POSTED // Nov 14,2012 - Pearl Sandick is an assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah, where she teaches a graduate course in general relativity. Her research interests include dark matter and supersymmetry.

POSTED // Oct 10,2012 - They appear in my neighborhood, abandoned on the sidewalk, miles away from the store whose name is printed on the handle. In the Jordan River, they rise like shipwrecks at low tide, exposed by low, late-summer flows of murky water. Where the down and out gather, you see them laden like packhorses with the essentials of street life.

POSTED // Sep 19,2012 - When they let the Big Dawg out in Charlotte, N.C., earlier this month, he gave them more than they hoped for. In a virtuoso performance, Bill Clinton galvanized the Democrats with a nomination speech that will set the standard for all those to come.

POSTED // Aug 15,2012 - Built 12 years ago by a consortium of local interest groups, Bend-in-the-River was once an attractive destination for students and nature lovers. Or so the residual evidence suggests.

POSTED // Aug 8,2012 - Over the years, I have come to admire the people who produce newspapers, especially reporters who are able to write coherently and gracefully on deadline—a skill I never mastered. I did learn to write a tolerable lead paragraph, but my favorite journalistic convention was “the reporter’s notebook.” It is typically the residue of a published story.

POSTED // Aug 1,2012 - We had biked a few miles on a dirt track north of Dead Horse Point before stopping to take in the distant rock-and-river spectacle from a cliff-top promontory.

POSTED // Jul 11,2012 - While walking in my neighborhood recently, I crossed paths with a large, regal dog whose coat of blond curls evoked Shirley Temple. A middle-age woman was on the other end of its leash. I stopped to greet the dog. “Is it a Standard Poodle?” I asked his owner admiringly. She stiffened. “No,” she replied archly, “he is a Labradoodle.”

POSTED // Jul 5,2012 - Just before the housing bubble burst, a Gen-X couple I know re-negotiated the terms of their mortgage. The wife told me that they got an “awesome deal” because the loan officer took a shine to them. “He said we were a cool couple,” she confided.

POSTED // Jun 20,2012 - There are more than 400 places in the United States where Pickle-Ball is played. Ogden is one. Brigham, Hurricane, St. George and Cedar City are also on the list.

POSTED // May 30,2012 - If you were going to make a movie of your life story, it would be a challenge to select the right scenes, but it would be much harder to choose songs for the soundtrack.