Media Sommelier

Everyone had their own way of coping with off-day jitters during the Stanley Cup series, and mine was bingeing The Athletic’s steady gush of Adin Hill worship. As a yogi, I got hooked by Jesse Grainger’s June 3rd story, “How Golden Knights’ Adin Hill prepared for years for his spectacular paddle save,” covering the surprise-star goalie’s journey from tall stiff athlete with back problems, to locked-down pandemic athlete who stumbled on the Down Dog yoga app, to chillest dude on the ice when the rest of the team needed it most. But to truly understand Hill — to get the necessary shading and detail around Grainger’s sketch — you have to read Joe Smith’s June 7th piece, “Behind the rise of Vegas’ Adin Hill: Funky yellow pads, a late growth spurt and a Stanley Cup Final run.” For the true Hill connoisseur, this piece comes complete with a little league coach interview, a story of early triumph over low expectations, and a photo of the now-hulking 6-foot-6, 215-pound Canadian as a scrawny youngster in what appears to be boxer shorts and a prophetic set of kid-size gold goalie pads. Spoiler: He was always pretty chill. – Heidi Kyser

If you’re like me, you’ve heard there’s something going on at Thacker Pass — Paiute protesters throwing themselves in front of earth movers, maybe? — but you’re fuzzy on the details. You may even sense a latent reluctance to educate yourself, a brewing internal conflict between the part of you that respects Indigenous sovereignty and claims to ancestral lands and the part of you that worries we need the lithium buried beneath Thacker Pass in order to produce more electric cars, lower CO2 emissions, and fight climate change. Jarrette Werk’s unflinching reporting from the scene for Underscore news sweeps aside that reluctance with a straightforward account of what’s happening on the ground today and how we got here. (You may remember Werk’s name from Nevada Public Radio’s podcast Native Nevada, which won a regional Murrow award due in no small part to his contributions.) Balancing facts and emotion, “At Thacker Pass, Extraction and Resistance Come to a Head” connects the dots between what happened at the site 150 years ago and what’s going on there today, which one source summarizes as, “still … colonization.” – HK

And speaking of former KNPR contributors, Nate Negyi (our pandemic-era reporter for the Mountain West News Bureau) has produced a jawdropping podcast for Outside/In called the Underdogs. It’s a compact, “Tiger King”-flavored tale — easy to take in over a weekend or even one afternoon — about a husband-and-wife pair of competitive dog sledders from New Zealand whose North American dog team is not the success the couple portrays it to be. In Hegyi’s deft telling, the cautionary tale is one that both very specifically belongs to the niche world of Iditarod and also nails a universal shady character type that regularly crops up in all sorts of fields, everywhere. But fear not, animal lovers:  It has a happy ending (for the dogs, at least). – HK