On a windswept hill in Albuquerque’s south valley, rows of metallic blue solar panels gleam beside a humming control center. The energy they capture from the sun’s rays goes into orange containers stacked with special lead batteries that store the energy for use after the sun goes down.

In a scathing dissent from the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, former US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that, by equating corporations’ campaign spending to individuals’ free speech rights, the Court’s opinion was “a rejection of the common sense of the American people.” The ruling prompted an explosion of campaign spending: The 2012 elections are expected to be the most expensive in US history, and multimillion-dollar TV attack ad campaigns are already flooding airwaves—even as Congress becomes increasingly unproductive. In such a climate, it can be tempting to repudiate the whole charade and refuse to vote. But to disenfranchise ourselves is to abrogate our duty as citizens of a republic.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.