I was about five years old when I first held a frog–a big mottled thing, cold as a well-rope and twice as slippery. It leaped out of my hands like it was shot from a cannon and landed square in Cousin Janice’s cereal bowl. Milk went flying. She cried. Mom swatted at me with the…

Palo Alto, California, May 14, 2025, 9:57 AM PDT The garage smelled of burnt solder and stale coffee. Elias Varn hunched over a battered workbench, his tablet’s blue glow illuminating his stubbled face. Empty Red Bull cans littered the floor, and a cracked VR headset dangled from a nail on the wall. Outside, Palo Alto…

You start life thinking your body’s sacred—and then one morning, you bend over to tie your shoe, and something snaps like a dry twig under a hunting boot. And you realize, this ain’t a temple. It’s a haunted house. Every joint groans, the floorboards sag, and there’s an old ghost inside muttering about the weather…

Now, I’m not saying I’ve ever been in charge of a whole state—or even a neighborhood, come to think of it—but I have been the only one around with a bucket when the barn caught fire. And let me tell you, that’s not the time to argue over who’s got the right to toss water.…

Have you ever noticed how the people with the biggest hearts seem to collect the worst kind of folks–like porch lights attract moths? I’ve been thinking about that lately, watching my 89-year-old neighbor from the comfort of my front porch bench. She’s the kind of woman who keeps a mason jar of dog biscuits by…

I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television, but I’ve always believed that if something is illegal, then taking action against it shouldn’t be illegal either. That’s just common sense, the kind of thing that gets passed down with your granddaddy’s pocketknife and your momma’s recipe for peach cobbler. But according to…

I was in line at the general store, where the smell of hay mixed with dog kibble and the fly paper near the door did its best to hang on to a respectable quota of customers. I had one arm toilet paper and the other nursing a bag of Granny Smith apples—green and unforgiving, just…

I didn’t always understand my Aunt Barbara’s logic when I was young. She had a way of saying things that sounded like they came from a place older than she was. “Own a crappy car, but keep a nice home,” she’d say, sipping instant coffee from a chipped mug that read World’s Best Mom, the…

It hit me last Thursday, somewhere between the last bite of meatloaf and the first yawn—I had become one of them. One of the older folks I used to poke fun at when I was a high-powered teenager with the metabolism of a squirrel and the social life of a minor-league rock star. The poor…

Although I have never served in the Nevada Legislature, I have attended a few family reunions that felt quite like this session. At those reunions, some people left early, others stayed too long, and there was never any agreement on who brought the best potato salad. It all started with Governor Joe Lombardo’s big health…