On the fourth floor of a research park north of the Strip sits a fake hotel room, a fake casino floor, and a fake sportsbook, built for one purpose: watching how people actually behave in them. Black Fire Innovation opened in 2020 at UNLV’s Harry Reid Research and Technology Park, a partnership between the university… Continue reading Inside the Las Vegas Lab Built to Study How You Behave in a Casino

For decades, emergency planners assumed a crowd under threat becomes a mindless mob. Modern behavioral research says that assumption is wrong, and a Las Vegas mass-casualty event became one of the case studies that helped prove it. Crowd psychology as a field spent much of the twentieth century built around the idea of panic, the… Continue reading What Actually Happens Inside a Crowd Under Threat — and Why Las Vegas Became a Case Study

Nevada law created an entire state office to build STEM education into the workforce pipeline. The Nevada STEM Framework never mentions the arts by name, and schools are folding them in anyway. STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math, an expansion of the older STEM acronym that adds creative and design disciplines… Continue reading Nevada Built a State Office Just to Grow STEM Schools — Here’s Where the Arts Fit In

A tribal court sits less than a mile from the Fremont Street Experience, running its own criminal code, its own evidence rules, and its own appeals process, entirely outside the jurisdiction of Clark County. The Las Vegas Paiute Tribe operates a Tribal Court that, according to the tribe’s own government, exercises sovereign jurisdiction over criminal,… Continue reading Sovereign Ground: How Tribal Law Actually Works in Las Vegas

A tribal school on the Nevada-Idaho border has waited three years for the state money it was promised, while officials in Las Vegas break ground on new campuses without a second thought. The Owyhee Combined School sits on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, home to the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes, along the remote stretch of Elko County… Continue reading A 70-Year-Old School Still Waits While Las Vegas Builds New Ones

Las Vegas is not on a reservation. The distinction between reservation, colony, and tribal territory determines who holds legal authority over land just miles from the Strip, and most residents cannot explain the difference. Nevada has 20 federally recognized tribes with land inside its borders, according to the Nevada Department of Native American Affairs. The… Continue reading Reservation, Colony, Territory: What Nevada’s Tribal Land Categories Actually Mean

Fifty miles from the Strip, a Paiute tribe generates enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes. Two miles from Fremont Street, another Paiute tribe runs the country’s largest marijuana dispensary. Neither business existed twenty years ago. Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, creating the legal foundation for tribes nationwide to operate… Continue reading From Slot Machines to Solar Panels: How Nevada Tribal Economies Rebuilt Themselves