Them and Us

We discuss the decidedly heartfelt LVCVA tourism commercial that promises what happens here ... is safe here.

In GLOW Season 3, the wrestling may be fake, but Vegas feels real

Good, bad, or ugly, these films tell essential truths about Las Vegas. (Yes, even Leprechaun 3)

Las Vegas through the eyes of the media in three recent, high-profile stories

Recent national news reports underline Nevada's perilous healt statistics. Now one agency intends to tackle the issue.

California Governor Jerry Brown’s nerves must have been on edge last weekend when he said, from Le Bourget, France, where he was attending climate talks,…

Perhaps lazily, perhaps cynically, I tend to imagine the collective Las Vegas tourist experience as some unremarkable tapioca smoothie of midlist peccadilloes involving a little too much to drink, a little too much to eat, and a little too much gambling, topped with a flimsy halo of overstimulation — calibrated, regulated, test-tube misadventure for a bovine mass sensibility. Yeah, like I said, cynical.

This sounds like a story premise that might bubble up in a screenwriting class brainstorming session: As one of her final wishes, a dying woman asks her daughter to take her to Las Vegas. Imagining how that might play out, you can envision something like Leaving Las Vegas crossed with Terms of Endearment.

The national attention on Las Vegas’ water situation, which I noted in January, continues — now with added polarity.

You may read this breezy New York Times story on sports betting as, oh, a decently wrought, workmanlike -- almost perfunctory -- entry in the annual glut of pieces about the wild, zany world of sports betting. But -- and here is a confession of what I sometimes feel is an innate, chromosomal, almost spiritual shortcoming of mine -- for someone (a Las Vegas native, no less! I know! The irony: mordant!) whose understanding of sports, let alone sports betting, is positively paleolithic, for some reason this New York Times article arrived as a bracing revelation of sorts in its very sunny, workmanlike, Wikipedia-ish approach.