Editor's note: The audio version of this story contains language some readers may find inappropriate. Sometimes the things that keep us up seem to come out of nowhere. Something we might never have given a second thought to all of a sudden, for reasons we can’t quite understand, become front and center in our life. That’s what happened to Arrington De Dionyso. He’s a painter and musician from Olympia. Back in 2010, De Dionyso was given the opportunity to paint a mural at a popular pizza place

The sidewalks of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood are home to drug addicts, the mentally ill and kids who’ve run away from home. These are the people most of us give wide berth to as we make our way in and out of trendy restaurants and bars. We turn a blind eye to then when they are camped out in a bus shelter. The level of caution afforded to these individuals goes up significantly when it’s dark outside. The people we avoid at night are the people Seattle photographer Tim Durkan actively

Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, is headed to Seattle later this month to give a talk. We grabbed a few minutes with him to ask what it is that keeps him from sleeping. As a child, Ira Glass spent nights considering his own mortality. “I would just lie in bed, trying to get my mind around the idea that I would be dead and everything in the world would continue without me,” remembers Glass. After he witnessed an uncle ship out to Vietnam and saw coverage of life there as a soldier,

This week on Sound Effect , we bring you stories of things that keep us up at night. We'll hear stories of fear and anxiety and meet people who work unusual graveyard shifts. Radio Nightmares Sound Effect gets a lot of inspiration from the hit radio show This American Life . So we thought we'd ask host Ira Glass what keeps him up at night . Turns out, his childhood fears were pretty dark. The Cameraman Seattle photographer Tim Durkan is a verified night owl and he spends his sleepless nights

Erika Lee Bigelow was out for St. Patrick’s Day in Portland when she saw a card advertising a contest hosted by the beer company Guinness. You had to write a 50-word essay finishing the sentence ‘The perfect pint of Guinness ...” The grand prize was a pub in Ireland. That’s right, you could win your own pub. So she wrote her essay: “The perfect pint of Guinness is simple: dark, rich, cool. A shamrock imbedded atop a creamy white pool. Guinness glides gracefully into glass, time woes, worries

Maxine Linial is a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and one of the world's leading researchers on an obscure group of microorganisms called simian foamy viruses. She’s been at the Hutch for 40 years looking through microscopes in the lab and studying swirling cells in petri dishes. However, that changed very suddenly five years ago. While Linial was going for a run, a car ran her over. She was rushed to Harborview and spent months in the hospital, only to go blind. Sound

I have never considered myself a musician. My father paid for more weeks of piano lessons for me than I was willing to attend and my stretch as a bassist in a high school rock band lasted just long enough for me to learn the bass line to Pink Floyd’s "Money." But for some reason, after turning 33, I decided to take up the drums. I took one lesson from a friend and felt more enchanted by music than I have, well, ever. Coming from a musical family and having seemingly no musical talent I always

One way to get a different view and to exit your comfort zone is to trade the warm and dry home you live in for a camper van that will take you around the country to meet and help the homeless. You'll also bring your nine-year-old along for this adventure. This is what Jennifer Underwood of Seattle is doing with her daughter, Rory. They are on a national tour called, “Just Say Hello.” “Just Say Hello” is also the name of a campaign that started here in Seattle by the nonprofit, Facing

Imagine growing up in a state to total innocence and freedom. You're a child, and you have an infinity of woods and mountains to explore. You eat fresh blackberries your mother picks in the forest. All the dangers of the modern world are miles away. Everyone in town is like an uncle, a mother, a grandmother. They dress up as Santa Claus for Christmas and stage a big egg hunt every Easter. That's how people describe growing up in Grisdale, a remote logging camp nestled for decades deep in the

This week on Sound Effect , we hear about changes of scenery. We bring you stories of people who were exposed to a whole different part of the world, a culture they weren't familiar with, or a lifestyle they never imagined. The Logging Camp Long before tech workers flocked to the shiny new apartments of Seattle and Bellevue, the Northwest offered a different kind of workforce housing. Logging camps were ready-made towns that lumber companies built specifically for loggers and their families deep