To appreciate the final lines of Gary Shteyngart’s Travel & Leisure essay, “To Russia for Love,” you have to read the beginning of the essay first:
“Only love is matter,” some besotted loverboy has scrawled along one of St. Petersburg’s ethereal romantic canals. Whether this is merely bad English or some newfangled law of physics we [...]

Behind the chain-link fence the jaguar prowled, his tail whipping back and forth, his lips parting to expose long ivory teeth. On the viewing bench, Blake and I leaned into each other. So far today everything had gone well: this morning the bus left on time from San Ignacio, it dropped us off at the [...]

By Laura Read
When an old-timer talks about having visited Lake Tahoe’s North Shore four or five decades ago, memories often include nights spent in a lakefront cottage and days lazed away on a sandy beach. Ask this person’s grandchildren about their recent North Shore getaway, and the story might just be the same.
While some Lake [...]

By Laura Read
My bed shakes, jostling me awake. The bunkhouse is roaring. Out the barred window by my head, I discern through the inky blackness eight milky forms seeming to glide around like Martha Graham dancers. Polar Bears. When I’d gone to sleep hours earlier, they’d been milling around the bunkhouse – enjoying the [...]

by Laura Read
In the 1880s, a Sacramento newsman compared Lake Tahoe’s sapphire depths to bluing solution, so astonishing was the color. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) said Lake Tahoe’s air was pure enough for angels. Clear sky and water still startle the senses here, especially when you spend the day close to shore on the 6 [...]

By Laura Read 
Lo·ca·vore, n. 1. One who eats local or regional food, often produced within a 100-mile radius. 
 Naysayers declared Tahoe couldn’t support a culture of seasonal, locally produced food because: A) The growing season is too short. B) Existing farms are too far away. C) Residents care more about sports than food. Yet lo and [...]

By Laura Read
A few years ago when Amy Larkin, the education director for the Art Association of Jackson Hole, looked into buying a home, the 31-year-old couldn’t afford what she liked, and she didn’t like what she could afford.
“Most of the affordable housing options were poorly built and poorly designed,” says Larkin. But last year [...]

By Laura Read
You’re five miles into a solo mountain bike ride in the woods near South Lake Tahoe’s Kingsbury Grade, tooling up a long slope, when suddenly you feel a buzz in your gut. It’s a sensation that someone—or something—is watching you. The feeling defies logic because you don’t hear anything strange. If something were [...]

By Laura Read
The City of Roseville has been hot news lately—not just for its soaring population, but also for its solar boom. Roseville, where Sacramento creeps into the foothills, aims to have 10 to 20 percent of its new homes built with integrated solar panels and energy-efficient features such as upgraded insulation, test-tight ducts, energy- [...]

By Laura Read
Since its inception, the League To Save Lake Tahoe has grown to some 4,500 members, acquired considerable political clout and produced a bumper sticker that’s been slapped on nearly every SUV in the Basin. The nonprofit conservation organization has also engendered more than a few detractors who say that the group has strayed [...]