By Channel 253
A National Conversation with a Local Lens
This month observant Muslims around the world are fasting in observance of Ramadan. Jasmine El Shear is an Egyptian-American school counselor in the Gulf, advising Emirati students in navigating an American school system. She joined...
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is an historian of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. He focuses on the political and cultural history of Europe and the Americas in the age of revolution, with a emphasis on...
We invited Professor Michael Artime from Pacific Lutheran University back on the show to discuss the upcoming election. In this conversation we covered several topics: Ezra Klein’s suggestion that Biden step-aside as the Democratic nominee...
Over the winter holiday, Matt Driscoll, columnist and opinion editor at The News Tribune, reached out to talk about the firing of Claudine Gay from her role of President of Harvard University. Gay was brought...
Happy New Year and go Huskies! This week’s episode is a discussion about navigating the internet in an era of misinformation. Our guest is Dave Clark, founder of Sounder at Heart. He also writes at...
Happy New Year! Recorded live in the Moonyard Studios in gorgeous North Tacoma, this episode is the second of our two part 2023 Year in Review. If you missed Part I, you can find it...
Happy Holidays! Recorded live in the Moonyard Studios in gorgeous North Tacoma, this episode is the first of our two part 2023 Year in Review. We were joined in the studio by Erik Hanberg, President...
Peter Talbot from The News Tribune has been covering the trial of the Tacoma Police Officers who murdered Manuel Ellis on March 3, 2020. We spoke with Peter in October as the state was making...
Earlier this month, voters in Tacoma passed a Tenants Bill of Rights, creating among the most sweeping tenant protections in the country. The initiative was specifically designed to combat displacement in the community. This effort...
Jeremiah Oshan is a recovering newspaper journalist and the editor-in-chief of Sounder at Heart. Sounder at Heart is the most read blog in US club soccer. The website was previously a part of Vox’s SB...
Manuel Ellis was murdered by Tacoma Police on March 3, 2020. The long-delayed trial of the police officers that killed him is underway and this week we’re checking in with Peter Talbot from the News...
In March, on episode 188, we welcomed Azeri journalist Sevinc Osmanqizi on the show for a conversation about the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. On September 19, that conflict...
Representative Marilyn Strickland is a former member of the Tacoma City Council, the former Mayor of Tacoma, and two-term member of the US House of Representatives. She joined us to discuss the recent dismissal of...
In 2019, my wife and I departed the US to begin our overseas teaching career. When I made the transition, I used a service called Search Associates. They helped me navigate the application process and...
I belong to a group chat. It used to be about the Seattle Sounders but as they began struggling last season it became more about crime novels, in the vein of Elmore Leonard. We now...
The Seattle Sounders are possibly the least convincing third place team in the history of world football. They’re about three fourths of the way through what can best be described as a Jekyll & Hyde...
Our guest, Sarah Kendzior, is a scholar with an focus on authoritarian Central Asian states. She leverages her academic background in her work as a journalist and commentator, offering unique insights about anti-democratic tendencies and...
Carter is a co-author of the paper Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018 along with Kathryn A. Edwards. The paper lays out how the average American’s wages would be $50,000 higher if income growth...
This summer we are hosting a series highlighting small businesses and their struggles and triumphs in Tacoma. In part three, we have a conversation with Cassandra Williams, the owner and proprietor of Love by the...
In June, over a hundred friends and members of Channel 253 gathered for Channel 253 Fest, an evening of live podcasting from the Press Room in downtown Tacoma. It was a great event and this...
This summer we are hosting a series highlighting small businesses and their struggles and triumphs in Tacoma. In part two, we have a conversation with Umi Wagoner from eTc, the Tacoma-based rareware retailer and design...
This summer we are hosting a series highlighting small businesses and their struggles and triumphs in Tacoma. Opening the series, we have a conversation with Russ Heaton the proprietor of Doyle’s Pub, named one of...
A social media post by the mayor of Centralia and recent reporting by our guest, Isabel Vander Stoep, revealed the existence of an Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA) group in Centralia. So, this week we invited...
Housing is a frequent topic of conversation on this show. We’ve talked to realtors about the market for first-time homebuyers; we’ve discussed Matthew Desmond’s Evicted; we’ve talked about combatting displacement; we’ve discussed efforts to combat homelessness with...
After a nearly four month trial, last week leaders of the Proud Boys were convicted in federal court of seditious conspiracy. The Proud Boys are a right-wing paramilitary group that relishes street fights and violence...
In one twenty-four period in March, over 42 billion dollars was withdrawn from Silicon Valley Bank in California. This led to the second largest bank collapse in US history and SVB went into FDIC receivership....
This week, I sat down with Israel Calera. Iz is an artist and designer from Rio Grande Valley on the US/Texas border, the setting of much of Blood Meridian. He currently resides here in Abu...
Long time listeners will know that the topic of regressive taxation in Washington has been a repeated talking point on the show. In 2019, we hosted an Adult Civics Hour called the Case for Progressive...
The show’s roots are local but it wanders wherever my interests happen to lead. Since moving to Abu Dhabi, I have had the opportunity to visit several countries I never would have considered visiting prior....
This is our long awaited conversation about Dopesick by Beth Macy. Dopesick is the story of the orign and rise of the opioid crisis and the actions of pharmaceutical companies in flooding our communities with...
Eli Cranor is an Arkansas based writer. His debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, is about a troubled young man named Billy Lowe, who is taken under his wing by the new football coach, Trent Powers, newly...
Tacoma Against Nazis (TAN) was founded in 2017 to warn the community about the presence of a violent neo-Nazi cell operating in the city of Tacoma. A member of that cell, Jason “Gravy” DeSimas, was...
Last night (Gulf Time), as Auckland City and Egypt’s Al Ahly were kicking off in Morocco, we jumped on with Dave Clark, founder and writer at Sounder at Heart. Dave knows more about football in...
This week we are joined by the founder and proprietor of Move to Tacoma, Marguerite Martin, to talk about what’s happening in the housing market in Pierce County. This conversation is a continuation of the...
On December 22, Channel 253 hosted the first Adult Civics Happy Hour since the start of the pando. This is the second of two panels from that evening. Cast of Characters Rep Elect Sharlett Mena...
On December 22, Channel 253 hosted the first Adult Civics Happy Hour since the start of the pando. This is the first of two panels from that evening. Cast of Characters Kari Plog – KNKX...
As we did when then Mayor Strickland left her position, this week’s episode is an Exit Interview with Pierce County Council Chair, Derek Young. Young’s career in public service began in 1997, when he was...
Housing is a topic we return to with regularity. This is largely thanks to its roots and association with the Pod Auntie’s Move to Tacoma Podcast. With rising interest rates (and inflation) shrinking folks’ buying...
The midterm election results are still being tabulated. The widely predicted Red Wave did not materialize nationally, as the Democrats retained possession of the US Senate while losing a handful of seats in the House....
Cameron Harwick is a professor of economics and SUNY Brockport. I stumbled across a video that he made explaining the causes of the current period of inflation as a result of monetary policy. Much of...
This week’s episode is our audio bookclub conversation about Michael Lewis’ The Premonition. The book is about the state-level & federal bureaucrats who foresaw the pandemic, as early as the George W. Bush administration. It...
In September, teachers in Seattle Schools went on a five-day strike. While the usual suspects in conservative media collectively pulled a hamstring faking umbrage, the community was widely supportive of the strike. Yet many people...
After a series of episodes about mass incarceration and duplicitous, corrupt sheriffs, today’s episode is something different. We talked about Running with the Devil: the Wild World of John McAffee, a new Netflix documentary film...
In this episode, the second of a two-part series, we continue exploring the controversial term of Pierce County Sheriff, Ed Troyer. In this episode, we look and the public record including two official investigations into...
In this episode, the first of a two-part series, we dig into the turbulent term of the elected Pierce County Sheriff, Ed Troyer. In this episode, we look at Troyer’s influence on the investigation into...
The United States imprisons twice as many people per capita as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and four times the number of communist China. The Prison Within is a documentary about mass incarceration and the harm it...
Danny Caine is the co-owner and proprietor of the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas. He is also the author of How to Resist Amazon and Why a zine/audiobook about the business practices of Amazon and...
On July 13, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a year over year price rise of 9.1%. Driven by rising food and energy costs, the United States is experiencing the worst inflationary period since 1980....
This week, we are discussing police unions and how they protect bad actors. But it is also a conversation about the elected officials who don’t hold law enforcement accountable. This conversation is in part a...
Over the month of June, the US Supreme Court released a series of rulings that upended established precedent (accepted legal patterns) in American society. They weakened the first amendment’s establishment clause, the fifth amendment’s Miranda...
