Crude Conversations

In this one, Cody talks to Karen Foster, the mother of Bonnie Craig, an 18-year-old University of Alaska Anchorage student who was sexually assaulted and murdered in September 1994. Bonnie’s body was discovered near McHugh Creek, south of Anchorage, and for more than twelve years her murder remained unsolved—it took almost 17 years before it made it to court. During that time, Karen became a relentless advocate for her daughter, conducting her own investigation, pushing law enforcement for answers, and launching a public awareness campaign that made Bonnie’s face and the words “Who Killed Bonnie?” a familiar sight around Anchorage. There were posters, bumper stickers, ads in newspapers and on the sides of buses enlisting the help of the Anchorage community and ensuring that Bonnie’s story would remain part of its collective memory. In 2006, DNA evidence finally identified Bonnie’s killer, giving investigators a suspect after more than twelve years without answers. But Karen’s work didn’t stop there. She went on to advocate for changes to Alaska’s DNA collection laws. After learning that Bonnie’s killer had been arrested multiple times before investigators connected him to her murder, Karen realized that if his DNA had been collected during one of those earlier arrests, her daughter’s case might have been solved years earlier. She took that realization to Alaska lawmakers and helped push through legislation in 2007 requiring DNA collection from people arrested for certain felony offenses. For Karen, it was an opportunity to turn her family's experience into something that might prevent other families from spending years waiting for answers. She details all of this in her book, “Justice for Bonnie,” a personal account of her daughter’s murder, the years she spent searching for answers, and the ways grief, determination, and the pursuit of justice reshaped her life and her family.

The Alaska Highway—better known as the AlCan—was built during World War II as a strategic military supply route connecting the continental United States to Alaska. Construction began on March 9, 1942, just three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor heightened fears of Japanese expansion in the North Pacific. Those fears became very real that June, when Japanese aircraft bombed Dutch Harbor and, days later, Japanese forces occupied the Aleutian islands of Kiska and Attu. Through perspectives rooted in history, Indigenous culture, poetry, and geopolitics, we trace how the AlCan reshaped Alaska and parts of Canada—connecting communities and countries while transforming the land, economies, and people along its route. And how a military road built more than eighty years ago became a permanent part of Alaska’s identity and our idea of the North. Image Details: Steep road section along the Alaska Highway, British Columbia, 1942. Image courtesy of the Office of History, HQ, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, RN 735-17c, 3460.

In this one, Cody talks to Nat Herz and Veri di Suvero, the editor and publisher behind the revived Anchorage Press. Nat is a longtime Alaska journalist. He spent years reporting for Alaska Public Media and the Anchorage Daily News before he founded Northern Journal—an independent, reader-supported publication focused on in-depth reporting about Alaska politics, natural resources, fisheries, energy, and the environment. Veri comes from the nonprofit and public-interest world, where they worked on issues ranging from consumer protection and energy policy to language access and government transparency. Now, Nat and Veri are both at the Anchorage Press, where they see its revival as a chance to bring back a locally rooted publication with a distinct voice—one that can do serious reporting while still making room for humor, irreverence, and some of the personality the Press has always been known for. In 2022, after decades as Anchorage’s alternative newspaper, the Anchorage Press stopped publishing. Now, in 2026, it’s getting a second life under new ownership, with Nat and Veri partnering with the independent media company Noisy Creek, which owns The Stranger, the Portland Mercury, and the Chicago Reader. At the center of what Nat and Veri are trying to build is the idea that a local newspaper should actually feel local—shaped by the people, relationships, communities, and subcultures that make a place what it is. Historically, that’s something alternative weeklies have been particularly good at: paying attention to the parts of a city that larger news organizations can overlook, and creating a fuller, sometimes messier, and more recognizable portrait of the place they cover.

Kyle Worl is an Alaska Native athlete, coach, and cultural advocate who has spent most of his life competing in, and helping pass on, Arctic Sports and Traditional Games. He’s earned more than 100 medals, been named an Outstanding Athlete multiple times at the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, and competed in Traditional Games throughout the circumpolar North. He’s even competed on American Ninja Warrior. But as important as all that is, a big part of his life now is making sure the games continue with the generations coming up behind him. Through coaching, he’s helping rebuild Juneau’s Native Youth Olympics program and creating opportunities for a new generation of athletes to learn the games. That means advocating for their growth, while making sure the culture, history, and sense of community at the heart of the games aren’t lost along the way. Kyle’s dad, Rod Worl—who competed in Arctic Sports in the 1980s and ’90s—introduced him to the games. He was an accomplished athlete, too. In fact, for almost 40 years, he held the world record for the Knuck Hop—a game that leaves your knuckles bloody and your body exhausted. These days, Kyle reflects on what it took for his dad to push himself that far—to establish a record that was only recently beaten—and how differently he understands that accomplishment now that he’s tested those same physical and mental limits. It’s a lot to think about, especially when you consider that these games carry histories much older than the competitions themselves. Their movements grew out of life in the North—hunting, communicating, testing endurance, and preparing the body and mind for an environment where those abilities mattered. So, every time these games are taught to another athlete, they pass along something that goes beyond technique: a connection to people, place, and lifeways.

For nearly 30 years, Doug Vandegraft has been writing about bars in Alaska. In his book, “A Guide to the Notorious Bars of Alaska,” he uses the state’s longtime watering holes as a way into its broader social history. Doug spent decades traveling throughout Alaska during his career as a federal cartographer, and along the way he became interested in the bars that seemed to function as more than just places to drink—they were gathering places, landmarks, and repositories of local history. He eventually spent years researching their histories, digging through liquor licenses, newspapers, business records, and archives, while visiting bars and talking with the people who owned them, worked in them, and drank in them. The result is a history of Alaska told from the barstool, where stories of gold rushes, fishing, military expansion, Prohibition, boom-and-bust economies, and colorful characters all come together in the places people gathered at the end of the day. When Doug moved to Anchorage in 1983, one of the things that struck him was just how many bars there were—and how each one seemed to have its own identity. If you liked reggae, there was a bar for that. If you liked blues, rock and roll, or country, there was a bar for that, too. And these weren’t just weekend destinations. Bars could be crowded any night of the week, something Doug came to see as a reflection of an Alaska economy where jobs were plentiful and people had money to spend. That early experience shaped the way he came to understand bars as reflections of the communities around them, places where music, work, personality, and local culture all came together. And after visiting more than a hundred of them, he developed a simple rule for walking into any bar, no matter how unfamiliar: act like you’ve been there before.