When Joe Hodl died of COVID-19 in August, his wife, Cheri, was left grief-stricken and bereft – and wondering whether there was anything she could do to help fight the virus.

Inspired by a project the Minneapolis Star had planned in 2013, the original idea for “Summer Stories” was to run a serialized novel in Sunday’s Today section of The Spokesman-Review. When several local authors started releasing short-story collections around the same time, Carolyn Lamberson, then the features editor, had another idea.

When Maya Zeller was beginning her graduate  work as a poetry student in Eastern Washington University’s MFA program in 2005, she attended a student reading where she saw Jess Walter in the crowd.

Journalist Sierra Crane Murdoch will discuss her book, “Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country” with The Spokesman-Review’s Shawn Vestal in a virtual event hosted by Auntie’s Bookstore at 7 p.m. Saturday.

The schools have to reopen.

I did not see this coming.

The historic Ming Wah sign fell during a windstorm in April. Now, with the help of local artist Chris Bovey, owner Kam Kwong is trying to raise the money to put it back up.

Roberta Wilburn says one of the most important things we can do to understand people is listen to their stories.

More than three months ago, a Spokane police officer racing for no good reason at 65 miles per hour down the steep pitch of Lincoln Street – where the lower South Hill plunges into downtown – rammed into a car trying to cross Lincoln at Fifth Avenue.

It’s a strange time to be thinking of normal times and “normal” problems on college campuses.

The armed yahoo brigades that have shown up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the Inland Northwest have so far been little but absurd sideshows.

Section 129 of the Spokane City Charter is where the sunshine of optimism shines most brightly with regard to police oversight.

Spokane’s police officers are four years overdue for a raise.

Midway into a new ombudsman's report on the now-infamous profanity-laced rant of a still happily employed Spokane police officer, a word appears that is crucial in considering where we’ve been, where we are, and where we going with police and accountability.Culture.

The virus threatening the health of the population is also threatening the health care system. In Spokane – where a large part of our population relies on government health insurance and a large part of our workforce is employed in health care – that means a lot of added pressure on hospitals that have already been losing money.

Most of us understand that the coronavirus presents a health crisis, an economic crisis and a social crisis. But for those at the bottom of the economic scale, it could also turn into a legal crisis.

Us is all of us, like it or not. At this moment of extraordinary national tension, so full of the potential for violence, so fractured at the core, so full of venom and incitement radiating from the White House, and so vilely attended by bigoted online calls to shoot protesters or run them over, us versus them is a disastrous formulation.