What to make of the tent that recently appeared in front of Seattle Central College, spraypainted to say “this is student housing”? If one looks at it through the eyes of a classical Marxist, they will see a disturbing connection between it and the idea that a post-capitalist society, as concei ved by Karl Marx, will be founded on a principle that ancient Greeks called scholē. The word means leisure and is the source of the English word “school.” You see, education is in essence a luxury, and Marx based his entire concept of communism on disposable time: time that’s liberated from the exploitative demands of wage labor.  The most important social philosopher of the 19th century believed that the “realm of freedom” could only be constituted by a direct and positive humans-to-human relationship (rather than one mediated by things, such as money). According to this way of thinking, freedom requires lots of time to develop and enhance. And this is what leisure, disposable time, provides: a path toward the full and social development of an individual. This is the message behind the words painted on that tent. Education is not only a necessity but a luxury–scholē.  Speaking of Seattle’s housing crisis, yesterday the City Council passed two bills that will, according to the Seattle Times, speed up “shelter construction this year.” The bills are a part of Mayor Katie Wilson’s three-point plan to add “4000 shelter beds during her first term in office.” If the plan remains on schedule, 500 of those beds will be available in time for the World Cup, which starts in June.  If on Monday morning you happened, like me, to be sitting on a chair outside of your crib, you experienced breezes that caressed the skin and the leaves of nearby trees with an insouciant sensitivity that can be described as erotic. This morning, however, there are no such breezes. The day has instead decided to begin with some rain and almost perfectly still clouds. Expect a high 49 on this mild mannered Wednesday. Yesterday, Amy O’Neal, a choreographer who blends modern dance with hiphop culture and splits her time between Seattle and Los Angeles (and a former Stranger Genius nominee), became a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. Something like 5,000 individuals applied for this grant, and only 223 artists, scholars, and scientists were awarded the prestigious prize. O’Neal, who recently had a show at On the Boards (Again, There Is No Other (The Remix)),” was among the select few. As they say in Zimbabwe: Mokorokoto!    The US Is Sending Thousands More Troops to the Middle East: And so it is. More of our resources are being poured into a war that, at present, has no end in sight and will cost tax payers billions upon billions. By the way, today is tax day.   From yesterday’s AM by Hunter Pauli: “Extended Iran War Will Tank Seattle Economy.” Why? Because, according to the city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecast, “[if] the oil prices stay high for a prolonged time, there’s just nothing that can be done to avoid a recession.” This assessment is correct. The recession is not only, at this point, unavoidable but is already happening. But here’s the thing: Seattle, unlike other cities, suburbs, and surrounding rural areas, has a functioning public transportation system. If gas prices get too high, you can just take the bus or light rail to wherever you want to go. This fact will be more and more appreciated as the recession becomes a depression. Places that are not heavily dependent on the consumer-level consumption of fossil fuels will be more resilient than those that are. China, of course, can weather the rise in oil prices because of its strategic crude stockpiles and, more importantly, the massive investments it devoted to rail infrastructure and renewables after the financial crash of 2008. As a result “China may be ‘less sensitive to a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz than many of its Asian peers.’” You don’t say!   Meanwhile in the US, whose form of capitalism is addicted to oil: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed on Tuesday that it was difficult to determine the actual causes of climate change, dismissing decades of science that has attributed global warming to the burning of fossil fuels.— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2026-04-15T11:25:03.046845Z Let’s return to Link and consider this: What happens every time I hear the robot that advises passengers to “hold on” as a train begins to move? I recall Eddie Money’s biggest hit: “Baby Hold On.” Indeed, “what will be will be.” In the philosophical context of mass transit, “being” indicates an ontology, a mode of existence, a form of experience that’s specific to a culture defined as urban. One more Link note: I snatched this curious morsel from a conversation that was heading up an escalator in Capital Hill Station: “I can’t stand Mark Wahlberg, but I can listen to him talk for hours.”  In 2019, an artist I met in Detroit told me, during a party at a gaudy mansion once owned by a Ford executive, that the universe might actually be the inside of a black hole. I did not see how this was possible until I read this post yesterday: “Two Supermassive Black Holes Are on a Cosmic Collision Course.” I now kind of understand what that artist was talking about over drinks. She was onto something. We might be in a super-super-supermassive black hole, a black hole formed by galactic-scale mergers. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute detected, at the center of a distant galaxy (Markarian 501), two black holes “screaming into space” as they circled each other. The researchers also believe that black hole collisions are happening all of the time.  Let’s approach the end of AM with this cosmic/musical note: At its best, dub music feels like a star whose light and substance is being sucked into a black hole. It is exactly this kind of disturbance. And it’s not only its stuff (stoff) that’s warped but also time as a whole. The dub echo is one of many unbecomings, frozen moments that orbit a diminishing eternity that suggests not a loss but a gain in whatever is on the other side of the singularity. This excellent reggae tune by Dezaire, “Mother and Child,” is like a star: The dub version of “Mother and Child” is a like star on the edge of a black hole: The post Slog AM: City Council Approves Shelter Expansion, Local Choreographer Amy O’Neal Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship Grant, More Boots on the Ground in Iran appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less