Asenath Kepler puts affordable housing and infill at the center of her mayoral platform, but what does that really mean? Meanwhile, the New Mexico Film Museum is increasingly looking like an underused facility--a thinly veiled marketing tool with an overpaid director.

Many Santa Feans were recently surprised to learn that an asphalt production plant had been slated to fire up at the Caja del Rio Landfill. The plant’s permit—granted by the New Mexico Air Quality Bureau—allows up to 600 tons of asphalt to be produced every hour.

Here’s how you can tell the truth about wages in Santa Fe: No one who is against the living wage would ever agree to work for a rate as low as the living wage. They’ll say it’s economics. But we can go ahead and call it hypocrisy.

Earlier this fall, my wife Lala and I had told Poppy she needed to do something active—take hip-hop dance, join a gym, jazzercise, her choice—and surprisingly she went postal on us and up and joined the cross country team. In my family, you only ran if you were chasing a ball or being chased by my dad and his wooden spoon of tough love.

You know what I’m all done with? Santa Fe’s quatrocentenario––the 400th anniversary celebration. So far nothing has really happened to convince me that it’s anything other than a weird post-colonial seizure—the fevered gasp of a misunderstood and violent history.

MIX needs a remix, Glenn Beck needs to be slapped, the AP needs to be put out of its misery, issuing a city bond to build a private movie theater is a bad idea on every possible level, and continually extending government support to a movie studio in the county is getting awful tiresome, too.

Santa Fe is once again a prominent player in Travel + Leisure magazine’s annual survey of America’s favorite cities. Of course, people who vote in the survey are just echoing the marketing campaigns put forward by the cities and the  preconceptions formed by, for example, Travel + Leisure magazine.

NWQ opponents chalk up a loss, while county anti-development activists log a win. But both cases are victories—even for those who feel they lost—and, taken together, constitute a bellwether for land-use policy in the region. It's just a matter of getting the proper perspective.

Being stuffed into a minivan may cause some minor disagreements, like whether or not “Gucci Bandana” is an appropriate song for an 8-year-old boy, but it also can promote conversation, as I found out this past summer when my former sister-in-law, Mimi, and two nieces, Maddie and Samantha, flew from Pennsylvania to stay with us.

Think you own your property? Think again. You might own your property, but someone else likely owns the rights to everything below the surface. Someone may be selling or leasing the ability to extract everything from helium to coal-bed methane right out from under you. It might even be the Santa Fe Opera.