New Mexico Mercury

Malala: ‘our hero, our champion’

The mission of a columnist is to tell stories as he sees them through his own eyes, but occasionally someone else tells a story so well that there is nothing left for me to add. Such is the case with a story published July 12 in the Guardian. Although it is by far the smallest of the seven national British newspapers, it has become, to my mind, the best newspaper in the world, with the strongest writing and the most fearless reporting.

This story, about the struggle of one teenage girl, is dramatic on a personal level but also of the utmost importance on the grand level of human aspiration. It deserves to be told as well as possible, and so I turn the rest of this column over to Ed Pilkington, the Guardian’s correspondent in New York...

Vanishing again

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were descending from the Continental Divide in Colorado when, as my wife observed with a mixture of awe, concern and laughter, “You just vanished.” It wasn’t the first time I had vanished, and it won’t be the last.

We were spending a few days in what Coloradans smilingly call the Banana Belt, the Arkansas River Valley north of the San Luis Valley, where summers are cooler and winters warmer than in most of the rest of Colorado.

It had been a nearly perfect trip, until I vanished...

“The Seven” - a fusion of theatrical treats

So this week they closed the national forest, state trust lands and county open space. The Rio Grande is a dry arroyo for much of its length, and most of the rest of the river is too shallow for recreation. The lakes are remnants of themselves, and some are not even usable. In the East Mountains, we watch the terrible wildfires in the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo Mountains and wonder if we are next.

So in these hot, windy days of early summer what are New Mexicans to do to escape?

I suggest The Seven, a collection of 10-minute, one-act, two character skits performed by the Fusion company at the Cell Theater in Albuquerque.

Deconstructing the media

When I went to work as a copy editor for the Baltimore Sun in the 1960s, I was informed of its explicit policy of crime coverage. If a crime occurred in the black ghetto of West Baltimore, we ignored it unless at least two people died, but any serious crime in the middle-class or wealthy areas of North Baltimore rated a full story, sometimes on the front page.

This kind of media bias, which used to be accepted with little more than a cynical shrug, has become the focus of a social movement called media literacy.

A small but notable Albuquerque organization, the Media Literacy Project, has been pursuing such issues for 20 years during which it has spun a widespread web that has taken executor director Andrea Quijada to such far-flung outposts as Venezuela, Tunisia and, most recently, Uganda...

You can go home again

Last week I spent six days in a city that almost seemed to live in a different continent that Albuquerque. What follows are some random musings on my visit to Indianapolis.

Indianapolis seems to be recovering from the recession in a way that Albuquerque is not. The emphasis in that sentence is on the slippery little word “seems.”

The big box stores are huge and very crowded. “Help Wanted” signs, which have almost disappeared from Albuquerque, are common...

The stupendous week that was

If you are President Obama surveying the scene from the Oval Office, here is what you might have seen last week:

• A House of Representatives committee finally negotiating a bipartisan deal on immigration, and doing so at the 11th hour just before negotiations would have collapsed.
Although it differs substantially from the bill moving through the Senate, the deal goes a long way toward assuring that some kind of immigration reform will eventually emerge from the congressional sausage factory.

• Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan, authoritative judge of all things budgetary, saying the unexpected strength of the recovery has increased tax receipts and reduced expenditures to a major degree...

Paolo Soleri Amphitheater—monument to a dream

A writer's name appears on the cover of his novel. A painter signs his canvas. A playwright is credited on the program. A star's name adorns a marquee. But what of an architect?

His creation obscures rather than announces him. He lives and works in the shadows of his buildings, which are named for their location, function or owner, not their creator.

However, there are two famous exceptions: the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Paolo Soleri Amphitheater in Santa Fe...

ABQ theater scene is hopping

Albuquerque had more than 20 plays opening in April, appealing to almost every conceivable taste, from children's stories and musical comedies to cutting-edge contemporary drama.

Among the latter was “Humble Boy,” a strange and generally confounding British family drama staged by the Fusion—at the Cell, the KimMo and the Lensic in Santa Fe through May 11.
Expertly directed and skillfully acted by a highly professional ensemble cast, the play describes the homecoming of a Cambridge University professor after the death of his father.

A perilous world comes knocking — again

Bombs at the Boston Marathon, poison letters mailed from Mississippi to President Obama and a U.S. senator, an explosion in a fertilizer plant destroying much of a town in Texas, two wounded by bullets as 80,000 gathered at an annual marijuana festival in the center of Denver: What are we to make of all this happening in a single week?

Against this background of mayhem, the U.S. Senate at the same time killed off all gun reform. What are we to make of that?

It seems to me there are several lessons to be learned from the terrible tragedies and momentous moments of recent days...

For returning veteran, war is neither just, good or innevitable

Scott Albright is not your ordinary ex-Independent reporter, ex-Marine, Iraqi war veteran, political science graduate, China specialist, PTSD sufferer and conqueror, freelance journalist, New Mexican and Hawaiian, a husband and a father expecting his third child.

He, of course, is all those things. But what is most interesting about Scott is that he has learned to describe his experiences in newspaper articles, blogs, a website and now a book that are at once coolly analytical and warmly empathetic...