weekly weekly report | sad stories edition
Does anyone actually pick up a weekly paper to read a long feature story? Doesn’t it seem a little soul-killing to read page after page of long form reporting on messy newsprint while shiny magazines sit neglected on the coffee table? That said, we’re off to another rundown on what the weeklies have to offer this week. Let us try to forget that it’s now Thursday evening and that you’ve probably read both of them already. This week, both papers go with long sad stories about locals.
features
The Stranger features intertwined profiles of Micah Painter and the men who savagely attacked him last summer. [#] The story, one of crushed dreams, drugs, immigration, gymnasts, Russians, and religion was strong enough to earn the A. Birch Steen seal of approval which is a rare commodity. On the other hand, the ombudsman also defended DeathFest; so take it with a grain of salt. But read it. Good work from Eli Sanders, even though it went to print before the three men were found guilty of committing a hate crime [p-i].

Cop: Good & Sad
In the other newsbin, the Seattle Weekly rigorously details the trials and tribulations of being a bipolar police officer [#] Over eight pages, we learn about so-called Good/Sad Cop Angela Holland. The shorter version: it’s hard to be bipolar, harder still to be a bipolar deputy, and that even a good record didn’t keep her on the force.
Not content with a single feature, the Weekly expands its book section with a series of related articles about books and film. Books about movies, movies about books, movies adapted from books, books about directors: there’s no shortage of topics and seemingly no page limit for this section; so if you’re into reading or watching or both, this could be the section for you to read on a long bus ride.
news
Both papers are skeptical of the ongoing struggle to save the Streetcar. The Weekly wins the column inches and cynicism battle (representative/concluding sentence: “the streetcar also demonstrates one reason Seattle continues to have such terrible problems developing solutions to our transportation problems — whimsy trumps reason”). The Weekly is also a little late to the Paul Allen South Lake Union Kickback Extravaganza while the Stranger rounds out its news section with some juicy Governor–Auditor drama in Olympia.
hot picks
Both papers agree on one topic: your should lay down twenty bucks and pencil-in Buck 65 for your Monday night. If you something better to do than listening to a Canadian hip-hop / unclassifiable musician at the Showbox on Monday, we’d like to hear about it.
comics
Good news for the Stranger fans. It looks like David Rees’s brilliant comic, Get Your War On might be a regular feature. Finally, a little competition for the Weekly’s usual best feature, This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow.
continued ignorance
We continue to ignore the Weekly’s personals section and still refuse to read Stefan Sharkansky’s column in the Stranger. Somehow reading a conservative rant mixed in with the usual Stranger frivolity seems like an unnecessary buzz kill.