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We make podcasts and newsletters that connect people with the cities they love.

City Cast Las Vegas

Celebrating the offbeat side of Las Vegas.

You may have ideas along these lines, too. Don’t be shy: 

Every day is a holiday, if you know where to look (next month’s 

 include International Skeptics Day, Howl at the Moon Day and Night, and Wear Something Gaudy Day). But tomorrow, Sept. 30, holds a special place in my heart: It’s International Podcast Day.

The podcast isn’t very old as media goes. Named for the iPod, the portable audio player launched in 2001, the podcast was 

 when a software developer created a program that allowed audio bloggers to syndicate their episodes on iPods. A journalist in the Guardian coined the term “podcast,” and today there are more than 2 million podcasts out in the wild.

The simplest way to describe podcasts is probably “radio on demand.” But what I love most about podcasts is how they keep me curious about the world. There’s a podcast for everything: I can learn about the work of 

 while driving to the grocery store, the 

And, of course, the podcast I work on keeps me curious about the city I love: 

. We talk about public art we hate, pizza we love, our water woes, and the industries that keep our economy thrumming. So this International Podcast Day, I have a two-part challenge for you: (1) Tune in to a new podcast you’ve never heard before, and (2) share your favorite podcast with a friend who isn’t a listener. (And I’m not saying it has to be City Cast Las Vegas … but I’m not NOT saying that either 😉)

An appreciation of the podcast form — and a challenge.

Why You Should Give Podcasts A Try

Lend an Ear to Podcast Day

The Appreciation Index

When Dr. Lynn Comella joined the faculty at UNLV, her office was in a space that had once been a bedroom. “It’s funny to think about that now,” she says. It was on the second floor of 

, a fascinating campus anomaly. Amid the school’s toybox of large architectural showpieces, Houssels House was once, as its name makes clear, a residence — a 1933 Tudor revival located on Sixth Street near Charleston.

The original owner, lawyer Harley A. Harmon — you’ve probably driven on the street that bears his name — sold it in 1936 to J. Kell Houssels Sr., one of Nevada’s first gaming licensees. Lotta history in 

 handshake! Both Houssels and his son, J. Kell Houssels Jr., went on to play big roles at joints like the Showboat and Tropicana, and Jr.'s wife, Nancy, was primarily responsible for Nevada Ballet Theatre. “The Houssels family did a lot to build the community,” says UNLV history department chair Michael Green, “and in my mind they don’t get enough credit for it.”

 in 1983. Once off the flatbed, it became the campus’ oldest building.

Over the years Houssels House contained programs as varied as architecture and consciousness studies. “It was where the women's studies department was housed when I started at UNLV in 2007,” says Comella, now chair of the school’s department of interdisciplinary, gender, and ethnic studies. “Houssels House was a real hub of activity then.” These days it headquarters a campus multicultural center.

The point of all this being, you gotta love a place that pulls so much local history onto a campus populated by structures that were born on-site, a building that literalizes the notion of the school’s connection to the community.

 Which UNLV structure was mentioned in our “

A small building on campus with big local history vibes.

Let's Hear It for the Old Las Vegas House at UNLV!

Let's Hear It for the Old House at UNLV!

Charleston Boulevard, I renounce you. I reject you. I shout it with the supernal gusto and cosmic finality of a cross-swinging exorcist: I rebuke you! So, yeah: The city’s been chopping up Charleston for, what, like, two years now as it upgrades water mains, sewer lines, and storm drains in 

 spanning the boulevard from Rancho to Fremont Street. The $90 million improvements are supposed to be completed by the end of 2024, but I don’t believe it. It feels like an infrastructural Groundhog Day. East Charleston has taken on a bleak aspect of grim Beckettian futility, permanently cloaked in dust, clogged with cars, jumbled with concrete divvies and orange cones. It’s not a construction project. It’s some atmospheric manifestation of dystopia straight out of a 

. When I need to self-yeet from my downtown bubble and access other parts of town, Charleston Boulevard is on my Categorical Hard Nope list.

On the upside, it’s forced me to take alternate routes that I’ve quickly come to love: Oakey Boulevard and Las Vegas Boulevard. It’s reminded me that Vegas has scenery, that driving can bring pleasure. East Oakey offers a cheerful lineup of quirky historic homes on my drive through Crestwood, Huntridge, and 

, from stately restorations to sharp modernist revamps, from vibrant Guanajuato Redux styles to hoarder-house-with-the-forest-of-lawn-ornaments.

The northern stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard is, shall we say, grittily quaint. To paraphrase poet Steve Perry: streetlights, people, shadows searchin’ the night, etc. But it’s also distinctly 

. As Las Vegas enters its mature megastructure phase with all kinds of freaky stadiums, spheres, arenas, and racetracks of unnerving size, this part of the boulevard, with its dinky hostels and faded hotel signs, wedding chapels and small restaurants, is an island of human-scale architectural sanity.

Look at it all! And wow: I am sightseeing in my hometown. I am enjoying the intrigues of the cityscape. Best of all, I arrive at my destination relaxed, even refreshed, subtly energized by the reminder that Las Vegas does, in fact, have character — and that no matter where you are, you can always take the scenic route.

There may be only one upside to Las Vegas's all-over roadwork.

Widespread Roadwork in Las Vegas Forces You to Drive New Routes

The Upside of Roadwork: Seeing New Parts of Las Vegas

,” author Kurt Andersen offered a forensically precise jab of Las Vegas satire: He gave the lobby of his fictional BarbieWorld casino a wonderfully apt tourist attraction — a holographic simulation of that resort’s eventual implosion.

It was a terrific comment on our city’s casual, expiration-date attitudes toward history and real-estate. It also led me to a fun thought experiment: imagining the implosions of ludicrous casinos. More specifically, ones that were 

 the Titanic casino that Bob Stupak wanted to build coming down in a billow of dust, shipwreck kitsch, and cartwheeling deck chairs. (As an orchestra plays, of course.)

Ditto the proposed WWF hotel. Can’t stand George Clooney in “Leatherheads”? That ought to enhance your joie de blast as you envision the Las Ramblas resort, in which he was involved, being imploded. The lunar-themed Moon Resort? 

 Both San Francisco-themed hotels? Collapsing faster than real San Francisco! The Excalibur? 

Of course, what these joints have in common is that they were 

 examples of the monetized kitsch Vegas revels in. So the kick of imaginatively purging our skyline of these eyesores is a lot like the petite catharsis a video game might offer as you clear its streets of mutants. Anyway, why should alternate-timeline Vegas be immune to the forces that constantly reshape the real place?

What Else Should We Implode?!

Imagine the ugliest unbuilt casino blowing up. Feels kinda good!

How to Enjoy Imagined Implosions of Unbuilt Vegas Casinos

How to Enjoy Fake Implosions

We called him “the little waving dude”: an elderly gentleman, bent and slow, who waved at every car as he and his companion shuffled along their morning walk. It was no modest hand gesture, either. It was a full arm-and-shoulder performance — a real physical commitment.

I live in one of those sterile suburbs you read about; I might recognize 1.5 of my neighbors if I saw them in a store. There’s no front-yard or street life here. So the little waving dude’s big wave stood out. And quickly brightened our mornings. My wife and I looked forward to seeing him as we left for work, and I quickly adjusted my return wave; my usual laconic finger-raise from the steering wheel seemed inadequate. I had to roll down my window to get more arm into it. It surprised me how effectively one simple, friendly motion dispelled much of the Nextdoor.com paranoia about strangers on our streets. We even thought about giving him a thank-you card.

Because of quarantine and work-from-home, I lost track of him for a long while; I assumed the worst. But I’m happy to report that he’s still out there, slower and more tentative now, but still waving — once again jazzing up each day that I see him.

As it happens, there’s another old guy in the nabe who walks his little dog every day and seems determined neither to smile nor return a wave. My wife, who believes in paying good things forward, is undeterred. “I’m going to get him to wave back,” she told me. And then, the other day, he did. A microscopic hand gesture. It’s a start.

We called him “the little waving dude”: an elderly gentleman, bent and slow, who waved at every car.

Simple Wave Brightens a Las Vegas Neighborhood

How a Simple Gesture Brightened My Neighborhood

We’re starting something new on Fridays: a column we call The Appreciation Index. In it we'll examine and celebrate offbeat, overlooked corners of the Las Vegas experience. If you have thoughts along these lines, don’t be shy: 

This essay was written by lead producer Sonja Cho Swanson:

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in a Vegas movie theater. Of course, I get the arguments for pumping up the A/C when the triple digits hit, especially for businesses with foot traffic. Doors are opening and closing constantly. Customers complain. Line cooks and busboys in hot kitchens need the reprieve.

But lately, it seems like erring on the side of frigid has gone to extremes. The other day, I saw a shop thermostat set to 

. Then I walked past another storefront whose roaring A/C chilled the sidewalk from wide open windows. Much like grade inflation and 

, thermostat escalation has invaded the valley — an arms race that gives a whole new meaning to “Cold War” geopolitics.

So the wise Las Vegan always has a cardigan handy in summer (and women in particular 

). But perhaps the most singular pleasure I can recommend is the relief of stepping into your hot car after a frigid afternoon indoors. In direct sun, your vehicle-turned-solar-oven can 

 by the North American Sauna Society to “guarantee the relaxing effects of a sauna.”

For two blissful minutes, sensation returns to your fingers, your lips unpurple, and your joints melt into the upholstery. You remember what it’s like to be human again. You remember sweat. You remember … how dang hot summer is, and how grateful you are for the A/C you’re now blasting in the car.

Places to dine outdoors despite this %@#*! heat

Think of it — however briefly — as your own private spa

Unexpected Bliss of Sitting in a Hot Car in Las Vegas

The Unexpected Bliss of Sitting in Your Hot Car

You might recall that in May, Clark County threw a concert in Commercial Center, with 

. The furor got a modest bounce in the media — including a certain (🎧) 

 — but never lived above the fold. Yet you could sense a story lurking behind the story, with voices, ideas, and contexts going unreported. “If this city still had an alt-weekly,” I told someone, “this would be next week's cover story.” It might've been the 15th or 20th time I said that — this year.

The print media cave-in brought on by the internet has 

. Doing their thing below the mainstream but above the underground, alts were a vital part of the conversation a city had with itself: where official narratives got questioned and elites mocked; where you found angles and controversies the big media ignored; where you’d connect with a city's cultural vibrance. (Of course, they could also be puerile, snarky, and shrill. No one's perfect.)

For a brief, wild heyday in the mid-aughts, local readers were wildly overserved by three good alts: CityLife, Las Vegas Weekly, and the Mercury. (Note: I edited the Weekly for a while and later CityLife.) They were distinct yet ultimately complementary, together providing a far more robust sense of the city, its shortcomings, and its mad possibilities than we’re getting now.

The Weekly’s still groovin’, but in a much different register. Mostly, the alt sensibility has evaporated from Vegas, and much has been lost. I miss learning about pockets of the city that don’t interest the Review-Journal’s audience metrics. I miss the phalanx of locally sourced cultural and media critics. Aw, hell, I even miss the wayward snark. Cue the sad trombone.

For a short heyday, Las Vegas was wildly overserved by three alternative weeklies.