Denali Time

We've been going up to Denali National Park in the spring before the busses take tourists into the park for over 20 years.  It's a brief time when you can drive out to Teklanika campground (30 miles in.)  Once the busses begin, the road is closed at Savage River (12 miles in.)

It's a time before things turn green, but there are fewer people around, campgrounds (but they were $55 a night, half that for Senior and other National Park Pass holders) are easy to get, and you can take your time, stopping where you want, as long as you want, taking in the magnificent views, and animals.  

This year there was still more snow than normal - lingering from this record breaking winter.  When we complained that we had seen no caribou at all (normally guaranteed) we were told that they are late arriving this year, probably because of the snow.  

We left Anchorage Thursday morning, with some sunshine in Anchorage, but as we drove north it got cloudy and we had short bouts of rain and wet pavement then dry pavement much of the way.  

There was a surprisingly good view at the Denali view point at mile 135.  You couldn't see Denali, but you could see all the smaller mountains. (these are eight and nine thousand foot peaks.)

People at the viewpoint tend to talk to each other and ask where everyone is from.  When they learned we were from Anchorage they wanted to know which mountain was Denali.  I had to say, "None of them.  It's the one towering above behind the clouds."  Then I checked my camera and found my picture from exactly two years earlier and shared it.  (The bottom photo was with a telephoto lens so there's some distortion between the two, but you get the point.)

As I compare the two images, it's interesting that there was more snow two years ago, because that definitely wasn't the case north of the mountain, in the park.  The mountains you see in the top picture almost look like they are part of Denali in the lower picture.  But they are all separate mountain peaks, about half the height of Denali.  

Gas prices were interesting.  The cheapest in Anchorage is around $5.49.  In Wasilla, there are stations advertising $5.19 and a few on the outskirts with $4.99. (Anchorage has a local tax on gas that raises the price.)  The Talkeetna turnoff station has $4.95 for the lowest grade.  

But in Cantwell, where the old Native run station seems to be closed down, the Vitus station is raking it in. (Yeah, regular was $6.45/gallon.)

We were tired when we got to the campground and made dinner and got into bed.  It wasn't sunny, but it also wasn't as cold as we expected.  

One of the many  awesome aspects of Denali is its vastness.  You can see wild landscape that seems to stretch out forever.  Below are two photos meshed together because one wide angle picture is way too small.  And as one tourist we met says, "The pictures don't come close to capturing it."

Below are some more photos from Friday, a gray day with occasional sprinkles.  

Here's J walking  down from the Teklanika parking lot and viewpoint where the road ends.  You can walk the mile down to the bridge over the Teklanika River.  Though beyond the bridge was closed off due to " a scheduled bear capture operation." (This for research, not to remove the bears.)

This is a view from the bridge.  It's not a black and white photo, but looks lie one.

There are a couple of large ponds (not sure how big it has to be to be called a lake) near the Teklanika campground where we can normally see waterfowl.  One still had a lot of ice and I didn't see any birds.  

But the other one had Northern Shovelers.  Pictures in bird books often show the males with green heads.  These had black heads.  I asked the bird guide on Saturday and she said the green shows iridescent when the sun is right.  

We were stopped at an overview, relaxing when a car stopped and asked if we'd seen any caribou.  They hadn't either, but they said there was a bear about 3 miles down the road.  

And not much later, we saw a driver looking out over his car.  Following his gaze we saw a big blonde bear sleeping on the tundra.  After a while, he raised his head, move a little further away, and crashed again.  

This raven was making a racket.

There were lots of ptarmigan on the road.  They're in the process of transitioning from the white winter plumage to the summer brown.  

When we got back Friday afternoon, there was someone parked in our campsite.  I wouldn't even mention this - he simply didn't see the paper clipped on the site marker, and since the site across the road was nice and was empty, we just pulled in there.  But I'm mentioning it because the vehicle was

 from Storyteller

unlike any I'd ever seen.  It was dark gray, almost black and looked like a combination of a truck and a tank.  It was big.  The license plate said Storyteller and I mentioned he could tell us a story.  No, he said, that's the name of the company that makes the vehicle.  He'd driven this thing up from Birmingham, Alabama and I don't know why I didn't take a picture.  

But I looked up Storyteller when we got home.  It's a company that makes very expensive and fancy campers.  

The picture is from Storyteller.  The sticker price for this model is $799,784 or $5385 per month.

There are different models and this seems to look like the one we saw.    Look for it in Anchorage this week, where the driver was going to meet his wife who flies up to Anchorage regularly for work.  

I guess there is a market for luxury goods for all those in the $50 million and up category.  

The next morning there was sun and we'd found an 8:30am bird walk listed on the Denali Website at Mountain Vista trail, near the Savage River campground.  We turned out to be the only visitors for the walk and our guide, Autumn, was great.  She identified a number of small birds by their calls and some we saw.  And at one point, we saw that Denali was out of the clouds.  

I identified the bird on the right, which is a heftier bird than the picture shows, as a gray jay, but Autumn told me it is now called a Canada Jay.

Below is a white crowned sparrow.  When we mentioned the bear and I showed her a picture, Autumn thought it might have been one of the bears that had been tranquilized.  

The artwork below is what I'm calling 'stained ice' - which was naturally formed on the trail.  

As magnificent as the park was on Friday, the sunshine on Saturday added to its glory. 

Below you can see the landscape with Denali seeming to rise over the horizon.

And a closer look at North America's tallest mountain through the telephoto lens.

And then we turned around and headed to the Alaska Geographic bookstore next to the Visitors Center and then toward home. 

We had lunch at a pullout along the Nenana River, just north of Cantwell.  The 'shoreline' in the middle on the other side of the river is actually large blocks of ice stacked up.  As we ate, ice floated by along the river.  The Denali rivers flow north, into the Nenana, and then the Yukon according to Autumn.

A couple of hours later we got back to the Denali South Viewpoint.  It had clouded up again as we drove south, but we walked back up to the viewpoint, where three young men from Orange County, California told us the mountain had been out.  There had been a cloud obscuring the middle, but the bottom and the top had been visible.  As we chatted, one of them said he thought the mountain was visible again.  I took this picture, but it wasn't until I got home and looked carefully, could I see the white of the mountain showing through the grayer clouds.  

Now we're back home.  It's gray and the weather app says that won't change in the next ten days.  Temps will get up to 50˚F (10˚C) and a little above.  But the plants know summer is coming and the birch leaves are showing green, though they aren't fully open.  

This All Sounds So Familiar

 From Peter Pmerantsev,  How to Win an Information War

"Describing the allure of such reality-denying propaganda, the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had fled Nazi Germany and eventually immigrated to the US in 1941, described how Germans, lost in  "an ever-changing, incomprehensible world . . . are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer
bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects. . .What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part."

Instead of "evidence," whether fake or real, what people were looking for was a larger sense that they were special, that they were surrounded by enemies, that they were part of a common destiny.  Fealty to the leadership became a value in itself.  The Nazi leadership could often change their policies - at one moment the USSR was an ally;  the next moment Germany war at war with it - but such inconsistencies didn't matter, thought Arendt.  In a world where Germany was portrayed as being surrounded by malign, deceptive, endless conspiracies, the leaders duty was to lie:

"The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood . . .they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. . .

The essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the "first commandment" of the movement:  "The Fuehrer is always right," is as necessary for the purposes of world politics - i.e. world-wide cheating - as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war."  (pp 90-91, emphasis added)

 

Why Books? Some New Ones At the Library

 While picking up my next Book Club book at Loussac Library, I went up stairs to peruse the new book section.  In this day of 300 character social media posts, I find books a great place to retreat to a deeper way of knowing about the world.  

So here are, in no real order, some of the books I looked at in the New Books section. 

Hush:  How to Radiate Power and Confidence… by Linda Clemons   (for an audio intro:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FyKL-6OvyE )

I saw Hush first   This is a self-help book to give the reader "power and confidence."  The "without saying a word" more than suggests it's going to be about body language.  There's a link above to an audio intro to the book by the author, who let's you know she can tell all your secrets by the way you hold and move your whole body as well as parts of your body.  

Language is Gesture -  by David McNeill     I saw this second book, ostensibly on an overlapping topic a bit later.  This is more of an academic book outlining this idea that language is based on gesture.

"Abstract:

A new way of viewing language, as a dynamic mode of meaning-making of which gesture is a fundamental part.

When David McNeill began his work on gesture more than forty years ago, language and the action of speaking were regarded as separate realms. But language, says McNeill in Language Is Gesture, is dynamic and gesture is fundamental to speaking. Central to his conception of language, and distinct from linguistic analysis, is what McNeill calls the “growth point,” the starting point of making thought and speech one. He uses the term “gesture–speech unity” to refer to the dynamic dimension of adding gesture to speaking. It is the growth point that achieves this unity, whereby thought is embedded in gesture and speech at the same time.

Gesture is the engine of language. It is foundational to speaking, language acquisition, the origin of language, animal communication, thought, and consciousness. Gesture is global and synthetic and brings energy; speech is linear and segmented and brings cultural standards. The growth point is a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage, the starting point of unifying thought and speech. Growth points create gesture–speech unity by synchronizing a bundle of linguistic features with a gesture that carries the same meaning. This gesture–speech unity is a form of thought, a unique form of cognition."  [From Linguist List]

I found the similarity of the covers of these four books interesting.  

The Rolling Stone's review title is 

"OZZY OSBOURNE’S ‘LAST RITES’ MEMOIR  IS HAUNTING, REVELATORY, AND OFTEN DEEPLY SAD"

Rolling Stone offers 14 things they learned that hadn't been in other Osbourne bios.  There was nothing I needed to know, but if you're a big Osbourne fan, maybe , . .

From Kirkus on Sumner:

"A skillful blend of legal history and biography that honors the 19th century’s foremost champion of civil rights..".

Given today's Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, perhaps we can bring Sumner back to life to help fight again for civil rights.  The decision is 36 pages.  Kagan's dissent is 48 pages.

 

Also from Kirkus on Lionel Richie's book:

"There’s an abundance of love and gratitude in this wildly entertaining, utterly charming memoir."

Roosevelt, also from Kirkus

"Roosevelt’s forceful life is portrayed as the embodiment of America 'as it was meant to be.'

Baier, chief political anchor for Fox News, is a prolific biographer whose volume on Theodore Roosevelt joins his works on George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. The author’s portrait of the 26th president draws on Roosevelt’s writings, diaries, letters, speeches, and other biographies. Baier sketches Roosevelt’s transformations to politician, president, soldier, writer, and naturalist. .  .

This portrait of an iron-willed president digs only so deep."

I wonder if the author embraces Roosevelt's trust busting and preservation of natural wonders in National Parks.  

When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever

 The Cheever book looked particularly interesting, though I've only read a few of her father's short stories.  

From Spectrum Culture:

"When All the Men All Wore Hats, the second study by author John Cheever’s daughter Susan, follows Home Before Dark, her longer 1984 memoir, inevitably repeating some of the material. Both accounts blend candor and tact, respect and pain, as she delves into his sense of never quite belonging to the patrician New England-New York smart-set her father limned.

John came from a checkered New England legacy, one that, like the many floundering characters in his short stories, trended downward. Susan archly observes: “The New Yorker was the stern father who would occasionally hand you a dollar and tell you to go and buy yourself a new fifty-dollar shirt.” Cheever’s standout stories mostly had been published before the 1966 success of the adaptation of The Swimmer into a Burt Lancaster film, and John didn’t publish more than a handful of stories at the magazine that had cemented his mid-century reputation after that."

Cloud Warriors, Thomas E. Weber 

 From Princeton Alumni Weekly:

"As his reporting proceeded, Weber began to focus on why more accurate forecasts don’t necessarily translate into better outcomes, in lives and property saved. Weather satellites, radar stations and the specialized scientific knowledge to understand the data they produce are all important, he concluded — but a key, underappreciated factor is how to manage human psychology.

A turning point came with Weber’s interview with a social science expert who traveled to locations that had recently been struck by tornadoes. As her colleagues were focusing on estimating wind speeds and damage patterns, this researcher was asking community members about the warnings they’d heard before the storm and how they decided to take the actions they did.

“I realized then that there was a huge push in the weather world to start better understanding people, as well as the atmosphere,” Weber says. 'The real issue is, how do you get people to make the safest decisions? You have to communicate that to people in a way that gets them to treat it with a gravity that is appropriate to the danger. It’s a complicated chain of events.'”

Empty Vessel:  The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, by Ian Kumekawa 

From the New York Review: 

Over the past few decades journalists and academics have chronicled the “lawless ocean,” documenting widespread human rights abuses in the shipping and fishing industries and what might be termed “the outlaw sea.” In Empty Vessel, Ian Kumekawa, a historian at MIT and Harvard, finds that the seas are in fact replete with laws—but that many of them are designed to get around other laws, to exploit or create loopholes, or to obtain regulatory and tax advantages, all with the goal of maximizing profits for shipping companies. This parallel offshore universe of laws and contracts was slowly built up by lawyers, corporations, and territories that function as tax havens, enabling them to reap profit without paying their due—and becoming central to what we call globalization.

Empty Vessel tells the story of a single barge, from its construction at a Swedish dockyard nearly half a century ago to its current status as a rusty, “laid up” accommodation barge for oil workers in the port of Onne in Nigeria. (The book also cursorily follows its sister ship, an identical vessel built at the same time, which had a similar course over the years.) By tracking the ship’s many lives—as a floating barrack for British troops during the Falklands War, as a prison ship moored at Pier 36 in Lower Manhattan and then in Portland, England, and as a temporary housing barge for assembly line workers in West Germany—Kumekawa charts the dramatic transformations that the world economy has undergone since the 1980s: globalization, the decline of manufacturing, financialization, neoliberalism. The ship’s trajectory lays bare both the physical infrastructure of the global economy—in the form of ships, ports, and the workers who operate them—and the invisible legal architecture without which it would be impossible. 

The Injustice of Property - Steven Przybylinski

From Project Muse:

"With the rise of homelessness in many U.S. cities, municipal governments are sanctioning organized encampments as an official strategy for sheltering unhoused people. Examining the shortcomings and consequences of these municipal policies, The Injustice of Property explores how unhoused individuals living in self-managed encampments navigate and organize themselves within and against the confines of liberal property systems. Through ethnographic research in Portland, Oregon, a paradigmatic city in advancing this model of homeless shelter, Stephen Przybylinski details the everyday struggles of self-managed encampments to highlight how key contradictions inherent to liberal ideology maintain property as a means of structuring sociopolitical equality. He argues that justice cannot be realized for unhoused communities within the liberal model of private property due to how liberalism and liberal ideology prioritize the rights and values of property over the personal rights of self-governance.

The Injustice of Property is a conceptually robust and empirically rich account of the limits of liberal thinking regarding what “just” property relations look like for unhoused and housed people alike. The book shows that while encampment communities struggle to establish alternative property relationships to the traditional model of private ownership, the injustices that residents of encampments face provoke a necessary reevaluation of how beneficiaries of property systems influence who can become housing stable and on which terms. This insightful book reveals how the injustices surrounding Portland’s encampment communities reflect the limits and injustice of liberal property more broadly."  

The Cost of Being Undocumented, by Alix Dick and Antero Garcia

From interview on UUWorld:

Dick: I would like people to understand that the decisions that immigrants make were never made lightly. Nobody leaves home by choice. When people read this book, I want them to understand that what happened to me could happen to anybody. It’s a privilege to think that tragedy will never hit you.

A black-and-white portrait of Antero Garcia, couthor of "The Cost of Being Undocumented."

Antero Garcia: Taking the “cost” part of the title, I hope readers see that the costs of undocumented life are so much more than just financial numbers. Sure, we offer a financial estimate of what living undocumented has cost Alix at the end of the book. However, more importantly, I want readers to understand the toll of living away from family, of navigating language and social barriers, of losing the opportunities for youthful joy in a new country. The financial costs also go both ways: while existing economic reports point to the fact that undocumented individuals actually provide a net-benefit to the U.S. economy, Alix’s story also highlights the ways wage theft, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and inaccessible university costs actually extract even more income for the most marginalized individuals in this country.

 I pulled out a few more books, but this is a good enough selection.  In this time of social media, influencers whose test for truth is how many viewers they have and how much money those viewers bring, and a president who's truth is measured by his own perceived best interest, taking a mental vacation from all that and reading a few books feels like a luxury.  

And it's a good time to support your local library.  Most have a new book section.  You can even find a comfy chair and just lose yourself in the library.  

Changing Seasons - Yard, Trails, Critters

 

Our front yard (south facing) no longer has any snow.  The tulips have poked out of the ground in a bed in front along the house.  Back yard still has some but it's retreating quickly.

The bike trails along the streets I've been on are all clear of snow, with some residual ice in shaded spots and large puddles of water here and there.  

The trails along the the greenbelts are not quite that far along.  some are clear - from Goose Lake parking lot to UAA has pavement all the way, though at some points it's narrow.  

The trail from Goose Lake parking lot toward the Chester Creek trail along Northern Lights to the Alaska Native Medical Center is clear. 

There was a guy in a pickup truck doing spins in the parking lot.  He was the only vehicle in the lot.  He straightened up and drove away.  Not sure if it was because he saw me on the bike, or he was just ready to go.  

Chester Creek south (from Lake Otis) to the Peanut Farm is clear in some spots and covered in snow in other parts.  This picture is just north of the bridge under International Airport Road.  

I passed a couple of rabbits near Loussac Library.  I backed up and they were still there, not moving.  

They didn't move when I pulled out my phone and took their picture.  Nice birch bark too.  

There was a pair of mergansers in the creek between UAA dorms and the dining commons. (Thanks Dianne for the identification.)

And at Lake Otis Elementary yesterday, the kids got a visit from the Bird Treatment and Learning Center (Bird TLC) and they brought along a Peregrine Falcon.  The kids were quiet so as not to agitate the falcon and asked a lot of great questions.  

They listened quietly in rapt(or) attention.  (sorry, couldn't resist, it's completely accurate.)

Oe more related note.  We had a lot more snow this winter and the weather stayed a lot colder longer.  For many weeks our daily  high temperatures were below our normal low temperatures.  So the snow and ice clung to the ground far longer than normal.  And to top it off, last year the sidewalks and trails cleared much earlier than normal.  

All this means I'm way behind in my biking.  Today, April 24, 2026, my total is 70 kilometers.  Last year on April 24, I was at 180 kilometers.  Can I catch up with last year's pace?  I'm guessing not, though last year I did do 100k weeks.  My total last summer was just over 1600 kms, or 1000 miles.  We'll see how things go as the trails get clear of snow.  

But biking is back on the agenda, even if we have trouble getting out of the 40s F, and going outside to get the mail or take the compost out, doesn't require putting on a coat anymore.  

Five Links Worth Checking Out - Definitely #1

 I used to blog daily, but I started this before most social media were active.  In fact I didn't realize a blog was part of social media when I started.  

I didn't intend to be a curator, but Bluesky, Spoutible, and other sources often unearth interesting articles that are worth sharing.  So here's another menu of interesting readings that taught me things I didn't know or know about.    

1.  Card Catalog - Teaching you how to think like a librarian in the age of AI.

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It.

40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.

HANA LEE GOLDIN, MLIS   FEB 24, 2026

These really are shortcuts on google searches.  Some examples:

"The minus sign

removes a word from your results entirely. Put it directly before the word with no space: jaguar -car returns the animal, mercury -planet returns the element or the musician depending on your other terms. Precise, effective, and useful any time a word you’re searching carries more than one meaning.

The asterisk *

works as a wildcard for any missing word or phrase. Try: “the * of artificial intelligence”. The asterisk stands in for whatever word you can’t remember or want to explore. It’s invaluable for chasing down half-remembered titles and quotes, and it surfaces the full range of ways a phrase gets used across different contexts, which is useful for research that starts from a concept rather than a specific source.

intitle: and inurl:

let you filter by the structure of a page rather than just its content. intitle:”media literacy” returns only pages where that phrase appears in the actual title, not just mentioned once in passing. inurl:gov intitle:”AI policy” finds government pages where AI policy is the stated subject. Combined, they’re considerably more precise than keyword searching alone."

I tend to use DuckDuckGo as my browser and I was wondering if these would work there.  Turns out there is a list of alternatives to using google.  Here's what it said about DuckDuckGo:

"DuckDuckGo is free, doesn’t track your searches, and supports all the operators covered above. It also has a feature called !bangs: type !w before any search to go straight to Wikipedia, or !scholar for Google Scholar. It turns the search bar into a shortcut launcher for wherever you want to land, without a company logging where that is."

Lots of useful tips.  I've bookmarked the page because I know I'll want to look at it to remind me of shortcuts I'm not using.  I'm going to try out at least three a day.

2.  The Situation: But Wait! There’s More!  (From Lawfare blog)

Katherine Pompilio, Benjamin Wittes

Tuesday, April 7, 2026, 2:46 PM

About their interactive chart to document habeas corpus cases in the United States courts that the Trump administration is not in compliance with.  

Sorry, the image isn't big enough.  It's just a screenshot, but here is the link to the interactive chart.

3. STRENGTH THROUGH NUMBERS  (his website and the title of his book)

The Strategist’s Fallacy in American politics

The average American voter does not think about politics the way elite strategists and pundits do

G. ELLIOTT MORRIS

OCT 28, 2025

This one is for those of you who rather not read too much - It only has the introduction in front of the paywall.  

4.  RUMINATO POLITICS

The People vs. Donald J. Trump

This presentation to a jury of his peers is also a handy, comprehensive reference to his crimes when you debate those somehow still on the fence about this maniac

CHARLES BASTILLE   APR 06, 2026

"On behalf of all decent Americans, I am calling for a citizen’s arrest.

Let us waste no more time. Let the proceedings begin. This post includes a comprehensive list of 39 separate crimes against the people of the United States. There are more, either not appearing here or not yet uncovered.

Defendant: Donald John Trump.

Charges: High crimes and treason. Nary a misdemeanor to be found because they’re all felonies. Felonious like a mafia boss, with loads of Diddy thrown in for extra effect. The worst human in the public realm.

Jury: The jury is you.

The judge in this case: Whoever happens to be wearing a nice, black, terry cloth bathroom robe while reading this."

It then goes on to list crimes committed by Trump and his entourage, with links.   

5.  'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back

Jason Koebler  March 16, 2026

"Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States. His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different personas."

There's a 45 minute video interview with Michael Geoffrey Asia.  If you open it at the website, there are no ads.  If I embed it from Youtube, it's got ads.  So it's better to just go to the website.  

 

·

Alaska Press Club Conference - Quick Look Friday

 

The Alaska Press Club conference was this week in Anchorage. I've been attending at least since 2011..  As a blogger, I wanted to see what 'real' journalists were thinking and doing.  All the conferences have been well worth my time.  

I gave up trying to capture everything, even everything in just one session.  There just wasn't time between session to write things up.  Besides, it's an opportunity to meet different people.  

I'm just going to give you a sense of what some of the people were doing at the conference.  There were evening events which I didn't attend.  

Katie Eastman

Her panel was:  Human Connection:  Documenting Real Life Makes Our Stories Stronger

Katie is the "Manager of Storytelling" at a Tulsa television station KOTV.  She offered a basic framework for how she 'gets access' to the people in her stories and then shared examples of stories she's done and how the framework applied.

Access was key for her.

EMOTION    Universal Experience   Focus  What is that universal thing that can connect people?

VIDEO          Natural sound               Understanding   See who you are in your own space,

Find a space that is more universal. In the first example she was in a high school gym, which is a pretty universal experience.  

The photo to the right illustrates a problem that in the room we were in - you can't light the speaker without also lighting the screen.  In this case the screen is lit and the speaker isn't.  

Katie Orlinsky Ethics and Access for Visual Journalists The second Katie spoke about her career as a photographer with examples from Mexico (homeless migrants, some prisoners), Mali, and then Alaska - Iditarod, caribou, permafrost, and some village life.  

As I look back to the title, she did talk about being sensitive about how you think about and treat the people you photograph.  In one example she'd asked two young women if she could photograph them and they said no.  She offered them the chance to change clothes and put on make up and they agreed.  

In the picture, you can see one of her National Geographic covers.  

B.A. Parker  How to Approach First Amendment Issues with Vulnerable Communities.

If you listen to NPR at all, you know B.A. Parker as the voice of Code Switch.  This was probably the session I got most out of.  There were various examples with  nicely laid out slides that included audio clips.  This one looked at the behind the scenes debates at NPR about the use of the word 

"Racism"by the journalists.  The fight was over being able to use the word or just giving examples of behaviors and actions and letting the listener draw their own conclusions.  My sense was that this was where the Trump administration was winning and the NPR position was anticipatory compliance.  This was an example of Michele Obama's 'we take the high road' that just 

Students

There was a student showcase over lunch.  Nathan Pobieglo did a presentation of a video story he did on a loon cam.  

Murat Demir, below,  a reporter for the UAA Northern Lights newspaper, discussed his use of the Public Records Act to get information on why a taxidermy exhibit in the Consortium Library was removed - it turned out there were serious contamination issues.  

Alaska Federation of Natives, President, Co-Vice Chair, and Attorney panel on Subsistance

It seemed that if this many AFN heavy weights were going to be at the Press Club Conference, I ought to go.  It was, in their words, an abbreviated version of a much longer presentation, and we would be glad we got the short version.  

I understood their basic concern was that Subsistence Fishing was being much more regulated than other categories of fishing even though it only represented about 1% of all fish caught.  

Then they went into the many conflicts between Federal and State rules and laws as including different official definitions of subsistence and an Alaska Supreme Court case that gives all rural residents, not just Natives, but denies those rights to Natives living close to Anchorage.

For those who want to know more about this issue, there's a video on the AFN site.

A few of the people I met.   Kaitlin Armstrong who's the host and executive producer of the Alaska Myths podcast.  

Jamie Diep is Education Reporter at KTOO in Juneau and Mari Kanagy works for the Anchorage Daily News in Juneau.  

And Steve Suo is from Pro Publica.  He was up from Oregon, but Alaska is part of his territory.  

I also met Lina Mariscal of Alaska's Spanish language paper and learned more about this bi-lingual journal.  I'd put up a picture, but it really didn't turn out well and I didn't catch her a second time.  But check out Sol de Medianoche.  

Hungary?

Most of us know that Peter Magyar decisively defeated Viktor Urban in the election yesterday in Hungary.  But   Who is Magyar? What does the future hold?  What lessons does it have for our elections in the US?

Below is a videotape from Deutschwelle (the German state funded  radio and television network) in English, interviewing Kim Lane Scheppele.  From the Princeton Department of Sociology:

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. She also works in sociological theory, comparative/historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of knowledge and human rights.  

Professor Scheppele’s research examines the rise and fall of constitutional government. After 1989, she moved to Eastern Europe, living in Hungary and Russia for extended periods, studying the way that new constitutions were being enacted and entrenched. After 9/11, she examined how constitutions fared under the stress of anti-terrorism campaigns with their repressive new laws, both in the United States and elsewhere. After the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, she has studied the way that democracies have come under stress, focusing on the rise of new autocrats, particularly those who are elected on populist political platforms and who then use the law to undermine constitutional institutions. Now, she concentrates in particular on changes within the European Union – exploring the way that the EU has had difficulty holding its own against national popular movements that brought about Brexit and the rise of illiberal autocracies among the member states. She has published widely in both social science and law journals, in both Europe and the US. She is a frequent commentator on the Verfassungsblog. 

Professor Scheppele’s work has been widely recognized. In 2014, she received the Kalven Prize from the Law and Society Association for scholarship that has had an important influence on the development of socio-legal studies, and in 2016, she was elected  to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and serves as a “global jurist” on the executive committee of the International Association of Constitutional Law. She served as the elected president of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019. Her book, Legal Secrets, won Special Recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication competition of the American Sociological Association as well as the Corwin Prize of the American Political Science Association.

 

Anchorage Municipal Election This Week And School Board Decision To Close Schools [Updated]

[UPDATE:  Added two photos just below, and screenshots of voting results for props 1, 9, and 4 at the bottom.]

Basically, the votes counted so far have put candidates for Assembly and School Board who are considered the more liberal candidates ahead.  

Except for Assembly District 4.  

On election night (April 7, 2026), Janice Park was trailing Dave Donley by 89 votes.  But tonight she's moved ahead. 

[UPDATE April 11, 2026:  I remembered that I had pictures of these two candidates.  Donley at the School Board where he argued against closing the schools.  Park at a campaign event for Bill Hill. ]

Dave Donley

Janice Park

The next night (April 8, 2026) Park was trailing Donley by 79 votes

On April 9, 2026. Park was trailing by only 21 votes.  

And tonight, April 10, 2026, Park moved ahead by 21 votes.  There are 60 unresolved votes - presumably these are questioned ballots and I'm sure both candidates will be watching those closely.   

Meanwhile the two school bonds continue to have more no votes than yes votes.  

Proposition 1 is behind by 747 votes.

Proposition 9 is behind by 566 votes.  

I can't help but think that voters, especially parents at schools scheduled to be closed or given to charter schools, were not going to vote for funding for Lake Otis Elementary (to be taken over by the charter German immersion school) or for funding for the Campbell STEM school which is now planned for closure. 

The Board had a financial shortfall to work out.  If these numbers continue, they're going to have a larger shortfall.  They really are out of touch if they didn't see this coming. 

And as I mentioned in the previous post, since all the left leaning candidates beat right leaning candidates, under normal circumstances, the school bonds should have passed.  Bonds for parks and for the performing arts center and the library passed.  

I'd also note that the Police bond looks to be going down to defeat as well.  I don't know what happened there.  Police used to always get their bonds passed.  Is there a new public wariness about the police due to ICE or other issues?  I really have no sense of what is happening there. 

Announced today, the parents of Campbell STEM school have filed suit to keep their school open.  And I heard something about Rilke Schule (the German school) parents not happy about the change.  I don't know how many, but let's see how that plays out.  

And an ironic note - Dave Donley is  one of the two School Board members to vote against closing the schools.  

[UPDATED April 11, 2026:  Here are the April 10 updates for Props 1, 9 (Schools) and 4 (Police)

You can see all the results at the Muni Elections page.

The propositions have a much larger vote count because they are voted on by all Anchorage voters while the Assembly candidates are chosen only by people in their districts.  School Board candidates, while technically in districts, are voted on by all Anchorage voters. ]