Quay County Sun - Serving the High Plains

The world, and particularly Brazil, lost a great one when Edson Arantes do Nascimento, famously known as Pelé, died on Thursday. Pelé was incredible in the sport of football, famously known in the U...

Wow. Another “existential” year. It seems they all are these days. COVID hit in 2020 and we, as a nation, argued over masks. Then 2021 brought vaccines and deeper divisions after an attempted...

Every year about this time I get to be Santa’s editor helper. I clean up letters that children in Santa Rosa, Vaughn and Anton Chico write to him, for publication in my newspaper’s Letters to...

Ever wonder how other nations view us? For New Mexicans, the first thing a foreigner might think is that we’re a part of our neighbor to the south. If they knew Billy the Kid became famous as a...

Every time I go back to my home country, I pine for the good old days of my youth. I was born in Ozark, Ark., where the Arkansas River Valley meets the Ozark Mountains, and graduated high school upstr...

The other day I heard a program on NPR discussing how children and youth are taking in the threat of climate change. One teenager spoke of how he became keenly aware of the threat when he had to...

If you ask me, Thanksgiving is better than Christmas, for a whole host of practical, spiritual and personal reasons. For one thing, it hasn’t been commercialized the way the Yuletide has. Black...

Did America’s fever just break? Last week’s general election provided strong evidence that democracy remains strong in our nation, as just about all those who lost their respective elections...

Sometimes I feel like an optimist in search of a reason to still feel that way. I want to believe in what’s good about this world, but writing about the issues of our time can be depressing. I’m...

All year long, I’ve had a hard time getting excited about this election year. I’m just not into it this time around. This isn’t normal for me. For decades, I’ve told people that “politics...

As an observer of human nature and the body politick, I’ve reached the conclusion that the meanspirited attacks on both sides are largely due to the extremes. But there’s a more moderate middle...

This is altogether anecdotal, so I won’t pretend it’s based on scientific observation, but I’ve noticed something in my annual trips to Arkansas for a Thanksgiving get-together in the Ozark...

Maybe you’ve read my brother Don’s column, something I run weekly in my Guadalupe County News because, well, he loaned me money. That’s why we call his weekly column “The One Percenter,...

If you ask me, a big reason why democracy in America is in trouble is because of the way we’ve set it up. First, there’s our Electoral College for electing presidents. By using state electors for...

The other day, I heard a pundit call New Mexico “purple,” as in a balanced mix of “blue” Democrats and “red” Republicans. If that’s the case, we must have some closeted Republicans...

In case you haven’t noticed, nuclear power is back in the headlines these days. Even here in New Mexico, where there are no nuclear power plants, it’s an issue. Not only do we have the Waste...

The governor is leading in her bid for re-election, as are other Democrats running statewide races. New Mexicans see crime and inflation as the biggest issues facing the state, and they want judges...

In the Great American Culture Wars of our time, two different worldviews, science and religion, continue to do battle, even though it doesn’t have to be that way. Science has reshaped our world in...

Heroes are easy to find but hard to keep. Especially when we’re young, we need our heroes, or positive role models if you prefer, as examples of what courage, sacrifice and success are all about....

I found inspiration at a burn scar recently. It was in California, which has been burning for years now as Exhibit A for the onset of climate change. I had driven into the state to pick up my...

Downsizing for an old-school media junkie involves lots of newspapers and magazines, the hardcopy kind, where the first draft of history was laid out for all the world to consume through linear...

The Governor’s Office recently boasted of record-setting in-state spending from the filmmaking industry. And while a good chunk of that is going into the Rio Grande Corridor, where Netflix and other...

Now that a 27-year-old man’s confession has substantiated a doctor’s story that a 10-year-old girl was raped, got pregnant and had to go out of state to get an abortion, you’d have a heart of st...

New Mexico’s been making the national news a lot lately, and not the good kind. First came the wildfires. The Hermits Peak Fire was making national headlines even before it merged with the Calf...