We talked with Whole U Ambassador Laury Istvan, the assistant director of operations in the Office of Animal Welfare, about what The Whole U can offer an outdoorsy introvert. How long have you been at the UW? Coming up on three years. I spent 20 years running a consulting practice, helping government agencies and private [...]

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Forget pills — can you take a tablet instead? As mobile technology expands, so does its potential to transform health care. Your iPad or iPhone can already look up your symptoms, but soon it might be able to treat your problems, too. At least your mental maladies. Pat Areán, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, says mobile apps that resemble video games can improve mood, cognition, and social functioning.

They met because of a book. It was 1968, and they were students at Michigan State University. Cherry McGee was searching for a copy of the Kerner Report, a recently published government study. Her friend suggested that a fellow named James Banks might have it. After all, James had his own personal library in 242 Owen Hall. If anybody had a copy, the friend said, it would be him.

There’s more than one way to save a life after yours is over. Organ donation might get all the buzz, but it’s not the only place to bequeath your body. A vital alternative: give it to science. Every year, around 200 people who pass away in Washington become donors to UW’s Willed Body Program. Their [...]

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The door of each office in Mackenzie Hall is adorned with a little metal placard, meant to display name plates, business cards, or office hours. For L.A. Smith, this 3×2-inch rectangle has been the frame for nearly a thousand pieces of art. Every day, Smith displays a new finger-length canvas on her office door. These [...]

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The first time Kathie Friedman taught a class about immigration, in 1991, she assigned her students to write a fictional story for their final project. None of them were immigrants, or even knew any immigrants, so they were tasked with estimating what the newcomer experience might be like. "I said, 'It's gotta be feasible, you need to do research. But you can create your characters,'" Friedman, an associate professor in the Jackson School, recalled.

Welcome to Seattle, where the Space Needle soars overhead, fish fly at the market, and majestic Mount Rainier looks on from the distance. And… where rents rise, construction cranes loom, displacement runs rampant, and thousands live on the street. It’s a city in flux, to say the least.

Listen up: Women rock, and they've been rocking for a very long time. That's what you'll learn from Michelle Habell-Pallán, an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. She teaches a class about the female side of American music, from early rock 'n' roll to punk and hip hop.

If you visit Michael Brown’s faculty homepage, you’ll encounter a pensive-looking man in a royal purple shirt — his eyes closed, head bowed, and hands in his lap. The tranquil scene is an oil painting. “That’s a self-portrait,” said Brown, a professor in the Department of Geography. He laughed: “I don’t take a good photograph, [...]

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What if a video game could make you healthier and more outdoorsy? Millions of people are playing one that does just that, and hundreds of them are on our campus. It’s called Ingress. "The point of this game is that it actually gets you out of where you are and makes you walk around," said Assistant Professor Jin Ha Lee, chair of the Information School’s Master of Library and Information Science program. "There are places I've went that I had never been to in the six years I've worked here."

How do you record a living history? That’s what Professor Michael McCann and the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies are trying to figure out. McCann, the center's chair, and a team of energetic grad students have conducted over 60 oral history interviews about the minimum wage in Washington. The audio and video testimonies are part a new website, launching in early 2016, called SeaTac/Seattle Minimum Wage Campaign History Project.

The two-party system is broken. There’s too much money in politics. Special interests don’t represent the people. These refrains about American democracy are widespread and, to some extent, hard to disagree with. But there’s a seldom-discussed tweak to the election process that may help it run a little smoother: move the goalposts. Using game theory, [...]

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