Communities

I recently attended a benefit for an organic farm in Missoula, Mont., a town known for its leftist politics, environmental activism and outdoors culture. Missoula can be described as part Portland, part Telluride, a “New West” city by any measure. So I found it strange that both the performers that evening kept referring to their […]

Los Angeles is nearly built out. The last empty bits of the metropolis are already being fitted into a titanic grid of neighborhoods that extends, except for mountains and coastline, 60 miles from south to north and from the Pacific Ocean deep into the desert. The closing of the suburban frontier in Los Angeles ends […]

The hailstones came down like meteorites. They crashed against the house and whistled through the trees, ripping and shredding as if their icy edges were honed razor-sharp. I stood behind the screen door and watched as the clear fiberglass roofing on the front porch was torn, twisted and obliterated, bits and pieces of fiberglass flying […]

I lucked out when I landed in Anaconda, Mont. I didn’t have to tell my friends I was a Helen or a Malted. I became an Anacondan. Newspaper folks like to find shortcuts when writing news stories, and one of the best ones around is the ability to describe the people in a town with […]

Last spring, the now-infamous Ward Churchill, University of Colorado professor of ethnic studies, gave a talk at Colorado College about the contents of our institutional closets. He claimed that we had the bones of 139 people — all Native Americans — hidden on campus. Churchill used this number to demonstrate the college’s complicity in the […]