For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Campbell depicts five well-known tourist destinations from around the world and populates the sites with endangered animal species native to each region. The more lyrical black and white drawings of the endangered species contrast the tourist sites, which are rendered in a brightly colored style reminiscent of textbook drawings. The contrast gives the animals an almost ghostlike quality—fading memories drowned out by the bright solidity of modern life.

Campbell tells Zócalo that she hopes her Sketchbook “may bring just a tiny bit more awareness to the devastating issue of biodiversity loss.”

The post Wild Sights appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, tourists from all over the world flock to Nevada to experience selective amnesia. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” the slogan goes. But Las Vegas’ culture of forgetting is more than drunken hijinks. The city’s existence depends on forgetting the colonial violence that made the Desert Southwest. Since becoming a state in 1864, Nevada’s basic political and economic infrastructure is a product of the expropriation of Native American lands.

If any one Nevadan represents this history, it’s Patrick “Pat” Anthony McCarran, the Democratic U.S. senator who served the state from 1933 to 1954. McCarran’s name is everywhere in Vegas: on street signs, building names, and, until 2021, the Las Vegas International Airport. Many locals remember McCarran for being a champion of the mining and ranching industries; less proudly, they have come to recognize that he was an unabashed anti-Semite.

For this reason, Clark County Commissioners recently rebranded the airport for a different Democratic senator, Harry Reid. Still, in reckoning with McCarran’s legacy, Nevadans sometimes overlook the ways in which even his most laudable successes carried on an ugly tradition of stealing from Indigenous people.

Dispossession began before McCarran’s time, in the 19th century. After Mexico ceded its northern territory to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, decades of violence ensued between white newcomers and Native nations defending their land.

American diplomatic efforts sought to reach accords between settler and Native communities, but often undermined Indigenous sovereignty in the long run. In 1863, near what is now the Utah-Nevada border, Western Shoshone leaders signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley for the sake of “peace and friendship.” The treaty acknowledged Native jurisdiction over much of the Intermountain West from Death Valley to Idaho’s Snake River, stating that “The United States [is] aware of the inconvenience resulting to the Indians … [from] agricultural and mining settlements” and promising “full compensation … for the loss of game and the rights and privileges hereby conceded.”

Except for limited rights of way, forts, and mines, Shoshone delegates neither ceded nor sold any real estate to the federal government. Nevertheless, Nevada became a state the next year, on Oct. 31, 1864. As American settlers began arriving in droves, they treated Newe (Western Shoshone) land—along with that of nearby of Nüümü (Northern Paiute), Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute), and Washoe nations—as “public domain,” empty for the taking.

McCarran’s father, an Irish immigrant also named Patrick, had emigrated west in 1857 with the California Volunteers, a division of the U.S. Army charged with pacifying Natives along the Sierra Nevada’s eastern slope. The 1859 discovery of silver on the Comstock Lode brought a wave of prospectors to the region, disrupting a fragile truce between California-bound migrants and Paiutes. The elder McCarran surveilled the newly created Pyramid Lake and Walker River Indian Reservations, where Native people tried to rebuild their lives. After serving, he built a ranch on the lower Truckee River, east of Reno. His son, Pat, was born on Aug. 8, 1876 and grew up on the homestead.

Although the younger McCarran was raised to think Native people were vanishing, in reality they were simply adapting to the settler invasion. Some relocated to reservations. Others resettled on the outskirts of mining towns. But most continued to visit traditional territories to gather pine nuts, hunt jackrabbits and perform ceremonies. They also began to mobilize, pursuing treaty rights in the courts as early as the 1920s.

In any event, McCarran inherited his father’s sense of Manifest Destiny. When he entered politics, anti-Indigenous ideas informed his policymaking in ways that continue to shape present-day Nevada. Even as he achieved national influence, serving on the Senate’s powerful Appropriations and Judiciary Committees, he pursued parochial goals in his underdeveloped home state. Often his initiatives involved systematically denying Native Nevadans access to resources—particularly water—while redirecting them to his growth-minded constituents.

In one episode, McCarran went out of his way to enable non-Native squatters on the Pyramid Lake Reservation, whose eldest tribal members may have remembered his father. The Senator called it a matter “of equity and justice toward the white settlers.” Avery Winnemucca, the Pyramid Lake tribal chairman, wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1949, imploring her to lobby Congress against bills McCarran proposed, which would have patented the settlers’ illegal homesteads retroactively. “In defeat our ancestors accepted the white man’s treaties and promises,” Winnemucca reminded the former First Lady. “Then why does Sen. McCarran propose the Congress of the U.S. to blow its nose on the American flag?” Although the immediate bills died, non-Native farmers would continue to contest the reservation’s limited water supply for decades after.

McCarran also pursued his vision of aggressive growth by soliciting military installations on the Nevada desert’s vast, “open” public lands. Nellis Air Force Base (originally an airstrip called McCarran Field, north of Las Vegas) and Fallon Naval Air Station near Reno, both established during World War II at McCarran’s urging, today represent two of the largest defense properties in the United States.

His crowning achievement came in 1950, with the creation of America’s first permanent continental nuclear weapons testing site, the Nevada Proving Grounds (later, the Nevada Test Site). When it opened, Gov. Charles Russell compared the Test Site to a flowing irrigation canal. “We had long ago written off that terrain as wasteland,” he announced, but “today it’s blooming with atoms.” Over the next 40 years, the Atomic Energy Commission (later, the Department of Energy) would detonate nearly a thousand fission devices above and below the 1,300-square-mile restricted zone.

The Test Site was in the heart of the territory of the Western Shoshone, which they call Newe Segobia. In the 1980s, citing violations of the Ruby Valley Treaty, Newe land defenders, along with non-Indigenous pacifists and environmentalists, began protesting outside its gates. The coalition of organizers drew thousands of demonstrators to the desert each spring to peacefully gather and pray for an end to colonial occupation.

To this day, much of the region remains a highly restricted—and toxic—military zone. Native downwinders suffer some of the highest rates of cancer in the nation, likely related to radiation exposure from consuming contaminated game and wild plants in traditional diets.

Pat McCarran achieved his vision for the desert: when he died in 1954, Las Vegas was one of the fastest growing cities in the country. Southern Nevada now contains over two million people, with a Native population of less than 1%.

Growth continues to be a point of pride for state leaders. Recent development measures include expanding the Naval range’s footprint, doubling down on wasteful settler water laws, and transforming Nevada into a “lithium loop,” an all-in-state critical-mineral supply chain. Despite allowing for more citizen and tribal participation—and an ostensibly “green” goal in lithium-ion battery production—the current development agenda channels McCarran’s extractive goals and disregard for Native land rights.

In some ways, things are getting better. Nevadans are rethinking McCarran’s legacy in public spaces. And this month, after years of advocacy efforts by Indigenous land defenders, the Biden administration established a half-million-acre national monument surrounding Avi Kwa Ame, or Spirit Mountain, in southern Nevada. The designation will, at last, protect land considered sacred by Yuman-speaking people of the lower Colorado River.

But decolonizing Nevada will require a more fundamental reevaluation of basic ideas about development, growth and resource exploitation at the core of the state’s economy. Despite facing a megadrought, McCarran’s vision still drives much of the state’s policies. Until that changes, Nevada, along with much of the American West, is living on stolen land and borrowed time.

The post What Nevada Stole from Its Native People appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Growing up, few things loomed quite as large as a trip to the buffet. I say the buffet because the chafing dishes all blur together—part and parcel of one great, endless table; a physical manifestation of the infinite scroll before the infinite scroll had even been invented. To call it a meal would feel disingenuous; nothing short of “trip” captured the feeling of the experience, which stretched time and space and stomachs.

I’ve been thinking about buffets lately because, if you haven’t heard, they are back. The pandemic is far from over, but the health restrictions that turned restaurants and grocery stores away from self-serve buffets and salad bars have been lifted. And rather than the death for buffets that so many predicted in 2020 and 2021, the all-you-can-eat model has returned—modified somewhat, revamped with social distancing measures, but present all the same.

What is it about the buffet that keeps us coming back for seconds (and thirds, and fourths)?

The modern American buffet owes a debt to the smorgasbord, Scandinavia’s bread-and-butter table. The spread, which emerged in the 16th century, has its roots in the more formal brännvinsbord tradition, a spirits table that was served at banquets. Scandinavian immigrants brought the “smorgy” tradition with them to the U.S. in the late 1800s (the term smorgasbord reportedly first appearing in American print in 1893), where it merged with other fledgling forms of the buffet here. Historian Jan Whitaker has mapped the concept’s early history, from the “supper clubs” of the colonial era to the “free lunches” of the 1800s—spreads of food put out by drinking taverns to boost sales of accompanying alcohol. These became “buffets or cafés,” where, for a nominal fee, businessmen could secure prepared food without hassle.

Temperance movement teetotalers tried to scuttle these early buffets, but the model re-emerged, adapting to the times. During the Great Depression, for instance, the all-you-can-eat format was used as a gimmick to get people back in restaurants. The hope was that by creating a set price for an unlimited quantity of inexpensive food, people would be more incentivized to dine out. Even etiquette maven Emily Post helped promote this style of dining, with a calculated 1933 endorsement of the newly invented buffet server, which housed boiling water in a dish’s base to ensure that food stayed hot.

But the buffet we know today wouldn’t be what it was without Las Vegas. As the story goes, El Rancho Vegas, the first casino resort on what would become the Vegas Strip, was trying to figure out how to keep visitors from leaving after the evening headliner finished their set. The answer was the Chuck Wagon (later renamed Buckaroo) buffet, which debuted in 1946 and charged $1 for “every possible variety of hot and cold entrées to appease the howling coyote in your innards.” It was a hit. Other casinos scrambled to match the midnight all-you-can-eat supper—and by the 1950s, the Vegas buffet concept wasn’t just for late-night patrons with the Dunes and the Last Frontier resorts introducing morning “hunt breakfasts,” which took the name of a brunch forerunner, often served with champagne, popular among the U.K. elite.

This rise in buffet culture ballooned beyond Vegas, in chains like Sizzler and among mom and pop Chinese restaurants (the first Chinese buffet dates at least as far back as an advert for Chang’s Restaurant posted in the 1949 Los Angeles Evening Citizen News). My dad, for one, swears by Shakey’s bunch of lunch buffet. He describes the wonderment he felt sitting down for the first time in the 1970s to unlimited quantities of pizza, garlic bread, chicken. To him, the appeal wasn’t just about the value—though the value, he emphasizes, was incredible—nor was it the quality (which was good!). It was about the freedom—almost anyone could afford to sit down in Shakey’s and eat like a king.

It was this sense of awe that he passed down to me as a kid in the ‘90s, just as buffet culture in the U.S. arguably hit its peak. Searching my memories of this moment (to date it, this is the time when the term “Super Buffet” hit the collective American vocabulary), they almost feel as if they’re pulled out of that scene in Mad Men where the Draper family picnics in the park and just leaves all of their containers behind them on the grass on the way out. Just as littering wasn’t recognized as a global problem before the 1970s, I never questioned at the time the post-Cold War exuberance and hyper-consumption that Peak Buffet exemplified. I just remember the thrill of going back for plate after plate of food. This was the cheap abundance the era seemingly promised.

But like so much of that decade, the price tag was there, even if I wasn’t willing to see it yet. The food waste the buffet engenders can be nothing short of shameful—one 2017 report found that just over half of food put out in hotel breakfast buffets is actually consumed. And then there are the health concerns (one food safety trade publication charmingly dubbed it the “all-you-can-eat illness”), which had curtailed the buffet’s ubiquity even before COVID hit.

But the buffet can evolve. Take the position of Food Unfolded, a European Union-funded platform for reconsidering the future of food. It proposes we can rethink the buffet coming out of COVID in a way that makes a path for them to serve sustainable and fairly produced food and minimize waste and germs.

The potential to recreate itself in better ways, after all, is in the buffet’s very DNA. Its earliest iteration, feasting, is a tradition that dates back centuries, in foodways around the world. Cultures have long used such all-you-can-eat affairs to promote feelings of fraternity, to repurpose leftovers, and even as a source of culinary innovation, as the need to differentiate dishes demands new ways of mixing ingredients.

I admit it: I miss the buffet. With COVID cases back on the rise, I won’t be returning to one anytime soon. But I look forward to the day I’ll be back to fill my plate once again. Because a truth about the buffet is that it keeps you wanting more.

It makes me think back to my family’s favorite buffet story, which takes place, fittingly, just a few miles off the Las Vegas Strip at Sam’s Town’s now-shuttered “Great Buffet.” As we were nearing the end of the night, a family friend opened her purse, placed a napkin over its contents, and scooped a serving of trifle—a dessert with thin layers of cake soaked in sherry or wine, fruit, and cream—straight inside. I remember the jiggle as it settled before she carefully closed the bag around it.

When she caught us, seasoned buffet veterans, staring, she looked at the purse, looked again at us, and said, “In case I get hungry later.”

The post The Buffet Is Dead. Long Live the Buffet! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The news reminded many of the Hoover Dam, a project known for its treacherous working conditions and a death count so high that it spawned myths that workers had been buried alive in the concrete. But since the Hoover Dam’s construction in the 1930s, workers have benefitted from the federal Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act of 1970, so that accidents are no longer considered a part of the job, and employers and the government are morally and legally obligated to protect them. Still, fatalities in high-rise casinos on the Las Vegas Strip brought up an uncomfortable question: How had the American workplace become so profoundly dangerous all over again?

Under American law, work and risk always have had a close relationship. Departing from English common law, 19th-century American courts developed the assumed risk doctrine, holding that agreeing to employment meant that workers in a free market had consented to assume all potential hazards of the job. Legal precedent also protected employers, and so accidents were considered part of the work process.

Early in the 20th century, several factors caused a shift of responsibility for safety from workers to employers. The first was simple economics: Business was not profitable if accidents stopped work, prompting the railroad, iron, lumber, and steel industries to develop basic safety programs and hire company physicians. The second cause was progressivism, an informal, nationwide reform movement that experimented with the idea that governments should provide information about industrial hazards and chemicals, and place controls on employers.

By 1921, the progressive ethic had encouraged 46 states to pass an assortment of health laws and workmen’s compensation. But the private sector partnered with the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations to repress labor unions, and remove economic regulations and industrial safety controls.

By the time the nation fell into an economic depression in 1929, employees regularly ignored safety standards to keep their jobs and employers disregarded well-known hazards, including silica, carbon monoxide, and lead, to stay in business. The most egregious example of this occurred in 1930 at West Virginia’s Hawk’s Nest Tunnel, where at least 764 workers died from acute silicosis and related conditions caused by breathing dust.

The construction of the Hoover Dam, which began in April 1931, occurred during this tenuous period for worker protection, and was further complicated by federal law in Nevada. The state legislature sent the state inspector of mines, Andy J. Stinson, to tour the site and make recommendations that included barring gasoline-powered vehicles in tunnels, outlawed in Nevada in 1929 because it inevitably exposed workers to carbon monoxide. Six Companies Inc., which was the contractor, ignored the order, insisting it would be financially impossible to convert to electric.

The project then began six months ahead of schedule without housing, medical care, or sanitary facilities for workers. The excessive heat, averaging 119.9 Fahrenheit during the summer, hospitalized 150 workers and killed 17 during the first months of construction. These deaths were part of a string of mishaps under the direction of chief engineer Frank Crowe, a supervisor famous for placing unrealistic expectations on workers to finish the job ahead of schedule.

Despite state warnings, Six Companies persisted in drilling the tunnels with gasoline-powered equipment. Large carbon monoxide clouds accumulated underground, leading some workers to suffer from nausea and dizziness, while others became completely incapacitated. Entire shifts became unconscious and crews had to drag their bodies out. Company doctors never listed a single employee death as carbon monoxide exposure, but “pneumonia” and “heart trouble” fatalities surged—both conditions that relinquished the employer of liability. Over the five years of construction, 37 workers died of such ailments, usually in clusters.

When the state filed formal charges in November 1931, the contractor applied for a temporary restraining order maintaining that the federal project was not subject to state intervention. Secretary of Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, a medical doctor who understood carbon monoxide poisoning, fully supported Six Companies’ decision. He even provided federal counsel to appear amicus curiae in statutory court to “protect the interests of the United States.” A panel of federal judges ultimately ruled in favor of the contractor in 1932, extending the temporary restraining order until further trial. A year later the judges officially exempted the project from state mining code, determining that the Nevada law only applied to mining, not reclamation.

Ultimately as many as 187 workers died building the dam. Contrary to popular memory, no workers were buried alive in the concrete—that myth arose during construction as a social response to the high death toll. The Hoover Dam would forever be remembered as a coffin of the workers who built it.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that worker health and safety became a priority in the United States. Radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing raised an initial alarm, followed by greater public awareness of chemical pollution surrounding industrial plants, the widespread use of pesticides in agriculture, and the prevalence of hazardous chemicals in household cleaning products. Americans realized that industrial hazards rarely stayed within the confines of the workplace, eventually affecting us all. This revelation prompted a symbolic switch in name from industrial to occupational health, which paved the way for regulations protecting workplaces, communities, and the environment from harm.

By the end of the decade, a combination of environmental and Vietnam War activism, along with skyrocketing accident rates, brought workplace safety to the national discussion, leading to the passage of the OSH Act in 1970. The Act created two federal agencies, a regulatory agency in the Department of Labor, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), and a research agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), as part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Since their establishment, fatality and injury rates have dropped dramatically, from approximately 14,000 workers killed on the job in 1970 to 5,190 in 2016.

But in the decades since OSH, the United States has entered the postindustrial age, marked by a dramatic decline in industrial work due to automation and imports. Multinational companies also responded to regulation by moving dangerous manufacturing overseas. As the economy deindustrialized, employment in postindustrial trades like service, technology, health care, finance, and education grew. In comparison to the industrial workplaces, these new postindustrial spaces appeared dramatically safer. But the workplaces still functioned like factories and postindustrial workers faced new hazards, with risks that were now harder to identify, define, and interpret.

The Las Vegas Strip exemplifies this shift, as it employs thousands of employees to continuously reimagine and construct the next great experience in hospitality. Before the 1970s, these resorts resembled beachfront hotels, built low and sprawling, but as their structures grew upward, so did the hazards, increasing both construction-related injuries and workplace dangers.

For example, during the construction of the MGM Grand, Taylor Construction Co. overlooked recommendations to install sprinklers. On November 21, 1980 a devastating fire killed 85 people at the resort. Afterward, a state panel voted against revamping the Nevada fire safety code, citing cost concerns. It took another tragedy three months later, in which eight people died in an arson-related fire at the Las Vegas Hilton, to force change. Nevada responded fiercely the second time around, passing the strictest fire protection standards in the nation, a move that inspired a global reevaluation of sprinkler use in high-rise buildings.

By the 2000s, construction at the Las Vegas Strip resembled, in some ways, the building of the Hoover Dam. Sandwiched between resorts, the congested, frenzied, 24-hour construction sites left even experienced journeymen frightened for their lives. While there were similarities between the two worksites, the workers labored in completely different times. By law, the building company, Nevada unions, and federal and state OSHA should have worked to protect the Strip workers. Instead, they failed them by initiating speedups, weakening safety requirements, and withdrawing or reducing citations for violations.

The episode reveals the limits of simple conceptions of responsibility. There is a misconception that the private sector is solely to blame for fostering hazardous workplaces. National, state, and municipal governments are usually involved in the worst cases, as they actively assist dangerous industries to promote industrial development.

We now find ourselves in an ongoing struggle between constantly evolving workplaces and regulations that remain frozen in time. Not only do the OSH Act’s protections fail to protect postindustrial sites, but when we look carefully at the history of occupational safety and health, we can see that its progress in protecting workers has not been linear, in part because workplaces and safety have also changed in non-linear ways.

Nowhere is this clearer than in today’s need to protect employees and guests from large-scale acts of violence such as the Route 91 Harvest festival shooting—an event no one could have predicted 47 years ago. Even before the shooting, where a lone gunman killed 58 and injured 515 at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, fatal injuries among hospitality workers nationally were up 32 percent in 2016 from 2015, and those involving violence increased 23 percent to become the second-most common fatal event. This points to the ongoing evolution of what we consider workplaces, and safety.

Workplaces can be protected, but the occupational health regimes need to be flexible enough to evolve to settings that are always changing. The high death counts at the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel and the Hoover Dam seems barbaric to us 88 years later. We have to assume that 58 people dying at a country music festival will seem equally barbaric in the future.

The post Why Do So Many Nevadans Still Die on the Job? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I had been thinking about freezing my eggs for a long time. At 38, happily single with a career just starting to take off and a lot of travel in my immediate future, I knew I wasn’t ready to start a family. But since I want a child of my own some day, I figured now was the time to freeze my eggs.

Once I’d decided on the procedure, I told all of my close friends. At first I felt sheepish, as if the decision signaled that I had “given up” on finding a partner. The traditional model of an American woman’s path to happiness and a family, reinforced in movies and television, does not leave much room for deviation. It feels as if the options are black and white–either you follow the traditional path (love, marriage, baby) or you’re a spinster with cats.

Luckily everyone–my parents, friends, and colleagues–was incredibly supportive. My friend Briita even texted me emoji of hypodermic needles and chicken eggs.

After getting over the exorbitant cost–the biggest barrier to egg freezing–my greatest fear was giving myself the shots. I imagined maneuvering giant horse needles into my butt, jabbing backward into the skin like puncturing a watermelon with a bread knife. Instead, the needle I held in the Vegas hotel bathroom was shorter than my thumbnail, and slid into the skin of my abdomen nearly effortlessly.

When Briita invited me to join her for a weekend in Vegas, I almost didn’t go because it was going to be the first night of my injections. But I figured if I had to do them, Vegas would be as good a place as anywhere.

Briita and I discussed the procedure poolside, lounging in the warm desert sun. Glancing at my watch, I realized the two-hour window for the injection time, which started at 6 p.m., was approaching. Briita gave me the idea to commemorate my first one: a shot for a shot.

A waitress came over, and we considered what kind of liquid encouragement was appropriate for my first stab into motherhood. “A lemon drop shot,” said Briita.

The drink arrived in a plastic mini-Solo cup. The purist in me wanted a real shot glass, but this would do.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Briita asked, her voice dropping, the words coming out more slowly and carefully, as if she wanted to offer her help but wasn’t exactly sure of the protocol.

“No, it’s fine. I got this. I’ll text you if I need help.”

Drink in hand, I went up to our palatial hotel room and retrieved my box of Follistim cartridges from its minibar perch on top of tiny cans of Red Bull and Heineken. I meticulously went through all the prepping steps, watching and re-watching YouTube instructional videos produced by fertility clinics, which usually featured married white couples with the husband administering the shot. They zoomed in on weirdly manicured and disembodied hands dialing back the dosage on the injection pen as if it were a gold watch on QVC.

The unofficial videos on YouTube by regular people were far more relatable. If a woman sitting at her computer could slide a needle into a soft roll of fat while talking to a camera without skipping a beat, then I knew I could do it. These women talked frankly about their fertility, the challenges of IVF, and the unexpected side effects. There were women struggling with infertility wishing each other good luck and “baby dust,” message boards where you could find “cycling partners” who were on the same hormone schedule, and endless tips about how to make the shots easier.

Pumping the music out of my iPhone (I had built an injection playlist that included Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” and LMFAO’s “Shots”), I laid out some paper towels on a “clean, flat surface,” sang along to the refrains, and giggled at every “shot” reference. Silly puns, it turns out, have great healing value. Aging, single motherhood, infertility, fear of dying alone—these issues are serious enough. When they’re coupled with a syringefest reminiscent of a scene from Pulp Fiction, you don’t need any more fear and trepidation. You need Pat Benatar, cranked up. There is something incredibly rewarding about drawing a deep breath, putting “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” on replay, and just getting it done.

I took a swig of the lemon drop shot with my left hand and steadied the needle with my right. I made two aborted attempts. And then I sank the needle into my belly, released the pinch of skin I was holding, and slowly pushed the medicine into my body. I counted to five, pulled out the needle, and began celebrating.

Las Vegas is such an impossible, unlikely place, a neon metropolis in the middle of the desert. Equally marvelous and unlikely is the technology that allows me to safely retrieve and freeze my eggs for future use, without a single incision. Because egg freezing only recently lost its “experimental” status and the success rates are not as well known as with embryo freezing, I decided to keep my options open and freeze both eggs and embryos. It feels a little bit like I’m living in a science fiction novel.

Now, a few months post-retrieval, I wonder when and how I will decide to use the eggs I’ve just nourished, protected, collected, and frozen. It’s possible I’ll meet someone and have children the traditional way. It’s possible I’ll marry in time for one child, but need to return to my frozen eggs for a second one. It’s possible I’ll decide to be a single mother, the way my mother was for many years. It’s possible I’ll adopt or decide not to have children at all, and be equally happy. But if I do have a daughter or son some day from the eggs I retrieved, I look forward to telling my child about the unexpected summer night in Vegas when it all started.

The post In Vitro in Vegas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why do you have so many rewards cards in your wallet? You can thank Caesars Entertainment, which pioneered data collection.

Gary Loveman, the CEO of Caesars Entertainment, and his math nerds do not wander casino floors personally sizing up customers as Benny Binion and old-time Vegas hands once did. Rather, they study data about customers’ past visits and project their potential future value. Just watching someone at a gaming table or slot machine for as little as 60 minutes makes it possible to predict how valuable a gambler may be in the future. It all comes down to how much someone typically bets, how many bets in a row he places, and how skilled he is. Such personal data is so valuable that Caesars sometimes reimburses newcomers for up to $100 in losses if they sign up for the rewards program and gamble for an hour.

The data gathering begins soon after a gambler walks into the cavernous casino lobby. A slight haze may linger from smoke (in the United States most casinos are among the last great refuges for those who enjoy cigarettes). A subtle perfume scents the air, pumped in to create a specific memory sensation. The gambler looks for her favorite slot machine and plops down. She reaches into her wallet and pulls out her Caesars Total Rewards loyalty card. She reaches toward a card reader surrounded by dotted orange lights. It turns green after she inserts the plastic card. From that moment, the casino records everything, starting with how much cash and paper ticket value she puts into the machine (coins were phased out more than a decade ago).

Caesars know exactly how many times she pushes the button triggering the electronic wheels to spin in random combination. They know how much she is losing (or, less often, winning) from the moment she starts. The law of averages means that everyone will lose over time. Yet the casinos want her to keep returning, so they will do everything they can short of rigging the machines to mitigate a particularly bad day. If she loses far more than she traditionally wagers and far worse than the game’s mathematical odds predict, a host, tipped off by a message to a smart phone, might arrive with a coupon for a free buffet to cheer her up. The logic? A bad day could inspire a gambler to defect to another casino to change her luck.

From time to time a host will greet elite-status slot machine players. At Caesars Palace, that might be Holly Danforth, a striking 6-foot-tall blonde in her late 20s who aspires to become an actress or model. She introduces herself and addresses the player by name, which she knows from the data on her cell phone. “Most of the time they are very shocked,” she says. “They ask, ‘How do you know that?’ I tell them it’s by their participation in Total Rewards.” She then gives out a business card and invites the player to contact her for any future assistance. If the player is a man who makes a pass at her, something she says happens all the time, she tries to gracefully extract herself and continue toward the next VIP.

Taking a break in the action, the gambler heads to one of the casino’s many restaurants. The maître d’ asks if she is a Total Rewards member. The waiter hands her a menu with two rows of prices, with a few bucks off each item for loyalty members. Or she could sign up for six all-you-can-eat buffets within a 24-hour period at the discounted price of $47.99. Caesars record exactly what she orders and over time chart her favorite foods. Capping off the evening at a show, she hands in the card to buy tickets, giving the management insights into what kind of entertainment she prefers.

In a fast-moving table game like craps, a supervisor notes down bets by visual observation, less precise monitoring than with slot machines. A player can later check credited points on a casino computer. If the gambler feels shortchanged, management can review a videotape of betting. The supervisor also keeps a close eye out for players trying to game the system. Some bet especially heavily when the supervisor comes into view, hoping they will be credited with more loyalty points. Others quietly pocket some of their own chips to exaggerate their losses (casinos are especially keen to lure back losers with generous future offers). The company is considering spending tens of millions of dollars to buy chips embedded with radio-frequency ID transmitters, which would allow the casino to track bets to the exact dollar.

In all, Loveman says, Caesars casinos know: “Did you respond to an offer when you came to the facility? Are you a resident with us at the hotel or not? When do you come? How long do you stay? What game do you play? How intently do you play it? What’s the average wager? What sort of success did you have in the game? Were you a big winner, a big loser, an average winner, an average loser? Did you eat when you were with us? Did you go to the show? What kind of dining habits do you have? Do you shop?”

Rod Serling’s old Twilight Zone episode, titled “The Fever,” portrays a slot machine that knows the elderly husband’s name, Franklin, and beckons him in an ominous voice. His obsession eventually drives him mad. Today Franklin might receive a direct solicitation for his business by mail, e-mail, or smart phone. A host might also call him up to see how he is doing.

Some critics say all this clever marketing exploits those with a particular weakness for gambling, especially those who suffer from gambling addiction. Loveman responds that while gambling addiction is a real issue, 98 percent of his clients can dispassionately decide whether to take advantage of a marketing promotion. These clients can rationally decide to buy or not in the same way they might review a new offer for books or products from Amazon.com.

“For the 2 percent of the people who are addicted, there is no evidence to suggest being good marketers is really the issue. The addiction has to do with lots of other issues, and there are mental health circumstances,” Loveman says. “It’s not whether or not the guy who runs the casino is especially capable or incapable of offering them things that they care about.”

By tracking a gambler’s last visit, a casino has information that can help lure him back in the future. Such logic motivates many companies far from Las Vegas to collect our personal data. Whether it is a local restaurant, airline, or online retailer, businesses want to know as much about us as possible, hoping to gain an edge in marketing.

Even if you have never set foot in a casino, many businesses—credit cards, banks, alarm companies, magazines, divorce lawyers, you name it—are trying to serve up individualized offers based on their interpretations of your personal data. You don’t get a pile of free chips from those companies, of course. But you might get a free flight, meal, or other benefit based on your value as a customer.

The post What the Casino Knows appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I can’t see you for a while,” she told me on the phone.

“Why?” I said, alarmed.

“I’m giving you up for Lent.”

“Why?” I repeated.

“My mother recommended it,” she said. “You’re supposed to give up something you really like.”

To this day, I’m not sure Virginia’s motive was entirely religious. She may just have wanted a break. But, after 40 days of hellish separation, she was back in my life, and I in hers. Three years later, we were married. I was 19; she was a month past 20. The odds are against young matrimony, but we never looked back.

What makes a marriage work? What keeps two people together for over 40 years?

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My first date with Virginia took place at the ninth-grade prom at Jim Bridger Junior High School in North Las Vegas in 1967. She and I were both 14. I’d bought a 20-dollar sport coat for the occasion and had my prom invitation rebuffed by another girl. My cousin Esther told me to ask her best friend, Virginia, instead. I think I fell in love with Virginia that night. She was gorgeous and dainty. She had beautiful eyes, a magical smile, and a laugh so ringing and appealing that it made other people laugh. For decades afterwards, Virginia liked to tease that she’d been my second choice.

A week or two after the prom, my younger brother and I were ushers at Virginia’s Quinceañera, the coming-out party that traditionally marks a Mexican girl’s 15th birthday. That day I was going to have to dance a waltz, and preparations had gone badly. “What’s wrong with you?” Mrs. Jiménez, our teacher, had yelled at me in a panic. “All Latins have dancing in their blood!” Perhaps my blood had misplaced it. Still, that day, I didn’t mess up the waltz. And I spent the entire evening dancing with Virginia. Maybe her tolerance for my dancing demonstrated one ingredient of a successful marriage: you don’t expect perfection.

María Virginia Eugenia Vela Lara was born in 1952 in Apizaco, a small town about 65 miles east of Mexico City. She was the third child and the oldest daughter of Sixto Vela and Virginia Lara de Vela. Life in Mexico was comfortable for the Vela family. They lived in a large house with servants, and Virginia was surrounded by extended family. But when her father, Don Sixto, a railway man, began making noise about corruption within his labor union, someone tried to kill him, and he left Mexico for safety in the United States. Don Sixto eventually went to work at an automotive plating plant in Las Vegas. In May 1959, Mrs. Vela and her six children caught a northbound train and moved into a small house in North Las Vegas. Virginia was seven.

Virginia, left, and her sister Alma

The homes in Virginia’s new neighborhood were tidy and well kept, but life in this new world was harder. Gone was the balmy climate of central Mexico, replaced by the scorching desert of Southern Nevada. Living quarters consisted of three bedrooms and one bath to accommodate what soon became a family of nine children and two adults. F-105s from Nellis Air Force Base streaked across the sky and rattled neighborhood windows with sonic booms. Staples of Mexican daily life, like tortillas, were nowhere to be found, at least not unless you made them yourself.

Dating Virginia was not like dating other girls. Don Sixto and Doña Virginia intended to protect their daughters from the looser mores of American culture, and that meant chaperones. When I finally got my driver’s license, Virginia’s parents allowed me to take the wheel—but not alone with their daughter. We knew to expect a younger brother or sister or a visiting aunt to join us.

At the time, we chafed at the oversight, and I wouldn’t advise a return to chaperoning as a means to strengthening marriage. But after we were married we looked back at it as part of what made our relationship special. This old-fashioned insistence on chaperones conveyed the importance of respect for a woman. Virginia relished telling people that, as she put it, “José had to put up with a lot” to win her hand. She knew my love was deep and serious. I suspect many other couples would benefit from such an effective filter.

Of the two of us, Virginia was probably the “fancier,” despite the crowded living quarters. My neighborhood, Vegas Heights, was much rougher than hers. Cabbies avoided the area, and the gas company often refused to deliver the propane tanks we needed for our stove. My father, a Mexican immigrant, was as macho as they come. He liked to gamble and to fight, which often made life chaotic. He died in a work accident when I was fifteen, but Virginia, unfailingly kind, was a great comfort to me.

Virginia and I enrolled at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and, in 1971, after our first year there, I asked her to marry me. She said yes, of course.

When the day came to deliver the news to our families, I dressed in a gray suit and wore my finest shirt: a pink number with ruffles down the middle. First we told my mom. Once we had assured her that Virginia was not pregnant, she took it well. Virginia’s parents took it harder. Her mother, unprepared to have her first and favorite daughter given away so soon, burst into tears. Still, we got permission. At stake was more than mere sentiment, because, at that time, a male under 21 in Nevada required written parental consent in order to marry.

On June 10, 1972, at St. Christopher’s Catholic Church in North Las Vegas, Virginia and I were wed. The ceremony included popular songs of the time—”Sunrise, Sunset,” from Fiddler on the Roof and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” by The Carpenters—alongside elements of a traditional Mexican wedding. A large white lasso was draped over our shoulders, and I gave my bride a small gold box containing the arras, the 13 coins symbolizing Christ and his apostles.

Our first dance at the reception got off to a rocky start. We’d asked the band to play “Going Out of My Head,” a slow song by Little Anthony and the Imperials, but they jazzed it up, and my pathetic bouncing would have confirmed every suspicion of Mrs. Jiménez that I was an adopted child of non-Latin descent. Being the good Catholic kids that we were, we’d spent no time alone together in our new apartment except to put in a few basic furnishings, and it was nearly empty. The next morning, we realized we had no household supplies, and the only clothes we had were my tuxedo and her wedding gown. It was a formally dressed pair that walked into a nearby 7-11 to buy toothbrushes and soap.

Virginia and author at prom

I suspect one trait of a healthy marriage is unpredictability—or at least unexpected moments. Life with Virginia was full of surprises. I was reserved, shy, and maybe a little square. She was warm, welcoming, outspoken, and impish. Her laugh was always the loudest in the house. I didn’t expect—but neither did I find it out of character—when she did things like turn a whipped cream canister from her strawberry shortcake onto my face instead, or drive off to church without the kids and me because she felt we were taking too long to get ready.

Javier, our first son, was born in 1975. José Luis came next in 1979, followed by Sergio in 1980. I completed law school at Stanford and joined the Phoenix law firm of Lewis and Roca, where I worked for the next 30 years.

Like every marriage, ours had its challenges. When I was younger, I spent too much time on my law practice and too little with Virginia and our sons. She bore most of the parenting responsibility, and she was frustrated. Such conflicts have destroyed other marriages—so why not ours? Part of it may be that we listened to each other’s concerns. And while we expressed disagreement or hurt or disappointment, we never used loud or deliberately cruel words. Yes, sometimes one of us might say or do something hurtful, but it always got resolved with mutual apologies.

The comfort and the traditions of religion also helped. We knew that we would be in church on Sundays, that our kids would go to religion classes, and that they would be baptized and confirmed. We also knew that both of us took our marriage vows seriously.

Not that my wife was above some non-church-sanctioned reminders. The actor Jeff Bridges once said that the secret to staying married is not getting a divorce. You could say that was Virginia’s philosophy, too. “There will never be a divorce,” she liked to say. “There may be a death, but there will never be a divorce.” It was not a romantic notion. Long before Lorena Bobbitt became a household name, Virginia made it clear that Bobbitt-like consequences would ensue if I ever strayed. “I’ll put it in a box and mail it to the other woman,” she added for emphasis, as if further emphasis were needed.

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None of this means that a marriage can’t accommodate people with tempers. Virginia, it should be admitted, had one. Not for nothing did her father call her a cabeza de cohete, or firecracker head.

She was an aggressive driver, even when she wasn’t driving. “Why did you let that person cut in front of you?” she’d chide. Confronted with slow drivers, she’d lapse into her best imitation of Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady and yell, “Move your blooming arse!” One time, when four jaywalking sailors brought traffic to a slowdown on Fremont Street in Las Vegas, Virginia leaned over and honked the horn on my behalf. I pointed out to her that I was the one they were going to beat up.

Virginia loved the United States and the opportunities it provided her, but she was also proud of her mexicanidad. It showed in her choice of art, literature, and entertainment (she took a guilty pleasure in following telenovelas), and it showed in her job choices: working with young immigrants, mostly Mexican girls, to prepare them for college. News reports about immigration raids upset her deeply. She would curse at the television when she heard about new roundups, and she once insisted we both go to a supermarket that we heard was being targeted to try to get ourselves arrested. (We didn’t succeed.)

Virginia was ladylike in most things, and she didn’t often curse, but she did have a weakness for use of the middle finger. As our son Javier once observed, people who said Virginia didn’t have a mean bone in her body failed to notice that she had two mean bones, one on each hand. Most of the time, the birds were teasingly directed at me. But not always. Javier found that out as a teenager when he joked that our Volvo’s Mars symbol, which is also the standard gender symbol for males, meant that only a man could drive it properly. “Here’s my symbol for what I think of that,” replied Virginia, with a genuinely angry bird. (She later apologized profusely.)

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In early 2012, Virginia began to suffer stomach and back pain that wouldn’t go away. After a series of medical appointments, we got a grim diagnosis: kidney cancer, stage four metastatic. It was Valentine’s Day.

Life expectancy for someone in her condition ranges from a few months to a few years. Virginia didn’t want to discuss the prognosis, but she knew things were serious, and she was frightened.

For all that, she maintained her sense of humor. After she underwent surgery to remove a cancerous kidney, I gauged her recovery by how many raised middle fingers per hour I got in response to my exhortations to her to wake up or to breathe more deeply. This was how she would communicate that she was feeling better, except when her mother was around.

On July 1st, 2012, Virginia died.

I do not agree with those who tell me that she is in a better place, although I’m certain they mean well. Anna Quindlen, discussing mortality in her latest book, best expresses how I feel. “There is no better place,” she writes. “This is the best place, here, now, alive.” Virginia and I had so much more to do together. We wanted to welcome our fifth grandchild. We wanted, years from now, to dance at our granddaughter’s wedding.

Virginia, granddaughter Sophia, and author

I do find solace in the many acknowledgements of the deep love Virginia and I had—what some have told me was a model marriage, a marriage that I can try to explain to others without knowing for sure if it can be explained. Many things, after all, have no explanation. I cannot, for instance, understand why God chose to take her from me at such a young age.

But I no longer view it just as cruel irony that the final chapter of our love story began on Valentine’s Day. In the months that followed her diagnosis, Virginia and I spent a lot of time together, time that I treasured. It reminded me of our dating days, when the only thing either of us wanted was to be with each other and to make each other as happy as possible. You can, I learned, fall in love with someone twice.

José Cárdenas is senior vice president and general counsel of Arizona State University.

*Photos courtesy of José Cárdenas.

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Dear Mom and Dad,

Don’t be alarmed by this unannounced letter. No one we know has died, and I’m not asking for money (although I, and many other Nevadans, could use it). I just thought, having lived in Nevada for more than 14 years, I’d recap my time here and let you know how your first-born son and the Battle Born State are faring. (OK. You know me too well. I’m being paid to write this letter, but don’t let that cheapen it.)

As you may recall, in December 1997, I packed my worldly possessions into my one-headlight Honda Civic and pushed off for Nevada, which I’d never even visited. (I thought I was being adventurous, but later discovered that’s how most people end up in the state.) Before I left Atlanta, our neighbor Bill Banks asked, “Why Vegas?” Saying it looked cool in Swingers didn’t seem like a satisfactory answer, so I said something about it being a place to set short stories and novels, to sports-bet without having to call a toll-free number in the Caribbean, and to explore the West and Southwest.

Crossing Hoover Dam and entering the Las Vegas Valley, I sensed I’d made the right decision. The Spring Mountains were swallowing the sun, painting the desert lavender. Nascent housing developments reached for the foothills. In the depths of the valley, the hotel-casinos of the Strip bloomed like wildflowers.

Even at dusk, it was clearly dawn for this one-time whistle-stop.

I was pleasantly surprised by the other 110,000 square miles of the state, too. Nevada is so much more than secret military bases and beef-jerky stands. It’s home to Reno (“The Biggest Little City in the World”), Lake Tahoe, Burning Man, ghost towns, cowboy-poetry festivals, and earthworks … dry washes and year-round rivers, bare deserts and dense forests, near-sea-level valleys and 13,000-foot peaks. Turquoise (though bathtub-ringed) Lake Mead, technicolored Valley of Fire, and snowcapped Mount Charleston are within an hour of Las Vegas.

I’ve come to view Nevada not as our nation’s junkyard or laboratory, but as a canvas randomly and beautifully touched.

As you know, I planned to stay in Vegas for only a year or two. But the city was booming and rife with opportunity. Every year, 70,000 people moved here-the population doubled in a decade-and 40 million visited. The unemployment rate rarely rose above 5 percent, the average price of a home was $300,000, and the casinos raked in more than $8 billion a year. Journalists christened it the “New Detroit” and the “First City of the 21st Century.”

After temping, freelance writing, and working on short stories for a few years, I joined the staff of Las Vegas CityLife. I covered politics, the environment, the literary arts, nightlife, and anything else that seemed interesting for the 80,000-circulation alt-weekly. The paper was regularly more than 80 pages, and I became managing editor. Though hectic, life was good.

Now, 50,000 residents a year leave Las Vegas-“Even the white people are leaving,” a Mexican cabbie told me recently-and visitation is down 20 percent. The unemployment rate rarely drops below 12 percent, the average price of a home is $115,000, and casino revenue is way down. The homeless, unemployed, and underemployed dress up in chintzy costumes (Mr. T, Bret Michaels, Capt. Jack Sparrow) and pose for photos for tips on the Strip and Fremont Street. The dope man is accepting food stamps in lieu of money. The $5 blow job is back in vogue. (Sorry, Mom, but it’s true.) Las Vegas is the “New Detroit” and the “First City of the 21st Century,” just not in the way the journalists envisioned.

Having written a book about exploring the underground flood channels, where I discovered hundreds of homeless people, and wanting to work on a nonfiction story collection, I left CityLife in early 2008. Six months later, the economy began to falter. I decided to work on the story collection, live off savings, and re-emerge when the economy improved. I’m still waiting.

In the wake of this spectacular boom and bust, the 2012 presidential campaign is underway in Nevada. President Obama visited Vegas a few weeks ago. My friend John, who lives in an underground flood channel near the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, emerged from the shadows and got within earshot of the president. He thought about inviting Obama into his home, but, he told me with a brown-toothed smile, a former businessman living in a storm drain probably isn’t the kind of story the president wants to promote right now.

This week, in advance of the caucus, the Republican presidential candidates are parachuting into the Silver State. It’s time for a road trip to Southern California or Northern Arizona. Seriously, I have no interest in what Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum has to say. I wouldn’t trust any of them to run the local pawnshop-and the Old Man, Rick, Corey, and Chumlee are doing a damn fine job anyway.

Well, folks, I’m rambling. That’s what happens when you’re homesick and haven’t written a letter in more than 14 years. I should unchain myself from this desk and take advantage of the sunny, 70-degree weather. Just wanted to let you know that I’m well and, while I miss you, I have few regrets about moving to Nevada. The media onslaught over the next few days won’t even scratch the dusty surface of this complex, resilient state.

Your loving son,

Matty

Matthew O’Brien is author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas and My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas. He’s also founder of Shine a Light, a community project that provides housing, drug counseling, and other services to the people who live in the storm drains. For more information on Matt and his work, visit www.beneaththeneon.com.

*Photo courtesy of Vanessa (EY).

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