NEWS

As any first-semester journalism student can attest, the word "news" was born as an acronym for the directions of the compass: north, east, west, south. Original news reports were designed as surveys of the landscape: what's going on, and where. Applying this definition to The Stranger's news offerings—which this week include ERICA C. BARNETT on Mayor Nickels's club crackdown, JOSH FEIT on the sale of the Seattle SuperSonics, and SARAH MIRK on some sort of "immigrant labor controversy"—only one direction is detectable: straight down into libertine lefty hell. ALSO: CounterIntel, In the Hall

FEATURE: High Art

In a high-minded feature package, Stranger visual art editor JEN GRAVES enlists a number of art-world bigwigs (bravo!) and Stranger staffers (no comment) to conceptualize on "the cosmology of skylines." As a resident of Seattle in 1926, when the skyline consisted of a single gaslight and the shadowy outline of Madame Clapp's two-story Whoratorium, I cannot bring myself to wade through the musings of Graves's gathered newbies. But I commend Graves and her writers for having the courage to bend their necks and look up, and anxiously await next season's feature package on the poetic nuances of cracks in the sidewalk.