I have a warring nature: I’m an optimist who expects the worst to eventually happen. So here’s what I’m hopeful about this year, though I’m sure it will be terrible.

Which presidential candidate will win Nevada in 2012? Will Nevada decide to soften its heart and better fund education? Will our freeways be less congested?

The Barrick transforms Staff efforts to turn the Barrick Museum into an art museum prove successful when UNLV announces that Barrick is now part of the College of Fine Arts.

UNLV’s Barrick Museum has been through a lot of changes during the past year: losing its funding, raising money to support itself as an art museum and now becoming part of the College of Fine Arts.

The state has a comprehensive study by the Brookings Institute to guide the preparation of an economic development plan, a full-time executive director and an Economic Development Board that officially has met a half-dozen times.

Clues to Las Vegas' past are hidden in plain sight at the Special Collections.

The craziest thing happened at the closing of a Picasso retrospective at San Francisco’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1940. Call it a sit-in of sorts. More than 1,000 visitors refused to leave until they’d “had their fill,” according to the museum.

Nevadans can be forgiven a degree of skepticism about the notion of economic renewal, not to mention about “Unify / Regionalize / Diversify”—the new state economic development agenda my team at the Brookings Institution, Brookings Mountain West, and SRI International presented to Gov. Sandoval last month.

Well the question isn't exactly who owns the Cavern Club. That's the original club in Liverpool where the Beatles performed before they were really famous. The Hard Rock Hotel owns the rights to the name in the United States and has created a Cavern Club in its Las Vegas hotel. So how can the name be owned in some places by one company and other companies in other places? A federal lawsuit is set to decide who really owns the name "Cavern Club."