In his Construction Management classroom, surrounded by his students’ papers, Frank Sturgell reads his e-mails. He looks every bit the professor: He’s wearing crisply pleated pants, a starched, cream-colored shirt and a slightly dated white preppie cardigan; the ring of hair surrounding his otherwise bald head is perfectly groomed, and…
Since getting out of prison in 2005, Piper Kerman has been pounding the pulpit for criminal-justice reform. Her prison memoir, Orange Is the New Black , attracted the attention of producer Jenji Kohan, who adapted it into a critically acclaimed Netflix series. Kerman has used the success of the show…
In 2008, The Advocate published “Is Gay the New Black?,” an article comparing the gay rights struggle to the civil rights movement. The story unleashed a fury of critique: How could people compare the fight for gay marriage to the abolition of Jim Crow and segregation? But as a string…
When The Advocate published the 2008 article “Gay Is the New Black,” they “pissed off a lot of people because of this feeling that it was saying that the civil-rights movement is over and done, and now it’s the gay-rights movement that’s ascendant,” says Yoruba Richen, director of The New…
The English translation of Los Phantazmas is “The Ghosts,” says artist Carlos Fresquez, explaining his art collective’s name, which evokes the invisible work that many Latinos, Mexicans and Chicanos perform in the United States. The four-person collective emerged in the mid-’90s, disbanded around the turn of the century and has…
“Most of Denver’s academic historians are venal and have taken money from corporate interests. They do shoddy research and bless the establishment altogether,” says renegade historian and self-proclaimed crank Phil Goodstein, who will be leading today’s unofficial bicycle tour of Five Points, a neighborhood he describes as an extreme transition…
As Denver’s crankiest historian, Phil Goodstein takes his audience on a journey into civic corruption, greed and corporate maleficence. He sniffs out stories of scandal and blasts ruling elites for degrading the potential of the Queen City of the Plains. Since the 1980s, Goodstein has walked and biked around Denver…
When I showed up for an advance screening of Focus on the Family’s documentary, Irreplaceable, about one man’s attempt to define what makes a family, I had a knot in my stomach. I was entering hostile territory. See also: James Mhoon on Focus on the Family’s new documentary and God’s…
Does God exist and, if so, has he provided humanity with a perfect design for family structure? James Mhoon thinks so. As vice president of Content Development and Integration for the Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, he leads the organization’s charge to spread the word about the importance of…
Forty-years-ago, six Chicano activists died in explosions in Boulder. Francisco Martinez claims the police were responsible for their deaths. Among the victims was his brother: 25-year-old Reyes Martinez, a lawyer who had devoted himself to fighting for Francisco’s freedom after the police had charged him with seditious conspiracy and were…
Over the past year, Andrew Elijah Edwards wandered Denver with his smartphone, snapping images of what he describes as “natural spaces void of humans…the nooks and crannies where the rawness of nature and reality is still living.” These photographs became the ingredients for Edwards’s new video installation, The Deep Novelty…
After thirteen years with Buntport Theater, actor Brian Colonna knows his fellow collaborators and they know him. They write together. They perform together. They even share directorial responsibilities. As a result, they have built one of the funniest theater troupes in Colorado. But sometimes, they know each other so well…
James Walsh found that the old methods of teaching were not working, so he threw out his textbooks, shredded his exams and turned his 200-person lecture hall into a space for radical, theatrical collaboration exploring people’s histories: stories of labor, immigration and gay rights. Soon he was interested in bringing…
David Rutherford, director of the Musica Sacra Chamber Orchestra, begrudges classical music institutions for relying on snobbery to attract audiences. Elitism has fallen out of fashion, he says; the border erected between the public and performers needs to crumble and musical institutions need to create new ways to bring in…
“How can we get people to engage with great music with fresh energy? How can we present this so that we can leave our prejudices and the stigma of classical music behind and get people engaged in listening and really having a good time?” asks David Rutherford, music director and…
“The moment I saw one of the rehearsals of the Romero troupe, I knew it was a project I wanted to be involved with,” says anthropologist Michael Kilman, director of the feature documentary film Unbound: The Story of the Romero Theater Troupe, which premieres tonight at Su Teatro. “What they…
“Sometimes we itch all over. We think it’s because of the gas leak,” says Timmy Moen, a lanky 27-year-old with bloodshot eyes glued to League of Legends, a multiplayer video game. When he turns on the heat, flames shoot from the vent, he complains to his 24-year-old roommate and best…
Whether writing about cadavers, sex or the digestive system, Mary Roach probes the annals of history and science for the funniest anecdotes and most moving characters she can dig up. She assembles these tales into biological travelogues that tour readers through those parts of their bodies that everybody shares and…
“Sometimes people are like, ‘Ew, I don’t want to read a book about digestive health,’ and I’m like, ‘No, this is not about digestive health,’” explains Mary Roach, the author of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. “It’s an unconventional travelogue through the food chute.” Whether she’s writing about “prison…
As editor of Found Magazine and a contributor to This American Life, Davy Rothbart has devoted himself to mining humor and pathos from the lives of strangers. When he learned about the Medora Hornets, a high school basketball team suffering through a nasty losing streak in a factory-gutted Heartland community,…
Ineffable is a dirty word for a writer. It means something like, “A concept you just can’t put into words.” Discussing The Deep Novelty Harvest Colony — a stereoscopic art installation that makes its debut tonight at Hinterland Gallery — with artist Andrew Elijah Edwards, you enter a philosophical wrestling…
The Medora Hornets are not the kind of state-championship contenders that moviemakers tend to chronicle. In Medora, a documentary by Davy Rothbart and Andrew Cohn, every time these charming serial losers hit the basketball court, the audience faces the nail-biting question: Can’t they win just this once? But it’s the…
