been a few weeks of pretty relentlessly depressing topics here at RANGE HQ so we thought we’d do something a little lighter. Not like, light light, but still light-er. Doing another film ep, this time talking about the Spokane Jewish Cultural Film Festival — which begins TONIGHT AT 7 PM! — with festival director and head of Spokane Area Jewish Family S...

This week on the pod we talk to Virla Spencer and Camerina Zorrozua of The Way to Justice, a newish non-profit that helps people get their lives back after run ins with the criminal legal system. Cam works primarily in post-conviction relief — helping people who have been locked up — while Virla runs the re-licensing program, helping poor folks who have lost their drivers license due t...

The conclusion of our interview with the inimitable Terri Anderson, Spokane Director and Policy Lead for the Tenants Union of Washington this week on the podcast. If you haven’t listened to PART 1 , I really recommend you do so before diving in here. You’ll thank me later. Things have not miraculously become perfect in the week since we posted the first episode, so it is still vitally...

Even after we manage to contain the public health crisis brought on by Covid-19, the danger isn’t over in Spokane. The economic crisis has left thousands of people without steady employment and, as a result, thousands of our neighbors are behind on their utility bills and behind on rent. This almost exclusively affects the poor, and because of our nation’s legacy of white supremacy and...

In this week’s episode we take a brisk 30-minute jaunt through some new polling data that confirms, yep, the rest of Spokane County wants a jail about as badly as we do — which is to say: NOT. AT. ALL. It’s encouraging news for everyone from reformists to prison abolitionists to get this sort of poll result in a Republican-leaning county like Spokane. But the real kicker is when...

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...