KUOW Seattle News and Information

Let this segment take you back — WAY back. We’re in your high school computer class. It's the 1980s: Walkmans in backpacks, satin jackets in lockers, Apple IIe computers running BASIC. Where is this nostalgic wonderland, you ask?

Can your car be your home, in the eyes of the law? What would you do if you could go back in time to the 1980s? And what do we do with the art of problematic men? We explore the ins and outs this hour.

When you think of cities known for southern cooking, you might think of Savannah, Georgia or Nashville, Tennessee. You wouldn’t think of Seattle. But Seattle chef Edouardo Jordan is putting Seattle on the map with his southern cooking.

If you’re familiar with the Dear Sugar advice column, you know who Steve Almond is. For the uninitiated, he was the first “Sugar” — a purportedly female advice columnist on The Rumpus. After a while, Almond says, that got weird.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is famously small in stature—and has a penchant for short jokes about himself — but he has big ideas about democracy, patriotism, work, leadership, and the American experiment.

We recently hosted a debate to answer a simple question: Is Amazon good for Seattle? And the answer is: We don’t really know for certain. But the debate did have a clear winner.

It's March 14! The day before the Ides of March, three days before St. Patrick's Day, but 3.14 is a special day all its own: Pi Day. This year is the 30th anniversary of a whimsical holiday that celebrates the irrational, infinite, transcendent excellence of the universal constant.

Marcie Sillman talks to Samuel Woolley , director of the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute of the Future, about how social media bots have influenced and driven conversations online and what can be done to stop the flow of disinformation.

Football verges on being an American religion. But instead of the saints being martyred, they're getting hit. Hard. And often. The ensuing concussions can cause severe mental deterioration, erratic behavior, and even suicide.

Last week special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians for using bots to interfere with the presidential election. What are bots, how do they work and why can't we seem to stop them? Sam Woolley of Oxford's Computational Propaganda Research Project gives us a Bots 101.

After a lot of rain, you might be used to hearing us say something like this on the air: “Amtrak has canceled passenger train service from Seattle to Everett for the next two days …” Landslides on railroad tracks along Puget Sound frequently delay trains. That made KUOW listener April Isenhower curious: Why were train tracks between Seattle and Everett built in areas prone to mudslides?

Marilyn Montufar is fascinated by life on the edge. Not the metaphorical risky edge; Montufar means civilization’s edge.

In the early 1990s, Carmen Best was working as an accountant for a local insurance company when she saw a recruitment ad for the Seattle Police Department. “I just wanted to do something different, try something out," she told Bill Radke. "Had no preconceived ideas about staying for a long time, or not staying, just thought I would give it a shot and see what happens.”

Marilyn Balcerak said she can predict that the birthdays of her son and stepdaughter will be hard. What’s harder to predict are the random events that will take her back to the day when her son James — who had autism and struggled with depression — killed his stepsister Brianna and then himself in 2015. One of those events was the shooting at the high school in Florida last week.

Several years ago, Seattle poet Tina Schumann was inspired to compile an anthology of memoir, essays and poems by children of immigrants in the United States.