Having our say
We, as Americans, generally idealize public opinion. The people will have their say and the majority will prevail. But will they?
Finding the lessons of the Alaska Dispatch News saga
Let’s take another look at the story. Maybe we believed the big tale the newcomer told us more than our own eyes. Maybe we put something over on ourselves.
Election returns show Alaska as red as ever
It takes a scandal crippling the other brand for the Democrats to win a statewide election. Alaska is not turning blue, except in occasional pockets.
A gracious exit – and lingering questions – for Bill Walker
I am not talking about an explanation in detail violating the woman's privacy. She didn't have to be named. But Walker needed to tell us how an elected public official went down a rabbit hole without any public process.
An Anchorage cab driver’s grief
A broken heart doesn't want to hear about due process, rights of the accused and bureaucracy.
The nature of memory
The impulse toward literature, organizing and improving the story, seems to be almost universal among people who are literate. Telling the story can change the story.
How an upstart East Coast newspaper resonated with an Alaska kid
I am sad to see the Village Voice die. But I also have to smile. The Voice came along at just the right time in my life. It excited my imagination like no other publication.
Measuring the candidates in Alaska’s top two November races
Two Anchorage Chamber of Commerce debates put the differences between candidates in this year's top-tier races into focus.
Many decades after World War II, remembering the banality of evil
Hans Frank, the German Governor General of Poland during the Nazi occupation, testified at Nuremberg "A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased." But already, neo-Nazis are busy with erasers.
Pictures are only worth a thousand words if we find their stories
Tracking down the owner of a photo album reminds that people impress their imagination on reality in surprising ways.
A newspaper shooting? It’s happened here. Twice.
Two shootings in the 1980s in Anchorage and another more than a century ago in Juneau are poorly remembered, but presage carnage like that of the recent Maryland killings.
A lifetime of letters, and what they capture
"I am not the same person I was then." This is true of all of us, isn't it? The Greeks taught, "know thyself," yet thyself keeps changing.