Claire V. Watkins

speaker

479 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 12 Sep

Claire V. Watkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins on the beauty & brutality of the desert · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

But the problem is, of course, that that's where the water is there, is underground.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

So no, I didn't hear them or see them.

My mom had as a kid, she would go up on the roof of her trailer.

She told me stories about going up there and they would put like sunglasses on to be safe.

And yeah, my grandma worked in casinos and atomic tourism was like a part of our life.

Atomic tourism is the most amazing coping mechanism that the people of southern Nevada came up with to deal with the fact that their own government was bombing them.

It was a phenomenon where people would come to Vegas to watch the detonations and people would dress up as like atomic bomb girls.

There were showgirls who had like mushroom cloud headdresses and there would be parties to like bomb people.

detonation watch parties up high in the casinos.

There's still a lot of like, I don't know, it's almost like the culture sort of metabolized this like ghastly, like deeply wrong phenomenon into a tourism gimmick.

It's incredible.

This is the thing with environmental injustice, which is kind of a wonky academic phrase, but the way I understand it is it means you get less life.

You know, that there are some people who get more time on this earth than others.

Some people are expendable in this model that we have, and we think we can kind of cordon it off.

It's what activists are talking about when they talk about a sacrifice zone.

We have this myth in America, I think, that we can do this stuff elsewhere.

War is something we do elsewhere.

But we do it to ourselves, too.

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