No More Normal

Former KUNM News Director and reporter, Hannah Colton, died by suicide at age 29 in November 2020. We have dedicated every episode of No More Normal to our dear friend and colleague since then, and now – for the last episode of the series – we memorialize her life, work and legacy.

Almost exactly one year ago former executive producer Marisa Demarco and host Khalil Ekulona were developing NoMoNo using what we learned from the previous four months of covering the pandemic with the show Your New Mexico Government. You might remember, YNMG was 5 days a week. First it was an hour, then a half hour then the schedule changed up a couple of times. The pandemic was new to all of us, to every human on the planet. It was the first of many changes to our collective reality and

Music! It drives us to hit the dance floor and creates the landscape of our memorable moments in life. Seeing that music is so influential it is the perfect opportunity to inquire about the people who make the music we listen to. How are musicians faring after taking a year off from performing publicly? What about the venues where we gather to rock with our favorite bands or DJ’s? Those that were able to stay afloat during the pandemic are gearing up to have the events that we’ve all missed so

Sports has been a form of entertainment for humans since, well... humans. While not all of us get obsessed with our favorite teams and look to flip over police cars when our squad wins the title, we do find ourselves lost in a world of athletic prowess and skill. Sports serve as a great tool to teach lessons to the youth. They learn about teamwork, dedication, loyalty, setting goals, and hard work. They also learn how to have fun. What is life without a little fun? Even if you are not a heavy

We are officially a few days into New Mexico’s reopening. Restaurants and venues are now at full capacity. Some people are eschewing their masks and are ready to have some summer fun. But what about people who are not ready to move on? What about the great losses we collectively and individually suffered? How are we supposed to move on, as if nothing happened? This week we continue our conversation on grief and transformation as we discover ways to process the events of the pandemic and its

New Mexico will be fully reopened on July 1, and people are getting back to what some describe as normal activities. But h ow can we just get back to normal after we all went through—more than a year of heavy, powerful change? What about all the losses people suffered? Loved ones and friends are gone. Homes taken away. Careers and opportunities disappeared. The future you thought you were heading toward vanished. And your old self—who you thought you were—that person might be gone or different,

One hundred and fifty-eight years ago, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, putting an end to slavery in the United States. News traveled slowly in those days—no social media to spread the word. But this executive order took an especially long time to get to all corners of the country: two-and-a-half years, in fact. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, where the last enslaved people were told of their freedoms. From that moment on, African

For more than a year now, this show has been keeping pace with changes large and small, noting them and documenting them. It’s about looking closely and creating a record of this historic year in human history. It’s also been an unusual time for journalists themselves. Today, we’re talking about the behind-the-scenes thinking and decision-making that goes into telling stories.

Young people in the last decades have had to study more than academics—they’ve had to learn what to do when a person shows up to your school with a gun and starts shooting. And unfortunately those types of skills could help you anywhere these days—even on Capitol Hill. As the American pandemic of gun violence grows, so do the arguments about what can be done about it. Often those arguments are about the Second Amendment, but do we have the right to bear arms ... right? Or are we arguing about it

As of Friday, May 14, there have been nearly 16,000 deaths due to guns so far this year in the United States, according to data from Gun Violence Archive . Last year, the COVID-19 pandemic, protests about racial equity, and the general election dominated our attention, but that doesn’t mean that other serious matters like gun violence disappeared. Data from the archive shows that nearly 20,000 Americans died by guns last year—the highest total number of deaths in at least the last two decades.