Articles By

Wally Gordon

“56 Up”—Life is for living

“56 Up,” a movie that recently played at Albuquerque’s Guild Cinema and widely available online, is the latest installment of director Michael Apted’s ambitious lifelong TV project that began in 1963. 

Some of the original participants dropped out, one left and returned 28 years later. But the others have continued, for reasons that defy even their own understanding, to allow their lives and psyches to be probed in public every seven years.

Our national nuclear mausoleum

The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History presides in isolation over a barren field half a dozen blocks south of Eubank Boulevard in Albuquerque. On each side of the gray, utilitarian building a rocket stands guard. Behind the building a score of military aircraft and missiles fill a 30-acre dirt lot. At the entrance to the museum building,  the only ornament is a huge model of a beryllium atom…