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Featured Event: This year’s Langston Hughes African American Film Festival features films spanning the globe, with narrative and documentary films from Africa to South America and others that address the U.S. immigrant experience. Highlights include tonight’s film Dimanche a Brazzaville, a documentary with “insight into the lives and style of sapeurs, magic-wielding wrestlers, political hip […]

Last week hipster Seattleites shrugged indifferently at the news that our city had been named by Travel and Leisure as America’s best city for hipsters. Seattle took the prized vegan cupcake for first place, and was lauded by the site for our brains, Mac products, coffee snobbery and unique “buttoned-down” brand of hipster. We even […]

Sakura-constarted back in 1998 as a humble gathering of 313 anime and manga fans at the Doubletree Inn in Tukwila. The 14th annual gathering last weekend at the Convention Center attracted 19,000. I waited in line for 5 hours on Friday waiting to get in the door. Sakura-con’s growth speaks to the rising popularity of […]

I have a love affair with the United States Postal Service. It began when I first immigrated to the US in 1996. I was fascinated by the efficiency: it doesn’t matter where you are in the country, 45 cents and the mail arrives anywhere else in America within three days! I don’t have a thing […]

Washington State is home to more than 40,000 refugees from civil war and political violence in Somalia. But this population is more complex than the occasional news story about Somalia would imply. That belief is at the heart of “In Search of Nabad,” a feature-length documentary film about the Somali community in Seattle, produced by Set […]

If you couldn’t make the trip to Tokyo for this week’s Mariners season opener, you could try celebrating here in Seattle with a Japanese twist on a baseball classic: Gourmet Dog Japon is a network of 3 food carts at 2nd and Pike, Belltown and Westlake Center, serving ‘Japanese Fusion hot dogs’. The most popular dog is the Matsure – a […]

Cambodia still suffers from the horrific Khmer Rouge rule of the late Seventies. The entire population was forced into the countryside, and the educated, professionals, and minorities were targeted for execution. Thousands more died from starvation and illness. Nearly two million people, a quarter of the country’s population, died in that time. When the Vietnamese […]

Bo Kyi, a renowned Burmese human rights activist, was in town last week on a speaking tour to raise awareness of the changing situation in Burma, and to help promote the new film Into the Current. Bo Kyi and filmmaker Jeanne Hallacy chose Seattle as a stop on their six city US tour for good […]

Global methods of agriculture are changing rapidly. Fast food chains like McDonald’s are spreading around the globe. And here in the US, we’re eating more and more processed foods. So it’s the perfect moment to take a step back and analyze what the world eats and how we’ve all adapted to the modernization of the […]

Shizu Ishihara is saying goodbye to Seattle. She came here a year ago with her two young sons Eishin and Ryousei, fleeing the aftermath of 9.0 magnitude earthquake that hit northeastern Japan last March. The Tohoku earthquake, as it has since been named, triggered tsunami waves taller than 100ft, leaving more than 20,000 people dead or […]