T.R. Witcher
Story Archive
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Environment
Mining opposition
Thursday, May 28, 2009 In tough times, you’d think the proposed development of a new mine on the outskirts of town might be a plus. Yet, the “outskirts of town” have been swallowed by the city. Which is why residents of Henderson are fighting a proposed mine near I-15 at Sloan.
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Literature
Granta is good
Thursday, May 28, 2009 The powerhouse literary journal Granta kicks off its 30th anniversary with its latest issue, showcasing fiction by established masters and up-and-coming young writers.
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Economy
Broken pencils
Thursday, May 21, 2009 Architects across the state are trying to stay afloat. No one's building - not offices, not hotels, not condos.
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Theatre
Chatting with legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow
Thursday, May 14, 2009 What was it like cross-examining your friend, legendary American lawyer William Jennings Bryan, during the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925?
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Government
The Searchlight stalwart
Thursday, May 7, 2009 Back in march, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid lent his voice trying to urge a resolution to financial woes at MGM Mirage, which were threatening to sink its flagship CityCenter project.
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Literature
Mind-melding
Thursday, May 7, 2009 Playing a Vulcan can be a real head trip: It was enough to lead the most famous Vulcan, Leonard Nimoy, to title his first autobiography I Am Not Spock, and to title his second I Am Spock.
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Entertainment
Leaps of faith
Thursday, May 7, 2009 This is a story about fear. Not fear of the economy. Not fear of death. But fear of the unknown, the uncertain. Alvin Tam calls this the oh shit moment.
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Film
The Informers
Thursday, April 23, 2009 Los Angeles. Early ’80s. Vacuous, rich and pretty blond boys and girls get drunk, get high and get laid; a few come to a vague realization that their lives are, um, vacuous.
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Taxes
Off-shore accounts (in the desert)
Thursday, April 16, 2009 There was more than an air of cry-baby defensiveness a few weeks ago at the G20 Summit in London, when Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, accused the U.S. of harboring tax havens
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Art
Through the looking glass
Thursday, April 16, 2009 We don’t think much about architecture in the Valley, because, frankly, outside of the Strip, there’s not much to talk about. The latest master-planned community, no matter how nice, is, as a design issue, a rote matter, as are the shopping plazas that fill in the gaps of the city’s fabric.
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Literature
Decorating death
Thursday, April 2, 2009 Local lawyer and writer Franklin Levy has figured out a way to combine literary muscle and good design.
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Art
Pinching pennies
Thursday, March 26, 2009 Here’s the good news. One: The federal government’s economic stimulus bill, the $789 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, includes $50 million in funding for the arts, administered through the National Endowment for the Arts. And two: It’s happening fast.
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Culture
Edifice complex
Thursday, March 19, 2009 While Artistic Director James Canfield and the ballerinas are calm and focused, outside, it’s a different story
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Entertainment
Straight outta Persia
Thursday, March 19, 2009 On came a young MC to briefly throttle the joint to attention. She was decked in black pants, a red top, a black vest, a red truckers cap perched high above a camouflage bandana, neither of which could corral her long black hair.
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Development
Dirty work
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 Even in the midst of an economic downturn, there are always plans in the Las Vegas Valley for new homes. And in Henderson, those plans are not small—or easy.
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Economy
Adventures in debt reduction
Thursday, March 5, 2009 “This is Jane with Credit Contact at 866-213-7580. I’m calling about your high credit-card balances." I get these damn calls all the time.
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Art
Culture Crash
Thursday, March 5, 2009 Apart from the staff of the Weekly, which came to tour through the Las Vegas Art Museum last Thursday, there were not many other visitors. The few I found were from out of town.
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Film
The man behind Madea
Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009 While you were watching the Oscars, Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail was the No. 1 movie in America, pulling in $41 million at the box office over the weekend.
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Crime
Swept away
Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009 There are two ironies about the city of Las Vegas’ Downtown Beautification Office, which sends people with parking tickets, DUIs and domestic-violence offenses on to the streets of downtown Las Vegas to clean them up, in lieu of fines or jail time.
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Development
Making designs on Vegas
Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009 We tend not to see the built environment, though it’s all around us, and of all the arts forms, architecture is the one that tends to have the most tangible impacts.
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The Strip
The impossible dream
Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009 First things first: the Washington, D.C.-based architect Nir Buras hates modern architecture. Second: He wants to remake Las Vegas' most famous street. Completely.
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Nevada
Shutting the doors
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009 Nevada State Prison in Carson City, which dates back to the 19th century, is the oldest prison in the state, and one of the oldest in the country. But its long history may be over.
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Congress
Extremely even Steven
Thursday, Feb. 5, 2009 A politician’s life is necessarily a dance between praise and criticism, between the handshakes that build consensus and make nice PR and the stinging words that establish differences—and also make nice PR. And so it goes for Steven Horsford, the first African-American to hold the post of State Senate majority leader.
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History
Century markings
Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009 When the city of Las Vegas celebrated its 100th anniversary a few years ago, Mark Hall-Patton, administrator of the Clark County Museum, knew that his institution would have to rise to the challenge—because the county’s centennial is this year.
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Culture
The museum we can’t use
Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009 At the north end of the Springs Preserve, construction crews are wrapping up work on the large new Nevada State Museum—the state’s most ambitious museum.
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Culture
Forbes to Henderson, North Las Vegas: Whatever
Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009 Forbes, last month, has gone and named North Las Vegas and Henderson two of America’s 10 most boring cities.
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Literature
Different times
Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009 At a time like this, when the bubble has burst on Las Vegas’ collective psyche, it’s nice to recall the good old days of sun and fun and money, when a writer could say of the city, without irony, “It is the most incredible oasis the world has ever known.”
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Henderson
Up from the streets
Thursday, Jan. 15, 2009 It’s safe to say there’s not a lot of street art on the streets of Henderson. But in John Martone's online gallery, vegasstreetart.com, which he operates out of his home in, of all places, Henderson, there's plenty.
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Real Estate
The house loses
Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009 There is construction at Inspirada, the massive master-planned community in the southern reaches of Henderson, tucked behind the Henderson Airport, but most of the land on the 2,000-acre site is vacant dirt,
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Poverty
Feeding the city
Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008 On a chilly Christmas Eve morning, Julie Murray, the CEO of Three Square Food Bank, and her staff were on the job well before 8 a.m., readying their giant warehouse for its daily ritual.
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Development
Union rules
Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008 Admittedly, it feels like a sign of the economic times, when the Culinary Union, the 55,000-member collective of hospitality workers, decides to pick a fight with City Hall.
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Encore
Encore: Let there be light
Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2008 There is, quite literally, no surface of this building, no wall, no ceiling, no floor, no pillar that has not been touched with woodwork or mosaic tile or glass or Kyoto-pleated wall coverings, or design touches like a 27-foot crystal-and-glass dragon, or hand-applied Swarovski crystal butterflies.
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Art
Reaching out
Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008 It’s often two steps forward and one step back in the Vegas cultural community. It may seem that art has taken a step back, but UNLV’s Department of Art is trying to push forward with the announcement of plans to create an arts advisory board by next spring.
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Music
’Tis the season
Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008 We’re talking Nat Cole singing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire, or a symphony galloping through “Sleigh Ride.” And this week the place to get your fill of yuletide tunes is with the Las Vegas Philharmonic’s Christmas Pops show.
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2008 Presidential Election
The Revolution continues
Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008 Clearly, the Republicans got some kind of beat-down—losing the White House, seats in Congress and control of the Nevada Legislature—although the extent of the drubbing is still open for debate.
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Film
Battle in Seattle
Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008 In actor Townsend’s directorial debut, a team of well-coordinated, nonviolent protestors take the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle by storm, outfoxing the local police and spurring them to violent means to restore order.
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Education
The wages of Sin (City)
Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008 A few weeks ago, Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons—who heretofore has opposed even a whiff of a tax increase, even when facing a tsunami of financial turmoil—floated the idea of taking a pay cut to help the state weather a $300 million deficit.
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Fashion
To a T
Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008 The key has something to do with obscurity—flaunting your command of segments of popular culture that only the hyper-clued-in know about or remember. But it’s not as simple as, say, showing off your rare 1970s-era repress of a Dirty Harry shirt.
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Environment
The 1 percent solution
Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008 Nevada is lucky enough to have a renewable energy standard that mandates that 20 percent of our energy must be met by renewables by 2015. Nevada is seeking only about 1 percent of its total energy from solar power. One percent. In a state where the sun shines so often a rainy day is cause for celebration.
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Entertainment
Literary Las Vegas
Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008 The Vegas Valley Book Festival, which wrapped up last week, can be understood as the community’s attempt to find a place for itself on the high-culture map.
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Development
What’s past is prologue
Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008 With a floundering economy and a post-election feeling that the country may be ready for a more sustainable society, the planning and design philosophy known as New Urbanism, which aims to combat the excesses of suburban sprawl, may be poised to enter the American mainstream.
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2008 Presidential Election
Okay, so now what?
Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008 If 2000 felt vaguely hopeful—pre-9/11, budget surplus—and 2004 at least had the housing boom to take our minds off the unsettling feeling that Iraq might not go as easily as we’d hoped, the aftermath of 2008 is just chockablock with trouble.
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Water
Tapped out
Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008 Water from Lake Mead turned up in a surprising place: several Walmart stores in the Bay Area.
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Music
Kind of Blu
Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008 Trumpeter James Barela was looking for material that he could “play a thousand times, a million times, and it still feels as fresh as the first time I played it.”
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Film
Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008 It’s that smile, those lusty teeth, somehow coy and seductive, warm and haughty. It’s a lush “I don’t give a damn” smile.
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Effortlessly presidential in the Chicago night
Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008 The black family members came from stage left. The white family members came from stage right. …that a man who looks like Obama…a man who looks like me…is monumental. It’s so monumental that words like monumental are small and somehow petty.
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The roar of history too loud to ignore
Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008 It’s tough to be an English teacher on Election Night. What was I thinking? To lecture on writing arguments—to a class trying to argue me out of even having class?
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Budget
More cops in ’09
Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008 Metro may be seeking as many as 400 officers a year over the next nine years. The question is not only whether we need all that protection, but also whether the money will be there to pay for it.
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Budget
The Final Pieces
Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008 Adventurer Steve Fossett’s downed plane was found October 1, 2008, in the mountains west of Mammoth Lakes, California.