The Daily

[NEWS] Nearly a month after Juniper Blessing was killed in the Building 7 laundry room at Nordheim Court Apartments, The Daily spoke with Blessing’s immediate family about their child’s gentle kindness and talents. They remembered her endless passion, her grounded nature, and also a feistiness of her spirit.

A talented alto in UW Chorale, Juniper began expressing a love for singing around age 4, constantly stretching her voice in environments ranging from her home to the pediatrician’s office. Craig Blessing, Juniper’s father, remembered his child skipping everywhere while in song.

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Read News Editor Anna Hull’s full piece online.

Photos by Evelyn Archibald The Daily

[ARTS + CULTURE] Pacific Northwest Ballet’s (PNB) “All Lang” is, on paper, a celebration of choreographer Jessica Lang. But the program’s strongest argument reaches beyond any single artist. Across three works — “Her Door to the Sky,” “Ghost Variations,” and “ZigZag” — the evening demonstrates ballet’s universality: its ability to translate painting, music, memory, grief, glamour, and joy into the shared language of the body.

That range matters. Ballet is often imagined as a narrow or rarefied form, but “All Lang” resists such limitation. In Lang’s hands, ballet becomes an open vocabulary. It can look like Georgia O’Keeffe’s desert modernism. It can listen to Robert Schumann’s haunted final compositions. It can swing with Tony Bennett. The program’s variety does not make ballet feel scattered, but rather makes the form feel expansive, capable of holding almost anything.

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Read writer Jolene Pollich’s full piece online.

Photos by Eris Nguyen The Daily

[NEWS] Students first learned of the killing of Juniper Blessing through a UW Alert shared in the hour after her death, when the message notified recipients of a homicide at Nordheim Court.

But the first campuswide message addressing the tragic nature of Blessing’s death came through an email from UW President Robert J. Jones, 18 hours later –– a delay that left students asking why the institution they expected to hear from had gone quiet.

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Read UWPD beat reporter Sophia Sostrin’s full piece online.

Photo by Anirudh Arun The Daily

[SCIENCE] Lifting off with 8.8 million pounds of thrust, the “Integrity” Orion spacecraft carrying the first crewed flight to the moon since 1972, launched for the Artemis II mission with Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman.

“We are [a] go for all of humanity,” Hansen said seconds before launch on April 1, 2026.

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Read reporter Kaira Wullur’s full piece online.

Photo by Szerena Guggenheim-Schoening The Daily

[OPINION] To the international students arrive at UW next year:

As I write this in early June, you are still a few months away from coming to UW. Your suitcases may still be in your closet back home, waiting. Some of you are probably already imagining what your life here will look like. I see you. I was you.

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Read columnist Melanie Nguyen’s full piece online.

Illustration by Max Smee The Daily

[OPINION] When he came to UW in 1998, Cristoph Giebel was the school’s second historian
focused on Southeast Asia.

By 2003, there were three active professors in the field, taking graduate students and teaching regularly. That lasted until 2018, when Laurie Sears, professor of Indonesian history, retired. In February 2026, when Filipino historian Vicente Rafael passed away, Giebel was left as the sole instructor.

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Read contributing writer Drew Nguyen’s full piece online.

Photo by Rylee Cooper The Daily

[ARTS + CULTURE] Fresh off his impressive Rolling Loud debut in Orlando, 20-year-old London rapper Feng kicked off the U.S. leg of his “Weekend Rockstar” tour for a rowdy sold-out crowd in Neumos on May 20.

Feng started making waves in the underground scene with the February 2025 release of “What The Feng,” a 16-minute mixtape with bouncy, synth-y production and uplifting, encouraging songwriting that touches on coming-of-age struggles and hopeless romance. Throughout summer 2025, his relevance and listeners grew even more, largely thanks to his singles “Princess” and “XOXO” gaining traction on TikTok. In February 2026, he released “Weekend Rockstar,” where Feng leans away from trap and into indie pop and rock, and announced his debut tour of the same name in March.

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Read contributing writer Sam Deibler’s full piece online.

Photo by Emily Schultz The Daily

[NEWS] May 23 marked the annual commencement of Trailhead Direct, a project co-led by King County Metro, King County Parks, and Seattle Department of Transportation that provides public transit service to popular trailheads near Seattle. Students can board Trailhead Direct using their Husky Card U-PASS to access Margaret’s Way Trailhead, Squak Mountain State Park, Mount Si Trailhead, Mount Teneriffe Trailhead, and Little Si Trailhead every weekend and Friday, July 3, with 2026 operations continuing through Aug. 30.

Trailhead Direct was launched in 2017 to expand access to the outdoors and alleviate parking difficulties at busy trailheads in the region. It has served over 89,000 passengers since launching. For students lacking their own transportation, Trailhead Direct connects students to nature beyond Seattle.

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Read transportation beat reporter Matthew Perez’s full piece online.

Photo by Magdelana Long The Daily

[MEMORIAL] When Juniper Blessing, a 19-year old atmospheric science student and an alto singer in UW Chorale, was tragically killed in her apartment laundry room the night of May 10, communities that she touched were rocked with grief and anger.

In the days and weeks following Blessing’s death, her community created physical areas of mourning around campus. Bouquets of flowers were left in the Nordheim Court plaza, while the base of the Broken Obelisk was covered in chalk drawings, handwritten notes, and candles.

The Q Center, in partnership with organizations including the Division for Student Life and UW Counseling Center, processioned the Red Square memorial to a protected, semi-permanent home in Mary Gates Hall on June 1. The university announced the creation of the Juniper Blessing Memorial Scholarship shortly after the procession, which will support students engaged in Q Center programing, particularly those studying music.

Those close to her have recalled Blessing’s love for Pokémon, poetry, singing, and especially weather, which prompted her to become a student in atmospheric science with a concentration in meteorology. One of Blessing’s English instructors said at the June 1 memorial procession that Blessing “knew everything” about Hurricane Otis, and was fascinated by hurricane forecasting.

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Read Arts & Culture Editor Alexa Meyer and Development Editor Evelyn Archibald’s full piece online.

Design by Paige Bajsarowicz The Daily

[NEWS] The College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) released a budget overview via email May 15 to faculty and staff within the college. The overview, entitled the “FY26 College Budget Reduction Dashboard: By the Numbers,” provides updates regarding the college’s plan to cut $14.1 million of its operating budget before June 30.

The spending cuts, driven by university-wide fiscal challenges and decreased state support, have saved around $12.7 million through Stage 3 of the four-stage plan, according to the dashboard. Stage 3 concluded March 31, leaving the university on pace to complete budget cuts of almost $1.4 million in the last month of this fiscal year.

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Read national politics beat reporter Nathan Gallagher Macke’s full piece online.

Photo by Shriya Sateesh The Daily