Wed Jan 15, 02025, 12:00AM UTC
Julia Sklar and Kyle Paoletta
American Oasis : Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest
Harvard Book Store and the Long Now Boston Foundation welcome Kyle Paoletta—local author whose reporting and criticism has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and New York Magazine—for a discussion on his new book American Oasis : Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest. He will be joined in conversation by Julia Sklar—story editor for Sierra Magazine.
Long Now Boston and the Harvard Book Store welcome Kyle Paoletta—local author whose reporting and criticism has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and New York Magazine—for a discussion on his new book American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest. He will be joined in conversation by Julia Sklar—story editor for Sierra Magazine.
About American Oasis
An expansive and revelatory historical exploration of the multicultural, water-seeking, land-destroying settlers of the most arid corner of North America, arguing that in order to know where the United States is going in the era of mass migration and climate crisis we must understand where the Southwest has already been.
Albuquerque. Phoenix. Tucson. El Paso. Las Vegas. Iconic American cities surrounded by desert and rust. Teeming metropolises that seem to exist independently of the seemingly inhospitable and arid landscape that surrounds them, belying the rich insight they offer into American stories of migration, industry, bloodshed, and rebirth.
Charting a geographic path through America's largest and hottest deserts, acclaimed journalist Kyle Paoletta maps the past and future of these cities, and the many other settlements from rural town to urban sprawl that make up the region that has come to be called “the American Southwest.” Weaving together the stories of immigrants and indigenous populations, American Oasis pulls back the layers of settlement, sediment, habit, and effect that successive empires have left on the region, from the Athapascan, Diné, Tewa, Apache, and Comanche, to the Spanish, Mexican, and, finally, American.
As Paoletta’s journey into the Southwest’s history becomes inextricably linked to an exploration of its dependency on water, he begins to ask: where, ultimately, will cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix find themselves once the Colorado River and its branches dry up? Richly reported and sweeping in its history, American Oasis is the story of what one iconic region’s past can tell us about our shared environmental and cultural future.
Julia Sklar is an award-winning science journalist, as well as an editor, educator, and public speaker. She is currently the story editor for Sierra Magazine, where she commissions and edits freelancers reporting on climate science, environmental justice, and conservation for their quarterly print magazine and website. Six years prior, she was an independent journalist reporting on science, health, food, and technology for National Geographic, the Boston Globe, Curbed, Lenny Letter, Undark Magazine, and others. In addition to pursuing her own reporting and editing, she has also taught science journalism at the Johns Hopkins graduate program in science writing, and an MIT summer program for rising high school seniors.
Julia Sklar
Kyle Paoletta’s reporting and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, New York Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, n+1, The Believer, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Baffler, High Country News, and Boston. Kyle holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and previously worked at GQ and New York Magazine. He is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kyle Paoletta
