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Summer 2009

Spring is the season for chèvre

After a winter’s break, the goats at Rhonda Gothberg’s farm have kidded and their milk is rich and sweet. The soft French-style cheese she makes is delicious with just a nuance of that goat tang. Maybe it’s because the animals have added tender green grass to their diet, maybe it’s because it has been a long winter without fresh goat cheese, but “June chèvre is my favorite,” says Gothberg.

With a few acres in Skagit Valley, Gothberg is raising 29 milk goats for her farmstead cheese business. Early each the morning, just as the sun illuminates the shape of Chuckanut Mountain in the near distance … » More …

Summer 2009

Art Still at Large

An episode of the Antiques Road Show television program last winter stirred some memories across the Palouse and brought to mind one of the most influential alumni to graduate from Washington State’s fine arts program.

A woman from California brought in a painting of the Grand Coulee Dam under construction dated 1937. It was by Clyfford Still, an artist who taught at Washington State College from 1933 to 1941 and who earned his master’s of fine arts here in 1935. Still was a product of the West, having spent his childhood in Spokane and on his family’s farm in southern Alberta, Canada. While studying and … » More …

Summer 2009

Letters in the Summer 2009 issue

Celebrated lentils

We at the Pullman Chamber of Commerce were so delighted to see your article in the most recent issue, titled “Local, Delicious, Neglected,” about our lovable legume: the lentil. We sincerely agree that lentils are local and delicious and having worked at the USA Dry Pea & Lentil Council before starting at the Chamber, I can indeed verify that all information you printed about the agronomic qualities is accurate and the recipes you printed are indeed delicious.

However, as the National Lentil Festival Director, I was disappointed to see the word “neglected” applied to lentils which have an entire festival devoted to … » More …

Summer 2009

Whatever Happened to Home Economics?

Lately, you may have considered tightening your home budget, planting a vegetable garden in your yard, eating at home, making food from scratch instead of out of the box, teaching your kids instead of hiring a tutor, mending your sweater instead of buying a new one, or updating your home to be more energy efficient. Prodded by the recession, you have been thinking about home economics.

In fact, economics starts in the home. The word economy comes from ancient Greek oikonomos, one who manages a household. And while we try to put our national household in order, Americans of late are paying more attention to … » More …

Summer 2009

Rowing 101

So here I am, about to row with the Washington State women’s rowing team on the Snake River.

This is not the first time I have rowed. That occurred a week before when I took some strokes in the new indoor rowing facility at the Bohler Athletic Complex. This is, however, to be my maiden voyage on an actual body of water.

A benefit of the indoor facility is that it allows coaches to provide one-on-one instruction, rather than shouting commands from a distance at the river.

After my first few strokes of the oar, Head Coach Jane LaRiviere walked over and grabbed my … » More …

Summer 2009

Interesting times

We were having a long midweek dinner at Le Pichet in Seattle, a sort of anticipatory wake for the Seattle P-I, where my friend Tom had worked as a reporter for 20-some years. Tom’s pretty crusty and tends to brush even the most irksome things off with a joke.

But being a fifty-something journalist facing a post-newspaper era in a town awash in laid-off reporters, reality had started to sink in. Even so, referring to the demise of his employer and the economic times in general, at one point Tom gestured outside to First Avenue and said, “But this is no crisis. Somalia has a … » More …

Summer 2009

Ramping up in rural Washington

If you drive for 45 minutes up the back road from Goldendale toward Trout Lake in Klickitat County, you’ll pass through Glenwood, set in its scenic valley at the base of Mount Adams, where the pastures begin to give way to pine trees, some 35 miles north of the Columbia River.

If you pass through in June, you might catch the local rodeo, celebrating its 75th anniversary this year over Father’s Day. Maybe you’ll stop at The Shade Tree for gas, that being the name of the biggest business in town, a combination hotel/cafe/gas station/convenience store. There’s a post office and a small grocery, and … » More …

Summer 2009

Picture this

Doerte Blume is good at explaining difficult concepts. She draws as she talks, putting into pictures what she knows about the tiniest fragments of matter. Her desk is swimming in paper, with notes and graphs and sketches of atoms lapping at the sides of her computer and spilling against a jetty of books. As a theoretical physicist, she relies heavily on high-powered math; but for her, before the math come the images.

Working solely from equations “doesn’t get me very far,” she says. “I also have to have the physical picture of, what would I expect? What do the particles do? I always try to … » More …

Summer 2009

A runner’s worlds

On a summer morning, the sun’s first rays peep through my bedroom window, warming the dry air when I hear a tentative knock on my door.

“Marisa,” my dad whispers.

It’s 5:45 a.m. at the Sandoval house in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The pink morning glow and the patter of running shoes mean only one thing: It’s time to run.

For me, every summer day begins with a family run on picturesque trails carved into the high desert canyons and mesas of northern New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains. With my dad, Anthony Sandoval, leading the way, I run with my brothers and sisters. On a good … » More …

Summer 2009

Bring on the boron

Lai-Sheng Wang has an impish smile, an infectious laugh, and a high-powered research program that studies matter a few atoms at a time.

He uses massive machines to create tiny clusters of atoms. Wang’s clusters aren’t mere lumps. As the magnetic models stuck to his file cabinets show, they are as geometrically elegant as a snowflake.

Wang came to the public’s attention three years ago when his team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland became the first to make golden buckyball, a hollow cage of 16 to 18 gold atoms. He has also worked on clusters of aluminum, another element with a long … » More …