“As you breathe, expand the radiance of your heart.” As roughly twenty yoga students contort themselves into various poses in the spacious, purple-walled “Sky Room” at the Vital Yoga studio in Highland, their teacher for this session, John Friend, pads about the wooden floor, adjusting spandexed hips and poking at…

This week’s cover story profiles John Friend, who built his Texas-based Anusara yoga program into one of the country’s largest yoga empires before losing it all in a 2012 scandal. Now living in Denver, Friend is collaborating with Desi and Micah Springer, co-owners of Denver-based Vital Yoga, on a new…

“This is a bold stroke, an anti-authoritarian project on many levels.” William Kuskin, eyes flashing, stands at the very edge of the stage in the University of Colorado at Boulder’s iconic Old Main building, leaning his five-foot-three-inch frame toward his audience and clenching his fist in excitement. He calls this…

This week’s cover story, “Professor X,” profiles CU-Boulder English Professor William Kuskin and his online course, “Comic Books and Graphic Novels,” which at last count had roughly 35,000 students. The class is part of CU’s foray into massive open online courses, or MOOCs, a new form of online teaching some…

This week’s cover story, “Slamming for Syria,” details how eighteen-year-old Syrian-American slam poet Amal Kassir is using her celebrated skills to raise awareness about the crisis in Syria. Amal, a member of the Minor Disturbance slam team that last year took top honors at the Brave New Voices International Youth…

Are you ready for a youth slam?” The capacity crowd whoops and cheers as the emcee begins the monthly Minor Disturbance poetry slam at the Mercury Cafe. Everyone is eager for literary pyrotechnics. The event will feature members of the Minor Disturbance youth slam team that last month took top…

It’s an idyllic summer day in Denver. Families are enjoying a festival in Civic Center Park, while residents and visitors alike happily stroll along the 16th Street Mall as a shuttle glides past. The air is filled with the sounds of people laughing and children playing. Suddenly, there’s a deafening…

On September 17, 2012, as detailed in this week’s cover story, “Life Sentence,” Ken McGill suffered a stroke while incarcerated at Jefferson County Detention Facility for a DUI, and he told everyone he could about it. In response, he was forced to spend the night on the floor of solitary…

Jen McCracken was watching television when the phone rang that evening. The call was from the Jefferson County Detention Facility, where her husband, Ken McGill, had been incarcerated since July for a DUI. Ken would often call from the jail, leaving her short, sweet messages when she wasn’t around, asking…

The 2011 feature “Mean Streets” described allegations of discrimination and abuse at Yellow Cab, the city’s oldest taxi company, as well as detailing taxi drivers’ inability to find alternatives because the state’s Public Utilities Commission made it nearly impossible to start new cab companies. But Denver could be one step…

In this week’s cover story, “Competitive skiing kept Army veteran Joel Hunt from going downhill,” I profile Hunt, an Iraq war vet who’s one of the country’s most promising skiers with disabilities; he’s in the running for the Paralympic Games in Russia next year. But when I first met Hunt…

This week’s cover story, “Competitive skiing kept Army veteran Joel Hunt from going downhill,” details the story of Hunt, who in a five-year span has gone from being a recently discharged Iraq war veteran struggling with debilitating injuries to a pro skier with a shot at the 2014 Paralympics in…

The midday sun is high overhead when Captain America steps into the start gate. The skier is Joel Hunt, dressed in the Captain America suit he wore on Halloween. The fun outfit makes sense: The Wells Fargo Ski Cup is a weekend-long fundraiser at Winter Park for the National Sports…

Terrance Roberts is one of Denver’s great comeback stories. A one-time shot-caller in the Park Hill Bloods, Roberts turned his life around and founded the Prodigal Son Initiative, an anti-gang youth program in northeast Park Hill. When a 2008 gang-related arson attack destroyed the Holly Square Shopping Center, Roberts helped…

After five years at Westword, I’m bidding you all adieu (at least for now). I’m taking a leave to work on the Humor Code, a book project in which I travel around the world with a humor professor in search of what makes things funny. Crazy? Yes. Foolhardy? Possibly. A…

This week’s cover story, “Running on Empty,” profiles Diane Israel, a former endurance athlete who in the 1980s helped put the fledgling Boulder triathlete scene on the map — but in the process nearly destroyed herself. Her road to recovery has taken years, and one of the steps along the…

“Go as hard as you possibly can for two minutes! Go! Go! Go!” The spin-class instructor hollers instructions to the two dozen sweating bodies hunched over stationary bikes in a darkened room in the Flatiron Athletic Club. The darkness helps the industrial-strength floor fans keep the space slightly below sweltering,…

It’s become a rite of passage for Denver mayors to record a welcome greeting for Denver International Airport’s underground train. John Hickenlooper started the trend; then came Bill Vidal’s bilingual version. Now, Michael Hancock has gotten into the act with his own DIA train greeting — but his version might…

Last January, we profiled local type-and-design maestro Rick Griffith and his MATTER studio. Much of the story focused on small details — the tiny serifs on a font, miniscule measurements between blocks of text on ancient letterpress printers. But Griffith and his crew also work big, as in a new…