The Latest Thought
The Latest Thought
Cancer Makes a Killing
Have we turned a disease into a celebrity?
June 14th, 2012
Cancer is a rock star. I want to hire cancer’s PR firm. The damn thing has diversified, outsourced, broken into every market. It has clothing lines, houseware accessories, those fucking annoying rubber bracelets that give adolescent boys the excuse to sport “I ♥ boobies” on their wrists. Cancer pushes magnet ribbons of varied hue and trinkets that would be the envy of any swag-bag-toting conventioneer. Even firearms distributors are trying to profit from cancer’s PR glow. Now you can rob the corner store while raising awareness of breast cancer with your pink-slide Walther “Hope Edition” handgun. We just love cancer. Read more »
The Latest Thought
Breaking the Spell
It’s time to teach the DJ culture to mind its ABCs and 123s
June 7th, 2012
Is this going to be one of those grumpy-old-man commentaries?” Read more »
The Latest Thought
A Season Unbound
It’s summertime. Do you know where your books are?
May 31st, 2012
There are two types of summer reading: The kind that makes you smarter. And the kind that makes you dumber. Read more »
The Latest Thought
Killing Time
With techno-efficiency like this, who needs inefficiency?
May 24th, 2012
The other day, I read a column in the UK’s Daily Mail about how Twitter is not only ruining the nuanced beauty of the English language, but also—along with technological devices of all kinds—taking us away from actually participating in the present, allowing us too many diversions from in-the-moment interactions with people, or with nature, or with our own whole paragraphs of thought. I read that column on my cellphone, while waiting in my car for the drive-up ATM. There were no cars in line for the human tellers; their lanes were open and empty. But I waited. Read more »
Latest Thought
Moving Mountains, Building a City
How a Vegas pioneer helped shape the Valley’s soul
May 17th, 2012
We’ve all heard the stereotype: Las Vegas is nothing more than a transient city, a plastic place where no one puts down roots, neighbors remain strangers, and the only civic duty is every man for himself. It’s not true, of course, and it never has been. But with the constant media flow of Vegas “mythology”—often delivered by our very own marketing gurus—sometimes we have to remind ourselves that we are a real community, built by people willing to devote their lives to an improbable dream. The recent death of Stuart Mason, a builder of the real Las Vegas, is occasion for such a reminder. Read more »
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Working Warriors
For Nevada's Guard and Reserve members, serving the nation is only half the battle
May 3rd, 2012
Gary Sallee drops into a chair across from me in the otherwise empty Nevada Department of Transportation training room and, in his soft Kentucky drawl, tells me a little about his journey as a U.S. Air Force Reservist. Read more »
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The Upside of Greenwashing
How a low-down, double-dealing dark art just might be raising our consciousness
April 19th, 2012
Green marketing purports to sell us products, but what it really sells is a more benign vision of the world—and of ourselves. It starts from the assumption that we know something is wrong with the way we’ve been living, proceeds to flatter us with the assumption that we care about fixing what’s wrong, and then proposes that we can fix it by buying the right stuff. Read more »
The Latest Thought
Downtown, Unbuttoned
The city wanted to keep the homeless from sleeping in a downtown plaza. So it ruined the plaza.
April 12th, 2012
Earlier this year, the city affixed more than 200 hard white plastic “buttons” onto the benches of the corridor and the planters of the adjacent plaza. Against the sandstone benches and mauve planters, the white buttons look ludicrous. They’re normally used as roadway traffic devices. Needless to say, roadway traffic devices are neither an intelligent solution to homelessness nor a way to craft quality public space. Read more »
The Latest Thought
The Terror of the Inexplicable
Madness, atrocity and a world without answers
April 5th, 2012
The hearing was the surreal thing that all post-tragedy hearings are. The family sat in the second row, waiting for the judge to arrive. The news media—the familiar gaggle of camera tripods and cellphones and TV faces—stood 15 feet in front of them in the empty jury box scrutinizing their every move, taking pictures in the awkward silence. The courtroom was so small it forced an intimacy, a direct imposition of the public eye on a confused and traumatic moment. Read more »
The Latest Thought
Karma, Bottled
Our intrepid, water-drinking reporter decided to break off her relationship with plastic. That’s when the past came back to haunt her.
March 29th, 2012
Mother Nature kicked my ass. I’m lying in bed barely able to move, and now, I get it. I deserved this. Somehow, after years of contributing plastic water bottle waste to the Pacific Ocean garbage patch, I had this coming. Read more »
