Cover Story
Fantastic Four: TMA’s summer exhibition features a quartet of solo shows by artists in distinct cultural communities
When I walked into the paintings of Willie J. Bonner at the Tucson Museum of Art last week, I couldn’t help myself. I had to share my delight. “They’re so pretty,” I blurted out to the security guard, someone I had never met. He smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “The colors are really nice.” Make that…
Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut”
In November 2017, with the administration of President Donald Trump rushing to get a massive tax overhaul through Congress, Sen. Ron Johnson stunned his colleagues by announcing he would vote “no.” Making the rounds on cable TV, the Wisconsin Republican became the first GOP senator to declare his opposition, spooking Senate leaders who were pushing…
Amphi Sixth-Grade Class Moves to Remote Learning After COVID Outbreak
A sixth-grade class in the Amphitheater Unified School District will shift to remote learning until Aug. 19 after reported cases of COVID-19 in the class, Principal Jason Weaver announced in a letter to families on Tuesday. Amphi students returned to school on Aug. 5 during a wave of COVID-19 cases. Most school districts in Pima…
Pima County Supervisors Shoot Down Mask Requirements in Schools, Other COVID Measures
Supervisors Matt Heinz and Adelita Grijalva supporting the emergency proclamation The Pima County Board of Supervisors voted against several COVID-19 related motions at its Tuesday meeting. With the number of COVID-19 on the rise because of the Delta variant, the board considered several resolutions including, reinstating an emergency proclamation for COVID-19, mandating vaccinations for county…
Painstaking search for new planets begins on a mountaintop in Arizona
One of the most precise instruments for detecting planets is being used at the Kitt Peak National Observatory on the Tohono O’odham Nation west of Tucson. The NEID spectrometer looks for Earth-like planets outside our solar system by measuring slight changes in the light coming from distant stars. Those shifts are caused by the gravitational…
Local Film Tells Story of Love, Diversity and Time Travel
“Time-traveling lesbians.” That was all the pitch Tierney Harris needed when their friend Will Holst asked if they wanted to participate in a short film, Mind Over Time. It tells the story of Dawn, a young woman who has been haunted for years by a mistake she is desperate to undo. But also, yeah, lesbian…
Party poopers: Independent voter registrations surge as parties fall
WASHINGTON – The major political parties in Arizona have continued to lose voters since the November election, with strident partisanship “turning off” voters and driving them to register as independents, analysts said. The most recent numbers from the Arizona Secretary of State’s office show that the Republican, Democratic and Libertarian parties all saw drops in…
University of Arizona Will Return to In-Person Learning for the Fall
University of Arizona officials are urging students and staff to get vaccinated and mask as they prepare to welcome students in two weeks to all in-person campus courses. “We recognize the challenges presented to all of us by the Delta variant, which is more contagious than the lineages of SARS-CoV-2 to that we dealt with…
4 ways extreme heat hurts the economy
Summer 2021 will likely be one of the hottest on record as dozens of cities in the West experience all-time high temperatures. The extreme heat being felt throughout many parts of the U.S. is causing hundreds of deaths, sparking wildfires and worsening drought conditions in over a dozen states. How does all this broiling heat…
A Dreary Forecast for Arizona as COVID Cases Continue to Rise
With 2,826 new positive cases of COBVID-19 reported across Arizona today, health officials are increasingly concerned that the Delta strain is driving a third wave of outbreaks in the state that could be similar to last summer. In his latest weekly COVID-19 forecast released Friday morning, Dr. Joe Gerald, an epidemiologist with the UA Zuckerman School…
Unscrewed Comedy Gets Back on Its Feet
They’ve scrimped, they’ve saved, and they’ve made it through some of the deepest and darkest days of 2020. Now, the comedy troupe at Unscrewed Comedy is faced with a new trial: They need to put on actual pants, because they’re bringing back live, in-person comedy! There’s no doubt that finding little pockets of fun and…
Help Out Teachers at this Weekend’s FC Tucson Match
FC Tucson wants to help out teachers this weekend, so the local soccer team is donating a portion of ticket revenue to the Marana Unified School District, Faith Christian Academy and the International School of Tucson. When you buy a $15 ticket to Saturday’s game against North Texas SC, you can direct $5 to any…
Public invited to pay respects to EMT killed in the line of duty
Jacob Dindinger, an EMT who was fatally shot while answering a call last month, will be laid to rest Monday. Dindinger was one of two people killed during a July 18 shooting spree. He had been on the job for four months. He died on July 29. The public is invited to pay their respects…
Expanded Silver Alert system helps those with developmental disabilities
PHOENIX – Cynthia Macluskie has memories of her 3-year-old son sneaking out of their Cave Creek home late at night, while she was asleep. “At 6 o’clock in the morning, someone’s banging on my door. … I still get goosebumps from this,” she said, looking down at her arm during an interview. A couple who’d…
A Bit Off Beat: Rock opera Annette is more of an adventurous curio than a truly memorable musical effort
Riding a career retrospective high after the recent release of director Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers documentary, musical siblings Ron and Russell Mael team with director Leos Carax (Holy Motors) for the rock opera Annette, perhaps the weirdest rock opera put to film since Ken Russell’s adaptation of The Who’s Tommy. The Sparks Brothers provide…
City Week: Weekly Picks
Music in the Mountains Concert Series. Honestly, what’s more psychedelic than a saguaro? They’re so wacky—all stretched out and groovy looking, holding their arms out ready to hug everyone. In honor of this vibe, the local band Lazaret is performing a psychedelic setlist among the saguaros at Catalina State Park. Lazaret likes to blend classic…
Third Wave: COVID cases on the rise as students return to the classroom
The state of Arizona reported more than 10,000 new cases of COVID over the five days between Friday, July 30, and Tuesday, Aug. 3, leading to concern that the Delta variant is driving another wave of coronavirus cases in the state. Dr. Joe Gerald, an epidemiologist with the UA Zuckerman School of Public Health who…
Ride the Train: Local mayors support Amtrak’s proposal for a passenger rail connecting Tucson and Phoenix, as well as towns in between
Mayors from 11 Arizona communities, including Tucson, Phoenix, Oro Valley and Marana, sent a letter to Arizona congressional leaders, supporting Amtrak’s proposal for a passenger rail connecting Tucson and Phoenix. “It’s about a regional approach to economic development because what’s good for Tucson is good for the region,” said Romero in a media roundtable with…
Seeing Green: Feds Continue To Fiddle as Pot Revenues Roll Like a River (of Cash)
Despite pot legalization of some form in a majority of states—36 have legal medical programs and adult-use recreational has reached 18, plus the District of Columbia—the federal government continues to hedge, with bills intended to legalize the cannabis economy lolling in the upper chambers of the U.S. government. While marijuana remains a Schedule I narcotic…
The Skinny: Why is Ducey acting so dumb about masks?
Gov. Doug Ducey last week expressed outrage that the Biden administration would advise Arizonans to wear seat belts. “The CDC today is recommending that we wear seatbelts in cars, regardless of whether we have airbags,” Ducey said. “This is just another example of the Biden-Harris administration’s inability to effectively confront highway safety.” Just kidding! Ducey…
Editor’s Note: Four on the Floor
In this week’s cover story, longtime arts writer Margaret Regan brings us a look at the Tucson Museum of Art’s new show 4×4: Willie J. Bonner, Nazafarin Lotfi, Alejandro Macias and Anh-Thuy Nguyen. The exhibition is actually four solo shows featuring artists who each represent a different cultural community. Margaret was dazzled by the show…
Danehy: Tom runs the numbers
My friend Jonathan Hoffman, knowing that I’m a math geek, sent me a link to an article in The Atlantic about some guy who claims that he can predict the future of humankind using a complex algorithm. When I finished reading the piece, my math-based reaction was that I had wasted 548.2 seconds of my…
Louisiana Proud Joshua Strickland: From Bourbon Street to the battlefield to The Bayou Bandits
New Orleans is where truth, fate and voodoo all intersect. A native of Parish Livingston in southern Louisiana, Joshua Strickland is familiar with all three. By 14, he was living through the nightmare of Hurricane Katrina; eight years later, he began the first of 187 Army combat missions in southern Afghanistan in Kandahar City and…
