Is Santa Fe Mesh-able?

According to the Mesh, the future of business is sharing - but do we have the goods?

Lisa Gansky describes herself, somewhat improbably, as “a monkey with one trick”: starting companies. Gansky has made a career of spotting potential trends, then molding those ideas into wildly successful business enterprises. And while Gansky herself has thrived in the current economic system—Ofoto, a mobile photo-sharing company she cofounded in 1999 and then sold to Kodak two years later for somwhere under $100 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, is just one example—her latest venture involves upending that system. In Gansky’s view, a new economic paradigm is emerging with the potential to recast the way we think of buying, selling and creating wealth. She calls it the Mesh, and its premise is as simple as a kindergarten aphorism: We all need to learn to share.

The Margarita Challenge

Bus-ted

For years, local officials used a Texas price agreement to green-light bus purchases. Now they’ve stopped—but the same out-of-state bus company still dominates the market

On July 12, 2011, Lynn Degenhart resigned from his post as a member of the New Mexico Passenger Transportation Association board with a message titled “Ethical Concern.”

Extremely Well-Read and Incredibly Amused

SFR's incomplete and totally biased guide to summer reading

The book chooses the reader. I believe this; however, I also believe that the reader has an obligation to make himself available to the book.

Listen: Years ago, I stopped taking advice on reading material. First, every reader has his own tastes; second, some readers just aren’t very discerning—they’ll read anything; and finally, RIYL only applies to people who want to read books like the ones they’ve read. Moreover, as a literature and creative writing student, I struggled to split my time between the assigned texts and the books that interested me, and the required readings only interested me after they ceased to be assignments. Maybe I’m coming off as contrarian—as someone who just doesn’t like being told what to do—but really, I’m just a slow reader, and I only absorb materials out of personal interest rather than obligation.

Night Lights

SFUAD students illuminate Santa Fe with graphic art

On an unseasonably cold spring night, Santa Fe University of Art and Design students are busy cobbling together all manner of computers, projectors and speakers for a dress rehearsal of this year’s Outdoor Vision Festival—a free, outdoor celebration of interactive video installations.

Homeless in Santa Fe (Part 2)

The continuing saga of Santa Fe's homeless people - in their own words

Who doesn’t make bad choices, whether it’s choosing the brownie for breakfast instead of the banana or picking the life partner who lasts much less than a lifetime?

Shadow Economy

Eight years ago, Santa Fe’s economic development plan was supposed to change the game. What happened?

It’s late afternoon in March, and spring is blooming. Roughly 50 of Santa Fe’s movers and shakers are gathered in a small building that resembles a slick, revamped old church, with bright white walls culminating into a triangular point in the center of the ceiling. Creative Santa Fe, the arts and culture nonprofit whose broad mission is to improve the city’s “creative economy,” is announcing a new direction after seven years of inaction, mostly on the city’s dime.

How to Fund an American Police State

Local police forces are arming themselves - with your money

At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, Calif. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.

Party's Over

With its budget slashed and a proposed nuclear facility dead in the water, Los Alamos National Laboratory and local activists look for new direction

On the morning of Feb. 13, Joni Arends, executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, was sitting in her downtown Santa Fe office when a flurry of emails suddenly flooded her inbox. President Barack Obama had just released his fiscal year 2013 budget, and it dealt a serious blow to a project against which Arends and others have been campaigning for years. The budget recommended that not a single penny go to construction of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement nuclear facility, a proposed plutonium pit manufacturing plant at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Rescue Me

Atalaya Search and Rescue, one of only two technical teams in the state, is up for recertification next month; Will Taylor goes along for the ride

 Wispy, cotton-candy clouds move briskly across the mid-February sky. My girlfriend, Thea Hutchinson, and I take turns climbing the mottled brown basaltic rocks of the cliff band just outside of White Rock. Thea gives me a hanging belay—making sure that, if I fall, she can catch me with the other end of the rope from her position 25 feet off the ground—as I climb. The sky doesn’t seem to be falling, but that changes in an instant.