His energy as electric as his violins, Mark Wood has been on a mission to disrupt the most venerable of musical traditions since his first day at Juilliard, when he discovered that innovation was not part of the string curriculum—and neither was the music that had ignited the fire in the fingers of this classically trained then-violist. Hard rock. Heavy metal. Eddie Van Halen.
It has been a harsh and anxious year for the Downwinders, America’s victims of the Cold War whose lives were forever altered by the aboveground A-bomb testing in New Mexico and Nevada.
Karen E. Peterson
A newspaper journalist by profession, I have spent my career as a writer of all trades, from reporting the news and management positions to corporate journalism in the tech industry; freelance features covering a wide range of topics, music in particular; web design and publishing; and a full measure of human interest storytelling.
I worked at various San Francisco Bay Area newspapers, primarily the San Francisco Chronicle. I participated in an investigative series by a small weekly newspaper in Pt. Reyes Station, California, that won a Pulitzer Prize for community service. As a writer and producer at Macworld Online, I joined my team in winning a prestigious Jesse H. Neal Award from the Software & Industry Information Association.
Twenty years ago I began adding climate change to my portfolio, first as a contributor to the Climate Change Business Journal, an industry research publication, then as founder and editor of Terra Marin, a magazine on climate and the environment in Marin County, CA. In Tucson, where I moved to in 2013, I founded Climate Tucson, an online community forum.
I launched The Tucson Climate Report on Substack to publicize news and issues affecting our region as climate change makes itself at home in an increasingly hot Sonoran Desert.
Former chair of the Tucson 2030 District, a national organization promoting energy efficiency in existing buildings, I currently work with Physicians for Social Responsibility, Arizona, on community outreach. I also write the chapter's newsletter, an example of which is included below. PSR is active in nuclear disarmament, climate change, and public health, health justice issues.
It has been a harsh and anxious year for the Downwinders, America’s victims of the Cold War whose lives were forever altered by the aboveground A-bomb testing in New Mexico and Nevada.
Climate Tucson
Climate Tucson is an educational community group that I founded in 2019. The Zoom meetings feature guest speakers that include climate scientists and researchers from the University of Arizona and other community members who work to prepare our city for the continued increase in desert heat.
The meetings are recorded and available on YouTube for public viewing. Please link to the Home page on the top menu to see previous meeting information.
A musician and guitar luthier who's no stranger to loud noises, Dave Lovos admits to being a bit undone by the boom he heard in his head one night earlier this year. It hit just as Lovos was drifting off to sleep, the force of it snapping him to attention.
TUCSON — For the past 23 years, Jim Filipiak, 73, has lived in a 1976 singlewide mobile home. Mobile homes dominate the flat landscape of his Tucson neighborhood, a mostly treeless plot near the railroad tracks and Interstate 10. The retiree and Vietnam veteran has remodeled his home and kept up with maintenance, but there’s little he can do to shield himself from what has become the norm in Arizona: searing, deadly summer heat. Caption Jim Filipiak outside his mobile home in Tucson. Photo by Cassidy Araiza.
As a child in Darmstadt, Germany, Florian Leonhard dreamed of being a surgeon whose specialty was healing broken hands. “In my childlike way, I wanted to make things work again,” he says. Today, building on his early dreams of regeneration—which, by his teen years, had become specific to reconstructing a broken cello—Leonhard is a respected restorer, maker, dealer, and trusted authenticator of new and classic violins, violas, cellos, and bows. He is also known for his line of True Copy instruments, based on years of research and the study of original antiques.
She photographed nature and animals. She photographed fame. But above all, Linda McCartney photographed the “silly love song” that she and her famous Beatle spouse lived for nearly three decades.
In this sunlit desert city, the Linda McCartney Retrospective at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography (CCP) is visual confirmation of how that romance played out far from the concert crowds and screaming fans. The exhibit is an intimate journey captured by Linda through the lens of her 35mm Nikon camera — a classic in analog, not digital, imagery.
An atmospheric river of rain was battering Southern California in February of this year, with forecasters warning of life-threatening flash flooding. Only a few days earlier, the Los Angeles Times reported that the storms causing the havoc were being supercharged by a deadly combination of two excessive rain-producing events, El Niño, a Pacific Ocean weather pattern, and climate change.
Despite this deluge, 300-plus people traveled to the Novo Theater in Los Angeles’s L.A. Live entertainment complex to plot next steps in a historic mission: How the music industry—a monolith of power and creativity valued at $31 billion globally—could do its part in saving a warming planet through the organizing efforts of the newly founded Music Sustainability Alliance (MSA).
Dramamine is in order when driving through the dense oak and hickory forests of southern Missouri, on roads with sidewinder curves and stomach-dropping dips into steep draws. Welcome to the hills and hollers of the Ozarks, a lonesome, lissome, rollercoaster landscape that flows from Missouri south into Arkansas.
It’s toad time in the Sonoran Desert, the season when Incilius alvarius, the Sonoran Desert toad—also the Colorado River toad or locally “the toad”—pops out of its underground burrow at the first hint of rain from the North American monsoon.
