I first met Sue Wagner between a stack of discounted biographies and a man arguing with a cookbook, which is about the right setting to meet a politician who preferred facts to fuss. She was standing there in the Costco on Plumb Lane, fresh out of the lieutenant governor’s office and browsing history like she…

With all the bad shit stacking up in the world, it gets harder to sit down and pretend I have something worth saying. The noise is constant now, screens screaming, people arguing with ghosts, wars replayed like reruns nobody asked for. Every headline feels like an effing punch to the ribs, and after a point,…

Some folks reckon that heroes come from the right stuff, hard work, courage, and a bit of cleverness. Others find out the hard way that even the brightest stars can cast long, dark shadows. The United Farm Workers, a union that had spent decades carrying one man’s name like a banner, found themselves staring down…

My brother Adam was seven when he started talking about his imaginary friend, the Green Man. He said the man was a magician and had a magic finger that could make things disappear. When he told me this, I laughed it off. Imaginary friends weren’t unusual, except for the way Adam said his name. Not…

I’ve stood in Eldorado Canyon with the sun baking the rock walls and the wind hissing through broken crags, and I can tell you the place doesn’t feel like Nevada. It feels like a place where rules don’t apply. Forty miles from Las Vegas, tucked between Nelson and the Colorado River, Eldorado once boomed with…

The flower garden had not always been wild. Once it had been orderly and bright, a place where roses stood in dignified rows, tulips kept their colors polished, and daisies chatted cheerfully in the sun. Paths trimmed, soil turned, and weeds, when they appeared, were quietly removed. The gardener had seen to that. In the…

Some mornings start quietly, a quiet that settles in your bones before the sun finishes rising. That’s how it was the day a man nearly knocked the glass door off its hinges, walking into the gas station, grinning as he’d just spotted a long-lost friend. “Hey there!” he shouted, waving both arms as if directing…

People keep asking me, “What’s up with Candace Owen’s attacking Erika Kirk?” While I don’t really care, to answer those caught up in the podcast soap opera, I am laying it all out as easily as I possibly can. To address a problem like Candace Owens, the first step is recognizing that something is amiss…

Lucas Hale had known fear in the usual ways a man learns it, flash floods roaring down a gulch without warning, the sudden buzz of a rattler too close to his heel, or the long, lonely nights when the wind could make a fellow think someone was calling his name from out in the dark.…

Lucas Hale had seen strange things in lonely country, but nothing that prepared him for the glow rolling off that old furnace. After hours of burning, it should’ve been dying down to embers and ash. Instead, heat poured from the rust-bitten hulk in slow, steady pulses, like the breath of some great animal sleeping in…