Danny Westneat

4 days ago | seattletimes.com | Danny Westneat

As a scientist who depends on research grants, Elena Austin of the University of Washington can’t bear to look at the DOGE grant-slashing website. “I’ve been trying to avoid it,” she told me. It did not, however, avoid her. DOGE, the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency, recently posted that a grant to Austin, an environmental health scientist in Seattle, had been tagged for elimination.

1 week ago | bellinghamherald.com | Danny Westneat

May 7-Some of the purported King's subjects gathered in downtown Seattle the other day, to object, as disgruntled Americans have been known to do, to a self-proclaimed King's latest decrees. The big question was: What if the King cuts us off? This was actually a routine committee hearing at the Metropolitan King County Council.

1 week ago | seattletimes.com | Danny Westneat

Writing this column for two decades, one thing I’ve noticed is that nothing hacks some people off more than good news. This is especially true of good news about crime. Reports of falling crime are uniquely narrative-upsetting and denial-triggering. People who regularly cite police data when crime is rising simply do not accept this same data when it goes the other way. It’s odd when these are the police themselves.

1 week ago | seattletimes.com | Danny Westneat

Now that lawmakers have ended their yearly session in Olympia, some unusually big questions remain over the state Capitol. What will Bob Ferguson do now? What is in the new governor’s head? Will he sign off on one of the largest tax increases in recent history? Or will he veto parts of it, or all of it, and call lawmakers back to Olympia for a do-over? Typically after nearly four months of legislative action, the answers to these types of questions are clearer. But with Ferguson, it’s: Who knows?

3 weeks ago | seattletimes.com | Danny Westneat

Abraham Flaxman is a professor at the University of Washington who studies diseases and how they affect global health. He’s a bit uneasy, he says, with military talk. But such are the times that when I ask him the meaning of the movement he’s brought to the UW, he answers with this:“An attack on one is an attack on all,” he says, quoting the core premise of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military alliance that formed in the aftermath of World War II.