Being a professional writer carried with it, for me, a bundle of contradictions – the arrogance of the act (I have something to say that’s so worthwhile that you should spend your time and your money to read it!) crossed with the insecurity, the fear (Do I really have something to say that’s worth their …
tl;dr I’m stepping down as director of the UNM Water Resources Program at the end of summer semester to write another book. longer When I was happily toiling those many years as an inkstained wretch, I had secret fantasies of leaving newspaper work to spend my waning years on the campus of the University of …
Continue reading ‘The next steps in “my semi-charmed life of the mind”’ »
Five plus years on from my career spent in newsrooms, I mostly don’t miss it, except when I do. The great joy of a newsroom was the intensity of being in the midst of All the Things. A newsroom, at least the ones I worked in, was a boisterous place, with chatter about whatever the …
My memory is vivid of the moment I realized newspapers – my vocation, my dream, my way of life – were fucked. I think it was the spring of 2008. Prices for oil and related commodities were spiking. To help write about it for the Albuquerque Journal, I’d signed up for UNM economics professor Jennifer …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries Revisited: the end of McClatchy’ »
This conversation triggered by Faith Kearns’ comments about memories of Santa Anas got me thinking about an old piece I wrote a while back and never published. I didn’t publish it because the editor I was pitching didn’t want it, but in retrospect I’m glad it never ran. It seemed ill-timed then, and on a …
Continue reading ‘Some thoughts on disaster journalism, fire, Southern California, and resilience’ »
Going through boxes in the garage, I came across this treasure: I was a young intern at the late, lamented Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Meese, for those too young to remember, was Attorney General of the United States of America under Ronald Reagan. Good times.
Worth bookmarking: We want to be a place where research findings about geology or sociology blend with our journalism about the world of the West, to give a multi-dimensional picture of the region’s life and issues. We will also introduce, and constantly update, a library of links you can use to explore the subjects we …
Continue reading ‘& the West – new offering from Stanford’s Lane Center’ »
When Brad Plumer interviewed me about my new book for Vox, he seized on this point: For a journalist, few things make better headlines than a good resource crisis. Which is why reporters writing about water issues in the American West are often attracted to the prospect of apocalypse — that the region is going …
News is a misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened and not about things that didn’t happen. So when there’s a police officer that has not been shot up or city that has not had a violent demonstration, they don’t make the news. As long as violent events don’t fall …
Laura Paskus did a lovely job chronicling my post-newspaper-journalism (post-journalism?) life and thinking about water and the news, no longer the old nickname – “the harbinger of doom”: “I began to realize there was this other story about people not running out of water,” he says. Locally, for example, he points to a drop in Albuquerque’s …