Greg Blake Miller
Managing Editor
Contact: 868-4514 • Email
The Las Vegas native has written extensively on the city’s culture and history for a variety of publications, including Las Vegas Life. He recently returned to town from Eugene, Oregon, where he taught journalism and communication studies at the University of Oregon while completing his doctoral degree. A former staff writer for Russia’s Moscow Times, Miller does his best to balance two irreconcilable passions—Soviet movies and Rebel basketball.
Recent Articles
Reason to Believe
April 26th, 2012
Endurance is the quietest of glories, but beneath its placid surface it harbors nimbleness, toughness, creativity, wisdom. The notion of endurance runs throughout this issue of Vegas Seven.
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Let’s Take a Medical Tour!
April 19th, 2012
Do you like to be punctured in moving traffic? Do you like to take on-the-go intravenous medications from phlebotomists in fishnet? Do you like to wear split-back hospital gowns and eat really big burgers? Then Medical Tourism in Las Vegas is for you!
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The Upside of Greenwashing
How a low-down, double-dealing dark art just might be raising our consciousness
April 19th, 2012
Green marketing purports to sell us products, but what it really sells is a more benign vision of the world—and of ourselves. It starts from the assumption that we know something is wrong with the way we’ve been living, proceeds to flatter us with the assumption that we care about fixing what’s wrong, and then proposes that we can fix it by buying the right stuff.
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Is The Smith Center the Last Good Thing?
March 29th, 2012
The opening of The Smith Center received far less national coverage than the opening of The Mob Museum. No surprise there; the world acknowledges what it’s already equipped to see. The Vegas mob narrative occupies a well-worn groove in American consciousness. So, now, does the tale of our Valley’s housing crash. Not so much the story of a performing arts center built at the very epicenter of the American Great Recession. Especially when it refuses to yield to the outsider’s need to turn it into a cautionary tale.
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The Day the Shark Swam In
March 23rd, 2012
As legendary UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian recovers from his recent heart attack, we mark the 39th anniversary of his hiring by UNLV on March 23, 1973. The following is an excerpt from Greg Blake Miller’s award-winning 2010 Vegas Seven feature story, “The Rebel Alliance.”
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When the Running Stopped
March 22nd, 2012
This was to have been the year when Las Vegas’ stage-parent college basketball fans could bask in the more luxurious sort of vicarious living. Dizzy on a rich cocktail of decades-old glory, lingering bitterness about a dynasty denied and wild hopes raised by a Nov. 26 win over North Carolina, UNLV fans thought that—to paraphrase the prescient cover of the Rebels’ 1989-90 media guide—The Big Year Was Here. Again.
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Rebel road-trip dreams deferred
March 15th, 2012
Each spring, a hue and cry goes up across the campuses of our great nation: Albuquerque, baby! At least, that’s how it was supposed to be this year for the Rebellion, the student fan section that successfully distracted UNLV’s basketball opponents all season long with cardboard cutouts of Jimmy Kimmel’s head.
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Who We Are
March 15th, 2012
For insight into the recent opening of The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, we turn to the erstwhile NFL coach Dennis Green.
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'Play Hard Exceed Expectations, Never Quit'
The first year as UNLV's head coach has been a long, strange journey for Dave Rice. But his childhood—and his father—prepared him well for just this moment.
March 8th, 2012
With a 25-7 record, the inaugural edition of Dave Rice’s Rebels had made themselves not only a Goliath worth felling but a team worth believing in. And at this darkest point of a bright season, Rice would be the last man to stop believing. He may have picked up some of that confidence from his old mentor, Jerry Tarkanian, but long before he played for Tark’s 1990 national title team, Rice had learned the art of calm and perspective from another coach—his father, Lowell Rice.
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The Clotted Artery of Interstate 15
March 1st, 2012
On first glance, what California gas prices beget from a Nevadan is this: HAHAHAHAHAHA! A more reflective take might be this: Oh, shit, we’re next. And on a higher level of discourse—that’s “interdependence,” for you Stephen Covey fans out there—the response would be this: If it costs ’em a fortune to get here, maybe they won’t come.
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