News of a feature story by CHARLES MUDEDE normally sends me sprinting to the nearest alehouse. Better to lubricate—or better still, obliterate—the senses before descending into whatever bog of tripe The Stranger's chief pseudointellectual dishes out. Inebriation doesn't just help soothe the bitterness that bubbles up the throat while reading his blather; it helps place one upon the same plane Mudede was stationed on as he scratched out his pseudo-intellectual drivel. Though this in no way helps one understand just what, if anything, Mudede is trying to say in his pieces, the blurring of sight and blotting of memory at least make the ordeal tolerable.

This week, however, I remained sober and, in a truly stunning twist, I was actually impressed. Mudede's feature, "The House on Queen Anne Avenue," about a neighborhood blight known as Sterling Residence, is not only coherent and decently written, but—and this truly boggles—entirely free of Marxism, Hegelian thought, and other dorm-room philosophies. It was also, apparently, penned while Mudede was not entirely sodden. These facts alone made me return to the article's byline a number of times, lest I'd somehow misread the moniker attached, and even then I couldn't help but wonder if there'd been some sort of production gaffe before the paper went to bed. When Charles Mudede is able to suddenly summon coherence out of the ether, just what is the world coming to?

Still, as my dear friend Orson Welles used to say, "It's far better to have one's dreams crushed immediately than to build a castle on shifting sands." The remainder of this week's issue aborted the nascent hope for a better Stranger that had taken root inside me. In the news section, we find JOSH FEIT attempting to stretch his desiccated brain cells around a local environmental group's complaints about Sound Transit. This, embarrassingly, is followed by another installment in ELI SANDERS's never-ending series of anorexic political insight. And the lemon juice upon the wound? Articles by ERICA C. BARNETT and JONAH SPANGENTHAL-LEE. That sound you hear is Edward Murrow's ghostly weeping.

As for the arts sections this week, they run the gamut from inexcusably gay (ADRIAN RYAN, as well as his piece in the theater section) to slumming (noted author ED LIN in books) to suitable for the likes of Sunset magazine (JEN GRAVES in visual art) to saturated with strained and bush-league-level metaphors (the entirety of the music section). As for film, the usual platoon of hacks are on hand (including ANNIE WAGNER and her oft-abused thesaurus), but there's at least one saving grace: The absence of regular contributor BRADLEY STEINBACHER, whose feeble knowledge of cinema is outmatched only by his blatant knee-jerk disdain for nearly every film he watches. You take what you can get.