Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883

Articles written by John L Micek


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  • Reopening isn't good enough. We need to reset everything

    John L Micek|May 4, 2020

    Somewhere on the Appalachian Trail...  We’d been climbing steadily uphill for 25 minutes, a deceptively arduous mile. The sweat was pooling in the small of my back. And my breath came deep and even against the climb, as I planted one foot ahead of the other on the rocky trail. My daughter was behind me, and I could hear her footfalls in the wooded silence. And so I started thinking about time. All this time we’ve had. This time on pause, this time in silence, where we’ve been asked to surrender our autonomy and stay away from friends and the...

  • We cannot ignore the threads that connect acts of hate

    John L Micek|May 13, 2019

    Holocaust survivors, their families, their friends, and their allies all gathered in the state Capitol building here Wednesday. And they vowed to never forget. But how can they? How can they when the same sparks that lit the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and other extermination camps keep burning in our own time? How can they when Charleston, Pittsburgh, Christchurch, Opelousas, Sri Lanka, and now Poway have become part of our shorthand of hate? When Linda Schwab, a Holocaust survivor from Harrisburg, Pa., stepped up to light...

  • Why are we so bad at science

    John L Micek|Apr 15, 2019

    What do most Americans know about science? If a recent Pew Research Center poll is to be believed - not nearly enough. And at a time when knowledge and facts are under assault as they have not been in recent memory, that's a problem. On the upside, about eight in 10 respondents to the new Pew poll knew that increase resistance is one of the big concerns about the overuse of antibiotics. And more than three-quarters know that an "incubation period" is the time when a person has an infection - but isn't showing any visible signs of it. But only...

  • Journalists aren't so different from our readers

    John L Micek|Jul 9, 2018

    If you stay in the news business long enough, you’re inevitably going to run into a reader who has a grievance - sometimes legitimate, sometimes not - against their hometown newspaper. Sometimes it’s because they feel they’ve been portrayed unfairly in a story. Or they feel like a reporter or editor did not give a sufficient enough airing of their views. Or sometimes it’s because they don’t like the font of the baseball box scores. I have been on the receiving end of those complaints. And it can occasionally be profoundly unpleasant. But these...