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Coming to terms with Las Vegas, all over again
The sky had emptied itself long ago, maybe in the early spring, maybe in prehistoric times. It was anyone's guess. The blue was pale and endless, yellowed by midday glare. My son and I had gone out in search of bugs. Nobody was anywhere. When the sky had emptied itself, perhaps the world had, too. My son sensed, though, that there were eyes lurking behind narrow windows. It was the fifth day of July, the third day after our move to Las Vegas, and our sixth neighborhood stroll. My son looked around, tugged on his baseball cap, and said, "People must be wondering: Who are those people who always walk?"
Read More »A Modest Proposal
UNLV needs money. We know who’s got it
Higher education in Nevada is dying. It’s a slow and excruciating demise, an ancient Chinese torture, death by a thousand cuts. The losses so far: eight departments and programs, 100 full-time faculty, at least 300 staff positions, plus 30 more layoffs in the pipeline. Classified employee salaries have been cut by 6 percent; nontenured faculty salaries by 5 percent. Tenured faculty are slated for similar reductions. And make no mistake: Students are suffering, the undergraduates hard-pressed to get into required courses, graduate students burning out by teaching two-course loads and trying to finish their degrees while barely subsisting.
Read More »How to Be Here
Ten rules for successful Las Vegas living
Rule 1. Get out! At least three times a year for at least three days each stretch. Otherwise, you will go insane. Cabin fever aside, you need to experience how the rest of the world lives to remind yourself that Las Vegas, for all its shortcomings, is like summertime, when the living’s easy. For every cool out-of-town bar, there is a last call. For every big-city museum, there is the price of admission and the realization that you don’t need a boring museum every day.
Read More »The Moveable Middle
When politicians say they’re mainstream, what are they really telling us?
Last month, Harry Reid accused his Republican rival for the U.S. Senate, Sharron Angle, of not being mainstream enough after she had voiced support for Yucca Mountain, speculated on ending Social Security and proposed the demise of the U.S. Department of Education.
It was a nice bit of theater for Reid. The man Republicans say is out of touch with the mainstream got to castigate his Republican opponent for being out of touch with the mainstream. No doubt Reid’s thanking his lucky stars that he’s running against Angle. But it’s that word that grabs me. Mainstream. It has a nice, only slightly sanitized ring to it. It’s like vaguely scented dishwashing liquid. Not very sexy. And yet, who doesn’t use it?
Read More »Places and Pasts
How Vegas looks from an old Polish town
I am writing this in the garden of my home in Torun, a medieval walled Polish city on the Vistula River. Oaks and willows are above me, bees and butterflies drift among the flowers. I can hear the whine of an electrical saw from a carpenter’s workshop, the sound of my neighbor’s table being laid for lunch, birdsong, speech, radios, laughter, invective, the passing of car tires over the cobbled street. A student up in a garret is playing Jean Michel Jarre. There is a tremendous profusion of color, green above all. I see the worn leather briefcase of a passing elderly man through the slats of our wooden fence. Has he had it since he first got a job? Did it belong to his father? It may, I think, be older than anything in Las Vegas.
Read More »Caught in the Web
Liberty and property in Old Media and New
I refuse to be tarred with the accusation of coddling bloggers. So before I say what I have come to say, let me first say this: I love my unalienable rights. Life. That’s a good one. Liberty. Can’t be beat. The pursuit of happiness. Hey, that’s the right to pretty much everything! But let’s get back to original intent: Jefferson just stuck the happiness bit in there as a politically correct code for Locke’s real deal: property. Didn’t he? And I love my property. In particular, as a writer, I love my intellectual property.
Read More »The Breakup
Urban life lessons with LeBron
It still means something to be from a place. Loyalty matters. Roots are still important in these days of highly mobile communications and capital. Betrayal, even if it’s only the perception of betrayal, still stings like a son of a bitch.
That’s one lesson to take from LeBron James, the erstwhile Cleveland Cavaliers basketball star who earlier this month announced, on a self-aggrandizing hourlong ESPN broadcast, that he was departing for the Miami Heat to join friends and fellow free agents Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade in forming a virtual all-star squad for the next half-decade.
Read More »Look No Further
The best superintendent for Clark County schools may be right under our noses
Fifty thousand dollars. That’s what the Clark County School District is paying a Nebraska consulting firm to find a new superintendent. And the focus is national, so, come fall, we’re bound to wind up with a pool of outsiders who—and the firm seems confident about this—will not have any embarrassing legal or financial problems.
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We Don’t Need New, We Need Next
What some of the world’s oldest cities can teach one of its youngest
When you’re in a city famous for its simulacra of other cities, it’s reassuring when you actually check in on some of those other cities. The Luxor may be able to beam a light into outer space, but the pyramids—you know, the real ones—have been standing for more than 4,000 years.
It might have been the sheer newness of Las Vegas that recently drove me to visit Athens, Cairo and Istanbul—three of the longest-running shows on earth. And the cities did not disappoint, with their intoxicating blends of people, culture and history.
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