New Mexico Mercury

Friday Voyage: Cambodia

Margaret Randall explores the unifying consciousness of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Insight New Mexico - Kirk Gittings

V.B. Price talks with photographer and longtime collaborator Kirk Gittings about New Mexico as a place of sacred power and how that is experienced through its land and culture.

Chemical Weapons

El Machete

Weekly Poem: In The Heart of Syria (A Hak-ku*)

Humanity is
never the most logical
option, just like love.

Provincial Matters, 9-9-2013

V.B. Price's weekly collection of appreciations and observations.

When U.S. Grant turned on Lew Wallace

Lew Wallace made the most ambitious effort of any New Mexico governor to reform our state’s errant political ways but famously conceded, “Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico.”

Wallace was not just a territorial governor from 1848 to 1851. He was also one of the most celebrated novelists of his time due to the success of his historical epic, Ben-Hur. Before he was a governor or a novelist, however, he was a major general in the Union Army during the Civil War, where he became an arch-foe of his boss, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant...

Friday Voyage: Breaking the Maya Code

Margaret Randall takes us on a journey of linguistic, cultural and academic creativity across continents.

The Puebloan view of a lesser-known war

A Chinese restaurant’s fortune cookie proclaimed that “You have a charming way with words and should write a book.” Inspired, I taped that little slip of paper to the front of my desktop computer where I was writing.

The result is a historical novel, Winter of the Metal People, which took ten years to research, write, and rewrite.

Winter of the Metal People is about the Coronado expedition and the Tiguex War he fought in 1540-41 against Pueblo tribes — but it’s told for the first time from the Indian point of view...

¡Ah, Chihuahua!

The changing character of the vast Mexican state that's our neighbor.

One Million Bones on ¡Colores! particularly timely

My most striking memories of being on the National Mall for the One Million Bones installation are of the conversations I overheard. Families of four would stop and look. One of the younger family members would ask, “What’s that?” One of the older family members would pause for approximately a moment of silence. Then, I’d listen as the adult gracelessly tries to choreograph an explanation as to why there is a mass grave in front of the United States Capitol without stepping on the word “genocide"...