Here’s my weekly roundup of events for the week of June 20 – 26 on Mercer Island:
Play and Learn 
Wednesday, June 22, 10:30 am
Mercer Island Library, 8501 SE 40th St (Temporary location)
Have fun singing songs, telling stories, reading books, creating art and playing.
Storybook Corner 
Wednesday, June 22, 10:30 am
Island Books, 3014 78th Ave SE
Bring your little ones in to enjoy popular picture books read by our staff or special guests.
Learn more >>
Pacific Science Center: Blood and Guts 
Saturday, June 25, 11 am
Mercer Island Library, 8501 SE 40th St (Temporary location)
There’s more to blood and guts than just “ewwwww!” View science exhibits using real organs from humans and animals that cover an amazing body of knowledge: biology! Assemble skeletons, analyze x-rays, and scrutinize skulls. Tease your mind with optical illusions and also look inside a real human brain!
Restoration Event 
Saturday, June 25, 9 am
Gallagher Hill Open Space
Meet: City Hall parking lot, 9611 SE 36th St
Each year, Mercer Island citizens donate hundreds of hours of their time to maintain the community’s parks and open spaces: picking up litter, planting trees, cutting down ivy, painting over graffiti, or repairing trails.
Alice Crary, Author of Inside Ethics 
Sunday, June 26, 4 pm
Island Books, 3014 78th Ave SE
Island Books is pleased to welcome Alice Crary, Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research, for a reception in celebration of her new book Inside Ethics.
We have come to think of human beings and animals as elements of a morally indifferent reality that reveals itself only to neutral or science-based methods. This little-commented-on trend, which shapes the work of moral philosophers and popular ethical writers alike, has pernicious effects, distorting our understanding of the difficulty of moral thinking. Inside Ethics traces the roots of existing views to tendencies in ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Crary underlines the moral urgency of revisiting our approach in ethics so that, instead of assuming we confront a world that itself places no demands on moral imagination, we treat the exercise of moral imagination as necessary for arriving at an adequate world-guided understanding of human beings and animals.
The book’s argument is both rich and practically oriented, integrating ideas from literary authors such as Raymond Carver, J. M. Coetzee, Daniel Keyes, W. G. Sebald, and Leo Tolstoy and bringing them to bear on issues in disability studies and animal studies as well as elsewhere in ethics. The result is a commanding case for a reorientation in ethics that illuminates central challenges of moral thought about human and animal lives, directing attention to important aspects of these lives that are otherwise hidden from view.
Learn more >>
Mercer Island Farmers Market
Sunday, June 26, 10 am – 3 pm
SE 32nd Street at Mercerdale Park (between 77th and 78th Ave SE)
Visit the Mercer Island Farmers Market for the widest array of top quality Washington foods fresh from the farm, the field or sea, artisan produced and/or ready to eat – plus music, children’s activities, artisan gifts, and more!
Here are the highlights this week:
- Featured Vendor: Coco Beza
- Music by Zach Lombardo
- Kids’ Table Activity: Garden Visitors
