Fire echoes through the West and onto the prairie

Sunny skies have been marred by smoke, as fires from British Columbia send us their haze from the north. Is this the new normal? Sim Larken is research meteorologist for the US Forest Service AirFire Team; Erik Saganic is from the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. We asked them where the smoke was coming from and whether it was realistic to put all the blame on climate change. (Tl;dr - yes.)

Like their namesakes, the fortunes of the Seattle Mariners seem to rise and fall with the tides. Star seaman Robinson Cano returns to the lineup after being suspended for the use of a banned substance. But will it help? Or is the season already a sinking ship? We asked the Seattle Times' Matt Calkins.

Little House on the Prairie has been a mainstay of American childhood for generations. And like many other longstanding American institutions, it has some ugly undertones of racism and xenophobia. A new book called “Prairie Fires” grapples with those undertones in a history of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book just won a Pulitzer Prize; author Carolyn Fraser came by to chat with Bill Radke about Wilder’s legacy.

Who run the world? Beyonce, arguably – but not everyone agrees on her feminist bona fides. The most recent episode of KUOW podcast Battle Tactics for Your Sexist Workplace gets into that; co-host and Beyhive member Eula Scott Bynoe tells us why Queen Bey’s feminism deserves respect.