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Las Vegas City Hall's television channel KCLV has been putting out documentaries on the history of Las Vegas. The first one was five years ago, "The City Of Las Vegas: The Early Years" which covers 1905 to 1920 [1h15m]. The most recent from a few days ago is The City of Las Vegas: The Sixties [1h15m]. They aren't releasing these quickly, but there are seven total in the playlist as of now.
posted by hippybear on May 21, 2024 - 10 comments

Brightline West is ready to start breaking ground this week, according to The Washington Post. The southwest endpoint will be in Rancho Cucamonga, where it will connect to Metrolink. (Which is definitely better than Victorville, which had been suggested a few years ago.) Connecting to the existing lines here will make it simpler to build than trying to connect all the way to Los Angeles proper. (gift link) [more inside]
posted by KelsonV on Apr 22, 2024 - 60 comments

How Phish turned Las Vegas’ Sphere into the ultimate music visualizer "Some moments last night felt like you were seeing enormous versions of the old visualizers from Winamp or iTunes. Others brought the crowd into intricate, dazzling scenes."
posted by dhruva on Apr 20, 2024 - 59 comments

To those who know what Oakland A’s baseball used to be, what Fisher had turned the team into was nothing short of tragic. A’s teams in the past had brought to Oakland pride and repute, as they had seemed to represent, in their character and color, their misfit swagger and underdog grit, something both essential and specific about the East Bay’s sense of self. In this way, certain of those teams had evinced something distinct about the constructive potential of pro sports writ large: how beloved local teams can bring a people together and lift a city up. Fisher’s A’s evince something very different: pro sports’ concurrent capacity for diminishment and plunder, disillusionment and grift. from The Long, Sad Story of the Stealing of the Oakland A’s [The Ringer; ungated]
posted by chavenet on Jun 29, 2023 - 39 comments

"During the months of December 1958 and January and February 1959, two young men flew a mission-modified Cessna 172 around and around over the desert Southwest for 64 days, 22 hours, and 19 minutes. The world endurance record in a propeller-driven airplane was set in that little Cessna over 50 years ago." [more inside]
posted by jessamyn on Apr 25, 2022 - 22 comments

"Consider these demographics, and one starts to understand why the people of Las Vegas get overlooked... I have often wondered whether the general ignorance about Las Vegas is born of laziness, snobbery, or an altogether more insidious impulse. Las Vegas was, of course, déclassé and embarrassing from the start: founded by the Mafia, the first “unaristocratic” Americans, as Tom Wolfe wrote, “to have enough money to build a monument to their style of life.”
It’s frequently said that Las Vegas has no culture, but that’s not true. My Italian relatives from Illinois—my aunts with their Carmela Soprano hairdos and long acrylic nails—love it for a reason. They love playing the slots downtown at the Golden Nugget and going out for martini dinners at old-school Italian places. (At one of these, I heard Pia Zadora breathily sing about her “accidents and arrests.”) They love Cirque du Soleil shows, where you can sit and watch first-class acrobats fly across the stage while you sip from a plastic cup of beer. Las Vegas is vernacular culture—“prole,” Wolfe called it—and thus, he notes, “it gets ignored, except on the most sensational level.”
Those who think of themselves as cultured and educated look down on Las Vegas as garish and brazen. But concern about “good taste” is often just socially palatable code for classism and racism. This is a working-class town that’s nearly 33 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black, and 7 percent Asian. It has one of the largest populations of undocumented immigrants in the country, and the eighth-highest rate of homelessness."
posted by growabrain on Feb 7, 2020 - 27 comments

‘But in the slot cheat business, triumph is always short-lived. Less than two years after The Monkey Paw’s invention, fresh innovations in security rendered it obsolete. Indeed, the legacy of The Monkey Paw wasn’t so much in its lasting efficacy, but in the confidence it instilled in Tommy. Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” At the end of the nineties, Tommy Carmichael declared, “Give me a slot machine and I’ll beat it.”’
posted by Fiasco da Gama on Feb 4, 2020 - 14 comments

Las Vegas' death investigators witnessed the atrocities of the Route 91 shooting, then had to grapple with the difficult task of healing themselves. (Ann Givens, GQ) [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower on Oct 3, 2019 - 7 comments

On September 24th, 1980, a man wearing cowboy boots and carrying two brown suitcases entered Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. One suitcase held $777,000 in cash; the other was empty. After converting the money into chips, the man approached a craps table on the casino floor and put everything on the backline.

[cw: suicide]
posted by Etrigan on Mar 13, 2019 - 27 comments

For the 2018 season, 33 Minor League Baseball hosted the first "Copa de la Diversión," or "Fun Cup," a season-long event series specifically designed to embrace the culture and values that resonate most with participating teams' local U.S. Hispanic/Latino communities (MiLB.com). The new initiative culminates more than two years of collaborative work and research with U.S. Hispanic/Latino civic organizations where each of the teams play, per Forbes, who also include the full list of Copa nombres and translations. Ranking The Best Team Names From MiLB's Copa de la Diversión (Sports Illustrated) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Jan 24, 2019 - 6 comments

Robert Venturi, famed-postmodernist and icon of American architecture, passed away Tuesday at the age of 93. [more inside]
posted by q*ben on Sep 19, 2018 - 10 comments

In October, 2017 Stephen Paddock, driven by right-wing conspiracy theories, set up a snipers nest in a Las Vegas hotel and opened fire on a concert crowd. In just over ten minutes he killed 58 people and injured 546, making it the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Six months and many shootings later it has faded in public consciousness, but the scars remain: WHAT HAPPENED IN VEGAS.
posted by Artw on May 28, 2018 - 88 comments

“It used to be that everybody wanted out,” Watkins says. “But the city has changed a lot in a 30-year time period, to where I don’t hear that now from people. I wanted this team because I wanted my daughters, who I’m raising here, to have something to be proud of.” He looks around the restaurant. It’s filled with businessmen and women from the surrounding office park, a normal set of buildings that you could easily mistake for Scottsdale or Houston if it weren’t for the huge pyramid, ferris wheel, and fake Eiffel Tower looming in the distance as you get onto the highway. “T-Mobile is this little part of the Strip that’s ours, that’s for locals,” Watkins says. “Every other part of the Strip is for them. It’s made for them and for tourism. That part is made for us.” The Golden Knights are for Las Vegas, and Las Vegas only
posted by everybody had matching towels on Apr 11, 2018 - 54 comments

There's some hot fuss about the song Mr. Brightside by The Killers which, after an initially poor chart run, has now totalled 200 weeks in the UK Top 100. Here, it's averaged 878,000 streaming service plays a week this year, and is the most streamed track released prior to 2010; it also remains popular in the USA. Matrimonially banned from singing it, the song is firmly embedded in popular culture and can be spoken as sports commentary, as many covers abound and memes proliferate. As ubiquitous as Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars from 2006, next year there will be teenagers born *after* both these songs were released. The Google autocomplete lyrics and the actual lyrics; the original demo and back story. (Previously)
posted by Wordshore on Mar 19, 2018 - 51 comments

John Woodrow Cox has spent the year reporting for the Washington Post on children affected by gun violence. "Did your father die?" For a 2nd grader, gunfire, lockdowns, then the worst violence of all. Almost two dozen kids are shot every day in the US. This 4-year-old was one of them. Twelve seconds of gunfire: school playground shooting still haunts the first graders who survived. He'd been shot at 15. Now, amid Chicago's relentless gunfire, he had one goal: stay alive. The Las Vegas shooting: six teens and the wounds they carry.
posted by ChuraChura on Dec 2, 2017 - 7 comments

As America reels from the mass shooting in Las Vegas (the third such shooting regarded as the deadliest ever in a decade), Puerto Rico citizens have gone nearly two weeks without power, with reports that already ageing infrastructure has been irretrievably destroyed. (Puerto Rico's infrastructure status page reports only 5% of the network is operational.) [more inside]
posted by Merus on Oct 3, 2017 - 3091 comments

More than 50 people have been killed and 200 injured in a mass shooting at the Route 91 Music Festival near the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. This is the worst mass shooting in United States history, exceeding the 49 in the Orlando Nightclub Shooting. [more inside]
posted by MattWPBS on Oct 2, 2017 - 1137 comments

Brooklyn Is Pizza Heaven is the first episode of The Pizza Show, from Vice's Munchies. In season one, the show examined everything from New Haven style pizza, the thickness of pizza dough, and pizza robots. Host Frahk Pinello returns for season two with shows about pizza in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
posted by Room 641-A on Sep 9, 2017 - 29 comments

After several months of waiting, followed by an additional several weeks of waiting for reasons nobody was quite clear on, and then a few more minutes of waiting while they tried to figure out how to get their video to play, the NHL’s newest expansion team finally has an identity. The Las Vegas To-Be-Determineds are dead. Long live the Vegas Golden Knights. [more inside]
posted by mannequito on Nov 23, 2016 - 39 comments

With 20 days to go until Election Day, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face off in their third and final debate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas at 9:00 PM Eastern Time. Print out your Bingo cards and tune in to any major network (BBC News and Sky News in the UK) or listen on NPR. Alternately, watch on one of YouTube's channels in English (NBC, PBS, Fox News, the Washington Post, the New York Times, C-SPAN) and Spanish (Univision, Telemundo.) Twitter will stream Bloomberg. Facebook has ABC and PBS. C-SPAN has its own feed (C-SPAN Radio is also streaming.) You can watch in virtual reality (Gear, Rift, or Vive) via AltspaceVR, although that may not be a good idea. If you hurry, you can even watch for free in your local Regal Cinema. [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker on Oct 19, 2016 - 3738 comments

The Police Use of Force Project investigates the ways in which police use of force policies help to enable police violence in our communities. (Proposed policy solutions from Campaign Zero) [more inside]
posted by jillithd on Jan 21, 2016 - 26 comments

Who bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal? It's anybody's guess. Nevada's largest circulating daily newspaper has been sold to News+ Media Capital Group, which was incorporated in Delaware on September 21st. The ownership of News + Media Capital Group is a complete mystery. [more inside]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious on Dec 14, 2015 - 55 comments

A few days ago, a reddit user posted a thought-experiment about living in Las Vegas and working in San Francisco, commuting four days a week by airplane. Their back-of-the-envelope calculations have them saving about $1100/month. The posting was picked up by CityLab, and is leading to some interesting discussions. [more inside]
posted by math on Oct 17, 2015 - 164 comments

Two short videos from last year's RISE Lantern Festival outside Las Vegas. This year's evnt is scheduled for this weekend in the Mojave desert. [more inside]
posted by growabrain on Oct 6, 2015 - 14 comments

An 8:44 long timelapse in 4K resolution on Vimeo and YouTube. Includes Yosemite, Yellowstone, Olympic, Banff, Kings Canyon, Sequoia, Acadia, Rocky Mountains, Mesa Verde, Arches, Mount Rainier, Mount Revelstoke and Zion. Also Seattle, Los Angeles, Vancouver, St. Louis, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Plus Mount Rushmore, New Orleans, Toronto, Boston, Calgary, Springdale, Three Rivers, Pagosa Springs, Swift Current, New York, Niagara Falls, Lake Palourde, Keene Lake, Horseshoe Bend, White Mountains, Hobson and the Mississippi River. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore on Sep 19, 2015 - 16 comments

"Erik, photojournalist, and I have come here to try and get the measure of this place. Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert." -- Built For Eternity, Elmo Keep on structures designed to potentially outlast human civilization. (Motherboard)
posted by The Whelk on Aug 9, 2015 - 67 comments

Pigeon.ly has joined Y-Combinator's 2015 Winter class. While in prison, founder Frederick Hutson was amazed by the cost and difficulty of communicating with those outside. When he was released in 2011, he founded Pigeon.ly (originally Picturegram) to help people send pictures (and, later, make phone calls) to inmates. Additional coverage: The New York Times (2013), Forbes (2014), Planet Money.
posted by Going To Maine on Mar 25, 2015 - 30 comments

"Show me another black man with a missing a penis and maybe we'll have something to talk about," Deputy DA Owens told the court. // Writing for The Intercept, Jordan Smith details the story of a woman, Kirstin Lobato, who was convicted for the brutal murder of a homeless man in Las Vegas. According to those who are working for Lobato's release, it is a "perfect storm of wrongful conviction. Everything that possibly could have been done incorrectly was done incorrectly." [NSFW: graphic descriptions]
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates on Mar 14, 2015 - 15 comments

A Life On The Line: For four decades, other gamblers have tried to be Billy Walters while investigators have tried to bring him down. And for four decades, the world's most successful sports bettor has outrun them all.

For 38-year-old Rubalcada, being at the M is a pleasing trip down memory lane, a visit to his primary workplace throughout 2010 and 2011. Back then, he had nearly $1 million in his account at the M. Dressed in slacks and a sport coat, he would saunter in and bet six figures a week on NFL and college games. He was, M Resort staffers say, one of the sportsbook's "bigger guys" -- a high roller who could afford to bet very, very big.

But he wasn't that at all.

In fact, Rubalcada was a faceless grunt in the most successful gambling enterprise of all time.

[more inside] posted by Room 641-A on Feb 8, 2015 - 15 comments

How Britney Spears went to Vegas and became a feminist role model. No, really. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns on Jun 13, 2014 - 47 comments

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson, published in Rolling Stone, November 11, 1971.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than 100 miles to go. They would be tough miles. Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Press registration for the fabulous Mint 400 was already underway, and we had to get there by four to claim our soundproof suite. A fashionable sporting magazine in New York had taken care of the reservations, along with this huge red Chevy convertible we'd just rented off a lot on the Sunset Strip ... and I was, after all, a professional journalist; so I had an obligation to cover the story, for good or ill. The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Los Angeles County – from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

posted by the man of twists and turns on Apr 14, 2014 - 67 comments

The 1970s Cold War Era Home built 26 Feet Underground
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse on Sep 5, 2013 - 52 comments

Eydie Gormé dies at 84. They met as cast members of the Steve Allen Show in the 1950s, and it was the start of something big. Known ever since as "Steve and Eydie," they became fixtures of Las Vegas and television variety shows. But Eydie had many hits of her own along the way, such as Blame It On the Bossa Nova, and she became famous in Latin America for her Spanish recordings like Amor. [more inside]
posted by dnash on Aug 12, 2013 - 20 comments

“What would happen if some of those ‘priests’ in white robes started chasing you at 60 miles an hour?” Frank asked. “What would you do?” And Sammy answered, “Seventy.” The Moulin Rouge: The Vegas Hotspot That Broke All The Rules. Smithsonian Magazine on the brief life but long-lasting legacy of Las Vegas' first racially integrated casino.
posted by goo on Jul 20, 2013 - 11 comments

An excerpt from the short film 5000 Feet is Best by Omer Fast. [more inside]
posted by ovvl on Jun 9, 2013 - 8 comments

When We Held Kings: The oral history of the 2003 World Series of Poker, in which an amateur named Moneymaker turned $39 into $2.5 million and the poker boom was born.
posted by Horace Rumpole on May 25, 2013 - 18 comments

" When I look at Las Vegas, I see a concrete and flashing neon message to the universe that humanity won't settle for caves and foraging. Both the churches and casinos are decadent monuments in the desert saying we are so highly evolved that we can afford to devote large amounts of time to indulging ourselves or morally policing those who do. Our beliefs and the specifics of our rituals may differ, but at the end of the day, the instincts that drive us are very much alike." Stoya (NSFW), the 'Pop Star of Porn', talks about Las Vegas in Vice Magazine.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants on May 13, 2013 - 43 comments

Sinatra, His Molls, and Me. Paul Anka riffs on his early days in Las Vegas, and a certain song.
posted by timsteil on Mar 25, 2013 - 28 comments

The trip was fine. I've never seen that part of the country from the highway before. There just were a few incidents on my way home that chipped away at my resistance. I really do try to remember how incredibly fortunate I am. I really do. I just can get worn down.

Freddie DeBoer messed up his airline reservation for a conference in Vegas, so ended up taking a bus home to Indiana. He meditates on the people he encountered on his trip in his blog.
posted by dry white toast on Mar 19, 2013 - 37 comments

Apollo Robbins is a spectacular pickpocket whose work extends to neuroscience, the military and magic.
posted by xowie on Dec 31, 2012 - 27 comments

The Touch-point Collective: Crowd Contouring on the Casino Floor - 'Historically, casinos have been eager adopters of technologies that help them to gather knowledge about their customers. The knowledge-gathering repertoire of the modern casino has shifted from telephone surveys, focus groups, and rudimentary datasets to complex feats of reconnaissance and analysis enabled by player tracking systems, data visualization tools, and behavioral intelligence software suites. Many surveillance techniques first applied in casinos were only later adapted to other domains—airports, financial trading floors, shopping malls, banks, and government agencies.' There are some large, embedded .avi files in the page, be careful. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns on Aug 6, 2012 - 12 comments

Fallout 3 vs. Reality - A fan of the video game series Fallout 3, which depicts a post-apocalyptic world, travels to Washington, DC and Las Vegas to take photos of the locations as they exist today and compares them to screen captures from within the game. (via Reddit thread)
posted by Argyle on Jul 3, 2012 - 50 comments

But THIS – this is different. If this doesn’t work – if this is not a success – it’s there, forever….” I remember thinking to myself “oh my god, this guy does NOT get it….” And he said “I don’t want to be the guy that approved this and then it’s a flop and sitting out there in Vegas forever.”

And with that, Mr. Jaffe in a single moment, destroyed about five months of work by a host of people, and killed one of the greatest ideas of all time.
posted by hippybear on Apr 8, 2012 - 84 comments

The files of the God of Gamblers case can be read as a string of accidents, good and bad: Siu’s run at the baccarat table; Wong’s luck to be assigned an assassin with a conscience; Adelson’s misfortune that reporters noticed an obscure murder plot involving his casino. But the tale, viewed another way, depends as little on luck as a casino does. It is, rather, about the fierce collision of self-interests. If Las Vegas is a burlesque of America—the “ethos of our time run amok,” as Hal Rothman, the historian, put it—then Macau is a caricature of China’s boom, its opportunities and rackets, its erratic sorting of winners and losers.

Evan Osnos on a real-life "God of Gamblers" and the rise of Macau, The New Yorker
posted by jng on Apr 6, 2012 - 13 comments

In 1971, Hunter Thompson first published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in Rolling Stone. Forty years later, The Daily’s Zach Baron revisits the piece and the town in which it was born, chasing Thompson's ghost through crazy desert car races, a dying local economy and a massive and menacing hacker convention known as DEFCON. (previously)
posted by Trurl on Oct 6, 2011 - 26 comments

Current TV previously & previously, the media company founded by Al Gore after the 2000 election, has picked up the kinds of in depth long form journalism being rapidly dropped by major networks, but has been tantalizingly unavailable for those without cable; until now. They have been putting their Vanguard episodes up on their website and on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb on Apr 30, 2011 - 23 comments

How can you have a university without a philosophy department? In response to a 17% budget cut to higher education by Governor Sandoval, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas is proposing the complete elimination of its Philosophy Department. The Mayor of Las Vegas has called it a sin. Others have said it seems like something out of an episode of The Simpsons. Todd Edwin Jones, chair of the UNLV Philosophy Department, makes his case.
posted by Lutoslawski on Apr 7, 2011 - 156 comments

After hearing of a recent heist in which a bandit wearing a motorcycle helmet robbed the Bellagio of $1.5 million in chips (the 10th Vegas casino robbery this year), I remembered the scene from Ocean's 11 where Reuben expounds upon why it is nigh impossible to steal from a Las Vegas casino. But that simply isn't true. Granted, no one has infiltrated a casino for a massive $160 million haul, but sizable losses have occurred over the years: 18 Casino Heists: The Strange, The Surgical, and The Stupid; 5 Most Famous Casino Heists in History, Top 10: Epic Las Vegas Heists; 13 Real Heists from Around the World (there is duplication of mentioned events on these sites, as well as non-casino-related crimes). Casino Security (Wiki) may be high tech (Google .pdf quickview), but it's not unbeatable (Casino insider tells (almost) all about security). Of course, there are other ways to steal from a casino, but you might still get caught. And it's hard to find much lore about successful robberies, mostly because casinos don't want that kind of publicity. [more inside]
posted by bwg on Dec 15, 2010 - 37 comments

The tunnel people of Las Vegas: "They lost their home when they became addicted to drugs after the death of their son Brady at four months old." [warning: Daily Mail]
posted by rodgerd on Nov 6, 2010 - 24 comments

Las Vegas as it almost was, as it was going to be, as it never will be, and as it still might.
posted by Joe Beese on Aug 19, 2010 - 40 comments