Happenings  Kentucky Derby fans: Get your fancy hats ready for a day of celebration at The Depot Craft Brewery and Distillery for their Churchill Downs VIP Experience, at noon, Saturday, May 4, at 325 E. Fourth St., in Reno. For $100, ticket-holders can expect a premium bar, a deluxe buffet, a costume contest, private race viewing and pop-up shops from Sierra Belle, Desert Gems and Lovely Links. For tickets or more information, find the event on Eventbrite.  The Jesse is hosting a Cinco de Mayo celebration from 2 to 8 p.m., Sunday, May 5, at 306 E. Fourth St., in Reno. The celebratio ..read more

The Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, often brings in national news-industry leaders to discuss their work with students and faculty. In recent months, the department has also invited local journalists outside of the campus community to hear from these speakers.  In April, the guest was Steven Waldman, a longtime New York political journalist and the founder/president of a group called Rebuild Local News, which is working to advance public policies that might help re-stabilize the industry.  “Government is not the only solution to the crisis in local n ..read more

On April 22, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in The City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the case that will determine whether it is constitutional for local governments to criminalize sleeping outside.   The Nevada Housing Justice Alliance spoke out regarding the case, as well as two recent local camping-ban ordinances—one passed by the city of Sparks, and the other by Washoe County.  The group’s press release reads: “The Nevada Housing Justice Alliance opposes policies that turn low-income, houseless Nevadans into criminals. The NHJA condemns leaders at all levels of governm ..read more

In the late 1990s and ’00s, the corporations running America’s mainstream newspapers did a very dumb thing: They trained Americans to think that news stories should always be free.  Before the mid-1990s, if you wanted to read a news story, you had to subscribe to a newspaper, or go to a newsstand, vending box or store to buy one. (If you couldn’t afford any of that, you could go to the library.) Even newspapers that didn’t charge a fee, like the RN&R and its alternative-newsweekly brethren, put the news in between ads and personals and other things that subsidized that news.  Th ..read more

In April 2022, Emerson Drewes, then a 19-year-old sophomore, became the editor in chief of The Nevada Sagebrush, the University of Nevada, Reno’s student newspaper.   The Sagebrush went all-digital after 2021 due to the closure of Northern Nevada’s last printing press, but Drewes and the staff still call it a “newspaper.”  Drewes grew up in Las Vegas, in a family that lived on a steady diet of news—FOX5, celebrity news like E! and TMZ, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which still arrives on her parents’ doorstep daily. She enrolled at UNR as a business major but soon switched ..read more

In 1974, a gold coin with the image of Caesar Augustus is discovered buried at the 2,000-year-old level of an archeological dig in Rome. That’s not unusual—except the medallion is dated 1998 and bears the inscription “Caesars Palace, Las Vegas.”  The story of how the coin became unstuck in time is the starting premise of A Coin for the Ferryman by Las Vegas-based author Megan Edwards, the winner of the 2023 Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. The story blends time travel and Roman history with a tale of betrayal and romance. The result is a page-turner of a novel in wh ..read more

Imagine you’ve had enough of your cheating spouse. You’re ready to leave. But it’s 1947. And that means unless your spouse “gives” you a divorce, you’re stuck. Or you could go to Reno! From 1931 to the 1960s, divorce seekers by the thousands were running to Reno for a six-week, no-fault divorce. If they had the money and the need for privacy, they stayed on one of the dude ranches around town. Someone called those dude ranches “divorce ranches,” and the name stuck. The Divorce Seekers: The Intimate True Story of a Nevada Divorce Ranch Wrangler (BMC Publications, 2023) by William L ..read more

Are you feeling the sting of Curb Your Enthusiasm coming to an end on HBO? Never fear: Conan O’Brien has come to the rescue—and his new show might be his best show yet. In Conan O’Brien Must Go, the legend travels to four foreign lands, with each trip inspired by a call into his podcast. Somebody from Norway called and said he was a fan? What the hell! Let’s get on a plane and go surprise the guy! We’ve got the budget for that sort of thing! We’re HBO! It’s a great premise, and while Conan became a fine interviewer over the years, it was the behind-the-scenes stuff and street skits that real ..read more

When former professional prima ballerina Rosine Bena founded Sierra Nevada Ballet (SNB) in Reno in 2001, she set a lofty goal: teaming up with other local performing arts organizations in the area, thereby amplifying each other’s work and promotional efforts.   But in the early 2000s, small, local companies tended to operate within siloes, focusing more on growing their own audiences than partnering with perceived competitors—so Bena quietly nursed her ambition to someday create a performing arts collective and hoped the right partner to help achieve that vision would come along.&nb ..read more

This month, I am so proud to share a story about a local startup in the hyper-hyped and warp-speed world of artificial intelligence.   I’m not going all technical on you; I don’t have the brains or qualifications to do so. I’m an AI user, but an amateur user, and I’ve been less than impressed with some of the results from my AI queries.   One such query: I was trying to verify a stat I saw in a presentation at the Lithuanian Consulate General in New York a couple of weeks ago; I was there to give a presentation myself the next day. I wanted to know if the statistic that on ..read more