As we march toward another new year, we put more distance between ourselves and the origins of the traditions many of us hold dear. Fruitcake, gift giving, and hanging ornaments – they’re all a blend of cultural ideas crackling aside the hearty yule log on a holiday hearth.

She competed in a long list of sports from elementary school to high school to university and adult life. Notably, she competed regionally in running and at the world level in dance. Regarding the latter, she is a World Championship-winning professional Irish dancer, and she now dances for coaching. Meanwhile, she ran her first 10K in 2017 and has remained very involved in running. She is the Graduate Lab Coordinator at the University of Nevada Las Vegas for The Optimum Performance Program in Sport (TOPPS), which blends traditional mental health services with sport culture and customized performance coaching.

When someone says they’re from Las Vegas, where do they specifically mean? The majority of the Valley lives in one of the adjacent municipalities or unincorporated Clark County. So how did we get this weird patchwork of townships and jurisdictions, and how did it set up the city and the county for their many tensions today? We’re sharing our notes in this re-airing of a popular episode — co-host Dayvid Figler talks to UNLV history professor Michael Green about the last century of Las Vegas and Clark County history, and how a city-county showdown brought us to this utterly unique arrangement.

When members of the 2025 Legislature take the oath of office in February, there will be a lot of new faces. A total of 15 lawmakers — representing 105 years of legislative experience — will not be returning to Carson City because they ran for other offices, chose not to seek re-election, were forced to quit by term limits or were defeated.

Cowboy boots epitomize America’s approach to style. From the flat rubber-soled option yanked on in the predawn hours of a long shift to the couture-adjacent styles headed to a televised red carpet, the origins of cowboy boots “are incredibly practical,” says Deirdre Clemente, the associate director of UNLV’s public history program.

Writer Roberto Lovato joins Francesca to talk about the need to use the R word: revolutionary!