During the same week in June, two freakish things happened. A rare but welcome incursion of monsoon moisture entered Arizona from the south, scattering welcome showers across parched forest and grassland, but also throwing down lightning bolts that set off dozens of wildfires. Elon Musk, meanwhile, became the world’s first trillionaire, reaching an...
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There isn’t a lot of time for reflection as the spring semester winds down, so thick is the calendar with projects and presentations and heaps of grading decisions to make, but in late April there were some mornings when the cool temperatures and bursting green leaves brought to mind wistful thoughts of a long-ago spring that for me was also defined by the...
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I first heard about the Master of Liberal Studies program at NAU not long after I moved to Flagstaff, in the person of a woman whom I would eventually marry. Well, that sounds interesting, I thought, adding it to the list of things I found interesting about her. The program was focused on good and sustainable communities, she said. As a writer I loved the...
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The night the police helicopter dropped from the west Flagstaff sky I was lying in bed, trying to get my mind off the disturbing flow of local news updates by immersing myself in a long magazine article. The piece was about Greenland. But it wasn’t one of those articles about Greenland, the ubiquitous kind exploring the politics or the psychology of a...
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As someone who lives by choice at high elevation, I know the happy truth that those of us who are lucky enough to live up here are simply closer to the sky than most other people. Which according to my dermatologist and eye doctor alike is not always a good thing. But I will take the trade, paid off in fresh air, mountain vistas, nighttime dark skies. And...
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