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."

The Barrick Museum at UNLV is now officially part of the College of Fine Arts, the school announced today. The news comes after Aurore Giguet, the museum’s program director and biggest proponent for the museum’s focus on art, kicked up the art component considerably and scheduled multiple rotating exhibits, something she began as a way to fill the void created by the Las Vegas Art Museum’s closure in 2009.

Until recently — the past three years — Nevadans have had a pretty easy time of it compared with our 49 sister states.

For decades, Nevada’s economy had a reputation for being bulletproof. It quickly rebounded from any economic downturn and continued to grow. A decade ago, Nevada was dealing with the slump after the 9/11 terrorist attacks but would quickly rebound and take off on a torrid pace of growth.