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Steve Friess

Story Archive

  • Entertainment

    Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008

    I was pushing my editor at a major newspaper hard last week to let me do a piece on Donny and Marie Osmond’s surprising resurgence as a resident act on the Las Vegas Strip. She wasn’t buying it.

  • Sheldon Adelson

    Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008

    As the election cycle heats up and money flies in every direction for the political parties and their causes, several members of the media have branded our own Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson the right-wing version of financier George Soros.

  • Olympics

    Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008

    Back when I lived in and covered Beijing earlier this decade, I used to have this odd little game I played with my friends...

  • The Strip Sense

    Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008

    Even for me, even with all that I say and write and do to evangelize the cause of digital media in this city, it was a stunning, perplexing, delightful moment. My husband and The Strip Podcast co-host Miles Smith was similarly surprised. He arrived a little late, and, looking around the room, he asked me, “Are all these people here for this? Are you sure they’re not just hanging out here because they saw the lights were on?”

  • The Strip Sense

    Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2008

    Gary Peck is a little bit ticked off with me. Earlier today on the New York Times Web site, I broke the story that the Nevada Equal Rights Commission had declared gender-based prices violate Nevada law. The five-page ruling has some wacky stuff in it and has the potential to fundamentally change how many Las Vegas Strip resorts do business, both of which I’ll get to shortly.

  • The Strip Sense

    Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008

    Within hours of last week’s not-terribly-shocking news that Boyd Gaming was halting construction on its $4.8 billion Echelon project, message boards and blog comment sections across the web filled with a reaction that surprised me.

  • The Strip Sense

    Thursday, July 31, 2008

    I am not one of those 9-11 conspiracy nuts. I have an eccentric British pal who does believe that George W. Bush, despite his incompetence at ordering in lunch, was behind the most horrific events of our time. This friend is constantly forwarding e-mails asserting that the Baltimore family behind Vegas casino implosions actually imploded the World Trade Center and made it look to the stupid people of the world as if some “hijacked” airplanes caused their fall.

  • Nightlife

    Thursday, July 24, 2008

    Before you roll your eyes and groan, hear Adam Russin out. He’s not trying to get any money, he’s not trying to draw any attention to himself, and he’s absolutely, positively not trying to ruin your good time. He just has a simple question that seems to have only one logical answer. And very soon, odds are good the state will agree with him, and a lot of melon carts will be upset. Russin’s question: How can anyone seriously believe it is not discriminatory to charge a man more than a woman for the same access or service?

  • The Strip Sense

    Thursday, July 17, 2008

    I'm sitting at the lobby bar of the undeniably pretty Trump International Hotel on a Sunday evening about to tuck into a $21 burger and sip from an $8 pink-grapefruit soda. I didn’t mean to splurge on dinner here, but I popped in to take a look-see and realized that this was the only thing for me to do. Which is, of course, the big problem here. The slender gold tower with the most famous name in real estate emblazoned atop it is a bafflement to all who consider its existence. It is also, by a large measure, the very last place most Las Vegas tourists should ever feel comfortable visiting.

  • The Strip Sense

    Thursday, July 10, 2008

    Joanna Freund and her boyfriend, George, have flown in all the way from Toronto to be here at the 2008 World Series of Poker’s Main Event. Neither of them actually is playing in the tournament, but they’ve watched it on television for years, and, the weak U.S. dollar being what it is, they figured they could make a holiday out of it and see their favorite poker players in action.

  • Poker

    Thursday, July 3, 2008

    t was a Monday, I was overdue on more than one assignment—including that week’s Strip Sense entry—and I don’t usually watch sports on TV anyway. But the human drama of a hobbled Tiger Woods somehow managing one amazing comeback after another in the U.S. Open was so compelling that it even made watching privileged people using a crooked metal stick to hit a small white ball across a water-guzzlingly lush and exclusive private park worth my attention.

  • The Strip Sense

    Thursday, June 26, 2008

    Every now and again, if you’re around Vegas long enough, you hear about the June 20, 1955 issue of Life Magazine with a Moulin Rouge showgirl on its cover. The issue is, to many, the “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment for Vegas journalism for the question its headline asked:

  • The Strip Sense

    Thursday, June 19, 2008

    Back when I first arrived in this city in 1996 to cover public education for the Review-Journal, the very notion of schools and Vegas elicited sardonic guffaws from people I knew in other cities. They mocked the notion of children growing up in the shadow of Sin City and actually asked whether there were classrooms inside the casinos. In the subsequent years, I’d learn that there are, in fact, very serious problems with the schools in Clark County.

  • The Strip Sense

    Thursday, June 12, 2008

    Next week, when Californians start allowing same-sex couples to legally marry as a result of a recent state Supreme Court ruling, the Golden State will reap a massive financial bonanza that should go a long way through the summer toward softening the harshest impacts of an ongoing recession and record fuel prices.

  • A&E

    Thursday, June 5, 2008

    About 15 minutes into Barry Manilow’s Music & Passion show at the Las Vegas Hilton last week, I received a mocking text message from my partner. Miles had ducked out of having to go with me, my 16-year-old niece, Courtney, and my mother because he had to go to work at the last minute, but he hardly seemed unhappy about that twist of fate.

  • The Strip Sense

    Thursday, May 29, 2008

    In my line of work, I meet and interview a lot of famous people. Because of the wide scope of my interests, they have included presidents, movie stars, controversial figures in the news, convicted felons and CEOs of major corporations. I am usually struck by how much nicer and more humble they are in private than I would ever expect them to be.

  • Entertainment

    Thursday, May 22, 2008

    The news that the impressionist-ventriloquist-puppeteer Terry Fator would be taking over the showroom at the Mirage after Danny Gans crosses the street to bore Steve Wynn’s customers at Encore with a 20-year-old act came as something of a shock.

  • Music

    Thursday, May 8, 2008

    It is hard to believe now, especially after the weekend that just was, that only a few years ago Frankie Valli walked out during a three-week contract at the Luxor and was declared by at least one entertainment writer to have essentially ended his association with Las Vegas once and for all.