Slog AM: Sound Transit Killed 2,000 Fish, Gen Z Is Talking Less, JD Vance Says War in Iran Isn’t a War

Fish fry: The first-of-its-kind light rail floating bridge is zapping the fish in Lake Washington. Sound Transit revealed its operations along I-90 have killed around 2,000 fish since the bridge opened in March—mostly perch and bass, but a few salmon are in the mix as well. Not killing fish was one of the requirements for the creation of the floating light rail bridge. The likely culprit are cables resting on the lake’s bottom. Oops! Sound Transit yanked those off the lake bottom two weeks ago and is seeing if that helps. TBD! In the meantime, is anyone in the mood for sushi?

The Humane Society for Tacoma & Pierce County is drowning in pussy.  The shelter recently took in more than 100 cats seized from “deplorable conditions,” 61 sailors cats rescued from an abandoned sailboat last month, and another 20 cats found living in a car. That’s a lot of cats! The shelter is looking for emergency fosters to help care for the more than 500 cats in their care. If you can’t foster, they’ll take supplies, too. 

Medicare cuts loom: Gov. Bob Ferguson signed an executive order to establish a committee aimed at keeping Washingtonians insured when new ridiculous eligibility work requirements—filling out paperwork twice a year proving that a person works, volunteers, or attends school for at least 80 hours a month—go into effect next year. The committee will also monitor how many of the 600,000 people subject to those reporting requirements lose their coverage anyway. 

A singles problem: The Seattle Times’s FYI Guy, Gene Balk, says one “overlooked” reason for Seattle’s housing squeeze is all of you single people. In Seattle, 44 percent of households are occupied by just one person. That’s the most common housing situation in the city. It “puts pressure on the housing stock.” To adapt, the construction industry has built more studios and one-bedroom apartments, but can it keep up with all of our independent dwellers? 

Miracle! Rescuers in Nepal pulled two workers from an underground tunnel at a hydropower plant nine days after catastrophic floods. Rescuers located the men after hearing their voices coming from the tunnel. One of the men said more people are still alive in there. Caused by a major landslide and glacier collapse, the floods killed an estimated 1,287 people. More than 5,000 are still missing. 

Gen Zip it: People around the world are more wordless these days. A new study of over 2,1000 people living mostly in America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe aged 10 to 94 found that they speak roughly 338 fewer words a day than what was found in a similar study conducted in 2007. Those 338 words don’t seem like much, but it means people are speaking “more than 120,000 words fewer than in the previous year.” Between 2005 and 2019, the number of words spoken per day decreased by 28 percent.. The people with the worst case of the quiets are those 25 years old and younger. They’re losing 451 words a year—44 percent more than older people. One likely factor could be the reliance on technology. 

Jobs: Employers added 162,000 jobs in August and unemployment stayed steady at 4.1 percent. Analysts feel August’s jobs report shows the labor market is steadier than it was this spring. Trump is celebrating these numbers and once again calling for lower interest rates. 

Diesel hits record high: Thanks to the war with Iran, diesel now costs $5.85 a gallon. That’ll raise prices for freight and delivery. Ahead of the midterm elections, Vice President JD Vance is doing his best to rebrand the conflict. “I wouldn’t use the word war,” he said of the war. “Right now, there is no active shooting.” He forgot about the bombs and missiles: On Tuesday, a US strike hit a fisherman’s house on the Strait of Hormuz on the day of his daughter’s wedding, killing four people and injuring more than 60. Vance said the US would never target civilians in combat, but “sometimes things happen.”

Guess who the US Open’s new brand partner is: Everyone’s favorite prediction market, Kalshi! Sports betting has been a real pain for tennis players. According to the tennis substack, Bounces, sitting court-side at the US Open this year felt more like being in a casino with bettors yelling at the players. Matches between relative unknowns are accumulating massive trading volumes—upward of half a million dollars in some cases—on the platform. The money on Kalshi is even more insane for the big matches, upwards of 21.7 million] in the first-round match between Flavio Cobolli and Francisco Comesana. What is enjoyment without some stakes, hm? 

Wild, Dark Shore: The Australian Antarctic Division is planning a mission to extract the 24 researchers stationed on the sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island due to a bird flu threat. But the humans aren’t the ones who need saving, the 100,000 seals on the island are. If the flu comes to Macquarie, 90 percent of baby elephant seals could die. That happened on a remote Australian island last summer. If this mass extinction event comes to Macquarie Island’s elephant seals, it could create “psychological risk” for the researchers stationed there.

Some good news: A woman has lived with a transplanted pig kidney, gene-edited to make it fit for human transplantation, for 285 days without need of dialysis. That beats the former pig-kidney-transplanted-to-a-human record by two weeks. This is big news for people awaiting kidney transplants, waits for old-school human kidneys can take between three and five years.

A concert review like no other: Read this write up of a Rosalia concert from the London Review of Books. Maybe I will channel this at Bumbershoot this weekend. 

New Charlie Kirk memorial: An Indiana farm has cut Charlie Kirk’s face into a corn maze. They chose to honor him because “he believed that disagreement should lead to conversation, not violence.” The farm’s name? Goebel Farm. 

Here is a fun geography game: I am average at it. 

Bumbershoot is this weekend: Here is an obscure song you should study in preparation for the festival. 

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