Your choice

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

The way I figure it, you’ve got three options. With Trump’s trial currently underway in the U.S. Senate, your first option is to watch as much as you can, and absorb as many perspectives and insights as you can. We can help with that. You can start on this very page—we get letters about Trump and/or the impeachment on a nearly daily basis, and there are a few in this week’s letters to the editor. After that, you might want to turn to page 5, our opinion page, which this week includes an editorial about the trial, an on-the-street question about it, and a typically fiery cartoon from Tom Tomorrow.

Your second course of action is to ignore the national fiasco—which might leave you feeling helpless and immobile because of your inability to do much about it—and focus instead on local issues. If you want some insight on things happening closer to your own backyard, you might want to first turn to our columnist Sheila Leslie on page 7, and then check out our main news story on page 8 by Bob Conrad, one of the best watchdog reporters in the valley.

The third option is to ignore politics altogether and find a rewarding distraction. I wouldn’t necessarily advise this approach, but I’d also be among the first to acknowledge that sometimes we all just need a worthwhile diversion. We’ve got some first-rate arts coverage in this week’s issue, spearheaded by our theater critic, Jessica Santina, who wrote an Arts & Culture feature, on page 16, about one local theater company, and a review of a play at another theater company on page 18.

And of course, if you want take that approach, your best bet might be to dive into fiction. We’ve got 20 great little short stories starting on page 13. The stories are the winning entries in our annual micro-fiction contest—and this year’s batch includes some of the best stories I’ve read in a over a decade of judging the contest.

No matter which path you take, we’ve got you covered.