On a recent Sunday, with May’s gale force winds temporarily subsiding, I took a long, circuitous walk downtown, trying to imagine what Santa Fe was like when young artists outnumbered retirees and wealthy financiers. Detouring over to Camino del Monte Sol, I passed by Eddie Gilbert’s estate where an American flag was flying out front. […]
Friday morning I met my friend Mac Watson at the new park on Canyon Road where, in his role as a historic conservationist, he is rehabilitating the old hydroelectric building. He introduced me to Victor Johnson, the landscape architect for the project, and we embarked on a tour of the grounds. The concrete parking slab […]
It seemed like a really good idea a few years ago when the Canyon Neighborhood Association began pushing for the conversion of the old hydroelectric site at Camino Cabra and Canyon Road into a public park. The area, closed off for decades, was covered with native grasses and wildflowers shaded by towering evergreens and stately […]
I was relieved to learn from Pilar Cannizzaro at the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division that San Ildefonso Pueblo will not be able to act completely without constraint when it erects four big cell phone towers on its picturesque reservation. (Please see the last paragraph of my entry of April 9.) Whenever a federal agency is […]
I should have known better. Earlier this month, after District Court Judge Sarah Singleton denied Arthur Firstenberg’s request for a preliminary injunction to keep his neighbor from using her cellphone and other electronic equipment (please see Electromania 4), I predicted that the case would be quietly settled with the defendant, Raphaela Monribot, receiving compensation as […]
Dr. Leah Morton of Isis Medicine Family Practice is a specialist on “wellness” and holistic medicine, and her name shows up in Internet directories of physicians offering bioidentical hormone therapy, natural anti-aging remedies, and treatments for multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome. She is also Arthur Firstenberg’s doctor. In Sunday’s New Mexican she pulls out all the […]
Imagine if the safety and effectiveness of prescription medicines were decided not by the federal Food and Drug Administration but by each individual town or village. If a new drug was ruled harmful by the Santa Fe City Council it might be marketed instead in Española or Taos. Or suppose that any city could trump […]
Three years ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration asked the National Academy of Sciences to recommend what research might be needed to deepen our understanding of the biological effects and “adverse health outcomes,” if any, caused by wireless communication devices. The Academy was not asked to evaluate whether these weak emanations actually cause harm. […]
Walking downtown on Easter Sunday as the bells chimed in St. Francis Basilica was almost enough to bring back the magic of a Holy Week years ago when I was writing Fire in the Mind. I had taken a year off from my job at the New York Times to gather material for the book, […]
It is cause for celebration when someone lives to be 90 and remains intellectually vibrant and politically alive. Yet it was sad to read that Stewart Udall has died. Shortly after I moved here in the early 1990s, I interviewed him for a piece I was writing for the New York Times about Indians and […]