POSTED // Mar 5,2008 - The dust-up over the death of a simple education funding request in the Utah Legislature late last month provides fodder for a bigger discussion: How does a lawmaker get educated on a bill? Perhaps more importantly, how should a lawmaker learn the pros...

POSTED // Feb 20,2008 - Just imagine the challenge of walking in Mitt Romney’s shiny leather Oxfords. The Utah folk hero and former Massachusetts governor failed in his presidential bid. Besides that, in the world of Wikipedia, Romney qualifies as a “BLP,”...

POSTED // Jan 23,2008 - Earlier this month intensive care nurse Lori Gay took a lunch break, as she often does, in a small room 30 feet from her nurses’ station at Salt Lake Regional Medical Center (SLMRC). But, on this day, along with two other nurses who joined her,...

POSTED // Dec 26,2007 - In keeping with every newspaper, magazine and broadcast outlet in the world this week, I feel a certain obligation to look back on 2007 with either warmth or horror. Or some combination of both, I guess. As I write this, there’s a 50-something man...

POSTED // Dec 12,2007 - There’s a certain comfort in our letters section here at City Weekly. The section reflects a feeling of ownership by the writers. It’s their page, mirroring back their thoughts—to themselves and to the rest of the readers. On a good...

POSTED // Dec 5,2007 - The Salt Lake Tribune labeled a Dec. 2 piece an “analysis.” Which means your whole attitude as a consumer of news has to shift. I had to gear up for more than a news story, push my shoulders into the high back of the barstool and dig in. The...

POSTED // Nov 28,2007 - The last time I saw Ed Mayne—about a week before the Sept. 11 primary election—he was smiling big and broadly. That was some feat, considering he had just finished another brutal round of chemotherapy for the lung cancer he’d been fighting...

POSTED // Nov 21,2007 - My friend was sitting in her car the other day, waiting in a morning rush-hour line at a drive-up coffee shack. The wait for quick caffeine seemed interminable. Three cars later, and edging toward being inexcusably late to an important meeting, she finally...

POSTED // Nov 14,2007 - It’s hard to find a colder, crueler world than the radio business. And local talk radio—in an industry that has all but killed the format in favor of cheaper, syndicated programming—can be the chilliest place of all. Michael Castner...

POSTED // Nov 14,2007 - West Valley City police found my younger sister on the morning of Jan. 31, 1999. She was in her bed, behind her locked bedroom door, in her apartment. They surmised she had been dead for at least a couple of days. Heather was 33 years old. An autopsy...