Las Cruces Bulletin

SPEAKING KURTLY

One of the most difficult things about running a community newspaper is accepting the stories we can’t cover. With a limited staff and a weekly publication schedule, we make choices every day between being a mile wide and an inch deep or taking...

Fending off confirmation bias

One of the most disturbing things about modern life is how easy it has become to surround ourselves with opinions that reinforce what we already believe. The technology we use has a tendency to lock us into a world in which we not only don't...

Learning how to lose with class

I used to have a podcast titled The Good in Sports. My premise was to find and tell stories about the positive impact athletics has on society. I’m not sure I’m as high on the availability of content for that podcast today. For weeks, the...

Straying from your lane

It might just be me, but politics and sports rarely mix well. Sports are the toy store of life. Government is supposed to deal with the real world, where decisions affect livelihoods, national security and, sometimes, lives themselves. Yet here...

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

They are documents that carry lofty expectations, loftier even than the lives of the men who wrote them. As we celebrate 250 years since the founding of the United States of America, how are we doing at living up to the spirit of these two...

Watch parties and other parties

For sports fans, it’s that time of year. This June, we can add the World Cup to the NBA and NHL finals, all in the middle of baseball season. When championship season arrives, the watch parties follow. Crowds in Carolina and Las Vegas packed...

Mother’s Day and balancing time

There was a time when Mother’s Day was quieter. Not necessarily easier, not necessarily simpler, but quieter. It was a day built around phone calls home, crowded restaurant waits, handmade cards, flowers carried out of grocery stores by...

There's more behind the score

The feeling of being judged has been on my mind a lot lately. It comes with the job. Every editor, every reporter, every person who puts their work in front of the public knows what that feels like. Some people seem immune to it. They take on an...

A sense of community

There’s always a risk when you pick up and move — leaving behind a home, friends and a familiar routine. When we left Utah in August to move to Las Cruces, we knew two of our children and five granddaughters were here. That was enough familiarity...

New super sections add variety to the recipe

My wife once gave me some simple advice about cooking: follow the recipe first. Then, once you understand it, start making it your own. That’s the approach we’re taking with the Bulletin. When arriving at a new publication, you keep most things...

Tell me about your Las Cruces

I think I’ve said this before on this opinion page: I have a strong interest in history. For me, it’s not so much about digging through archives, old documents or family records. It’s about people. I love learning about events — both from world...

When ‘because I said so’ isn’t enough

I think most of us have been there at some point in our youth. A parent, teacher, or other authority figure asks us to do something. We push back, wanting to understand why, and the answer comes, straight and to the point: “Because I said so.” My...

Problems with the inefficient committee

Sometimes I watch the way people choose to deal with problems, and it makes me take a second and third look at my own approach to such things. Perhaps, for that reason, it’s a good thing we have examples of “interesting” approaches to...

Celebrating great women all around us

March is Women’s History Month and the theme for the 2026 celebration is “Leading the Change.” As we prepare to publish our special section honoring great women of all eras later this month, I reached out to a number of people for suggestions on...

A few random thoughts for the week

I enjoyed a great conversation with New Mexico State athletic director Joe Fields last week, leading to a pair of stories we’ll run starting this week and concluding next week. We talked about his background and what motivates him and then...

Getting past what's in it for me

One of my favorite movies is “Field of Dreams,” in which Kevin Costner turns his Iowa cornfield into a baseball field when a voice tell him, “If you build it, he will come.” After he creates his immaculate ball field, players who have long since...

Disagree better

When we lived in Utah, the governor started a campaign working with other public officials around the country to encourage people to “disagree better.” It was met with some positive response, but a significant percentage of the vocal political...

Rules to protect us from ourselves

We really couldn’t see this coming? Everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten, and one of those things was that rules are often in place to protect us from ourselves. The NCAA continues to teach us that lesson, and the pace of its...

Resolution: a little better every day

I’ve never been particularly good at New Year’s resolutions. It’s not that I don’t have certain goals and aspirations, I just don’t tend to center them on specific dates on the calendar. Maybe I’d be more successful at the changes I seek to make...

The light within

It has been a while since I thought about Brian Scott, but Friday, while taping the Christmas Day Mesilla Valley Sports Show on KTAL Radio with Mike O’Larey and Brian Cox, he came into my mind. I was asked to name a memorable sports story I had...

Still learning lessons from Christmas classics

One night last week we came across the old, animated Christmas classic movie, “Frosty the Snowman.” Just had to stop and watch it again for old times’ sake. Like so many Christmas classics, it is a movie with a message. While the magician is only...

What happened to the toy store?

When I was 12 years old, my Little League baseball team faced a decision. We had played a game earlier in the season that we were unable to finish because of weather or some other occurrence. I can’t recall the exact reason we didn’t finish the...

Random thoughts

I read a story from New Mexico State University the other day about researcher Jin Ho Yun, a researcher studying the impact of artificial intelligence on student learning. I am intrigued by his conclusion that “students who rely on artificial...

Tender mercies

It was an August Thursday night, a work night, when we made the final preparations to relocate from our home in Provo, Utah, to Las Cruces. As often happens with a move, we were running way behind schedule in getting the moving POD loaded, packing...