Welcome to Boomtown

Stories of a Changing Los Alamos

Boomtown is a collaboration between two experienced full-time journalists — Stephanie Nakhleh and Minesh Bacrania - who both live in Los Alamos and believe all Los Alamos citizens deserve to be informed about the complex and nuanced issues that affect our community.

Journalism, like any craft, takes time, energy, and creative thought. Our goal is “slow journalism” — thoughtful, meticulous, and bold research that allows us to write and illustrate the deeper stories. Our project is hosted by substack.com, and starting out, we plan to publish 2 or 3 articles a month.

The stories we publish during our launch phase (November 2023) will be available to everyone at no charge. In the coming months, we intend to transition to a subscription model where some content will only be available to paying subscribers.

By some accounts, Los Alamos is one of the healthiest, wealthiest, and most educated communities in the United States. This sweeping and superficial generalization ignores a variety of social difficulties: housing scarcity, downtown blight, wildlife conflicts, food insecurity, and the crisis of our local physical and mental healthcare systems. Our goal is to report on these and other issues with depth and integrity.

If you see a factual mistake in our stories, please let us know by e-mail at corrections@boomtownlosalamos.org. We do not accept opinion letters at this time.

If you have an opinion about something we’ve written, we hope you’ll share and discuss our work with your friends, neighbors, and colleagues. We want our work to foster a new wave of thoughtful, civil, and informed discourse in the community.

Sincerely,

Stephanie Nakhleh and Minesh Bacrania

editors@boomtownlosalamos.org