Santa Fe Reporter - Features http://www.sfreporter.com/articles.sec-5-1-features.html <![CDATA[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.]]> <![CDATA[The Margarita Challenge - ]]> ]]> <![CDATA[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.”]]> <![CDATA[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.]]> <![CDATA[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.]]> <![CDATA[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?]]> <![CDATA[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.]]> <![CDATA[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.]]> <![CDATA[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.]]> <![CDATA[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.


]]> <![CDATA[VOTE! - SFR’s picks for the March 6 City Council election]]> Instead of a City Council that produces radical, outside-the-box ideas—the types of ideas that are beginning to turn a crumbling Detroit into an urban-planning mecca, for instance—Santa Fe’s leaders turn repeatedly to the same government and tourism industries. Instead of stopping to think carefully about where we want our city to go, elected officials often seem complacent, quietly biding their time until “the economy gets better.”

What if it doesn’t? What if Santa Fe won’t improve unless we take action? ]]> <![CDATA[Roundhouse Cowboy - In New Mexico’s shifting political landscape, Andy Nuñez’ brand of rugged individualism has made him an unlikely star]]> On Jan. 17, the opening day of New Mexico’s 2012 legislative session, longtime state House of Representatives Speaker Ben Luján, D-Santa Fe, stood before a hushed chamber. Luján, a diminutive man in his 70s who for years had controlled much of what happened at the capitol, had just announced that he had lung cancer and planned to retire from politics. The 2012 session would be his last. It was the end of an era.]]> <![CDATA[Who Killed Richard Burick? - A simmering mystery raises questions about LANL’s past]]> On a clear day in January 2003, Richard James Burick, the retired deputy director of operations at Los Alamos National Laboratory, drove his silver Dodge pickup into the Pajarito Mountain Ski Area parking lot, waved at two workers, circled around and parked the truck. The next time anyone saw him, he was dead from a gunshot wound to the head.]]> <![CDATA[No Page Unturned - Five essential books for understanding New Mexico]]> There are a lot of things Edward Abbey didn’t like: dams, fences, billboards—and cars in national parks. Writing of his time working at Arches National Park, in Desert Solitaire, he railed against visitors who never stepped from their vehicles: “Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs—anything—but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out.”]]> <![CDATA[Homeless in Santa Fe - Two women - one homeless, one not - on what it means to live on the streets of the City Different]]> This fall, a series of community meetings revealed what many Railyard residents considered a serious problem: the rising homeless population in Santa Fe, and a perceived parallel uptick in crime. With the departure of the Occupy Santa Fe encampment and the opening of Santa Fe’s new Interfaith Community Shelter on Cerrillos Road, the complaints have abated—but the problem hasn’t.]]> <![CDATA[One Year of Susana - ]]> On a sunny Saturday in March 2010, Republican candidates and supporters thronged the halls of the Albuquerque Hilton. That morning, New Mexico’s Republican gubernatorial field seemed every bit as wide-open as the GOP’s current presidential field.]]> <![CDATA[South Side Rising - Despite enduring challenges, Santa Fe’s south side is moving up]]>  Every year, thousands of tourists with open pocketbooks flock to Santa Fe for its multiple culture festivals, opera shows and art galleries.

The City Different consistently tops lists as one of the country’s best destinations for food, wine and culture. In 2011, Condé Nast named Santa Fe the third best place to visit in the United States. This year, the city was chosen over Lake Tahoe and others to host the International Mountain Biking World Summit, a highlight Mayor David Coss emphasized in his annual State of the City address this past fall.

“This is a great place for active, outdoor vacations,” Coss said in the October speech, “for nature and environmentally friendly travel; for food, wine, spas, wellness, art, culture and history.”
]]> <![CDATA[New Flame - Are we ready for another Las Conchas?]]> On a late June afternoon, 18 mile-per-hour winds whistle across an open meadow on a small piece of private land in the Jemez Mountains. In the saddle between two pine-covered ridges at the edge of the property, an aspen tree teeters over onto the bare wire of an electrical pole, causing a spark. Over the next 14 hours, the resulting fire burns 43,000 acres, or one acre every 1.17 seconds. It devours areas the size of a football field in (literally) two seconds. In a little over a month, it has spread through 156,000 acres and incinerated 63 homes. ]]> <![CDATA[Stories of the Year - 2011: Top 10]]> It’s not easy to summarize an entire year in 10 abbreviated news stories.


Or is it?
]]> <![CDATA[The Fire Next Time - Las Conchas is over. How do we move forward?]]> If a tree falls in the woods, is it a catastrophe? On June 26, it was.]]>