If you’ve got a few spare hours, there are worse ways to spend them than browsing Lake Mead National Recreation Area’s Virtual Museum, a collection of photos and artifacts that the National Park Service put online last month in honor of the National Historic Preservation Act’s 49th anniversary and International Archaeology Day.

We want to say that Decemberlands, by local writer and occasional Desert Companion contributor Greg Blake Miller — a slim, highly readable volume of three short stories with holiday themes — would make a great stocking stuffer. But that would shortchange the book: By the time the recipient opens it on December 25, he or she will be pretty much holidayed-out. And it would be a shame to set aside a book that, really, isn’t about seasonal clichés.

What does UNLV President Len Jessup’s plan to bump up the school’s status actually mean for students and the state?

Twenty years ago, Martin Scorsese’s meticulous Casino explained Las Vegas to the world

In February, this magazine published an article entitled “Is the Army at it Again?” which reported an explosion on January 8 at Frenchman Flat, northwest of Las Vegas. A month after we ran the piece, we received an envelope containing two cassette tapes from a man who claimed to be an orderly at a hospice in North Las Vegas.

Millions of years of Nevada history rendered as a series of improbable conversations.

We call this (*flourish of parting curtains*) our Illustrated History issue, but we seriously need to Frankenstein up a better word for what’s going on in this month’s feature package, our second stab at excavating our state and city’s history for interpretive doodle-fication.

Three new chicken-centric spots take flight — each with their share of hits and misses.

If we had trees in Las Vegas, and those trees had leaves, and those leaves turned gold and orange and red, and those golds and oranges and reds carpeted your lawn in a soft/crunchy matrix of invitation to leisurely autumnal frolic, and you waded in among them, enjoying the whisper, crunch and rattle of the leaves, their scent of earthen secrets unlocked ... yeah, that might approximate the flavor of The Daily at StripSteak.

A revered destination for gourmet ingredients, Artisanal Foods brings its inventory to life in a new café.