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It’s Monday evening and I’m parked illegally on Colfax, walking through cones and rubble with a heavy bundle of paper in each hand—what gym rats call a farmer’s carry. In theory, publishing this magazine would be a glamorous enterprise. In reality, it’s a paper route at age 37. Being a small business owner, as folks along this street will tell you, is a…

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I think the war is already lost. I think we’re doomed. Let’s… Let’s win a few battles along the way.”

I listen as Todd Madison, 11-12th grade English teacher at East High School, utters a swan song for his profession.

“We always hear about those Japanese soldiers after World War II who kept fighting for years or even decades, not knowing it’s over. And that’s what I feel about myself right now,” he says. “The war’s already over, but I’m going to keep fighting while I can… have a few victories.”

Meanwhile, right down the hall from Madison, fellow teacher Jason Sternberg sings a different tune. “I call it my friend Chad,” he says, referring to ChatGPT. He elaborates that, while he’s opposed to students using these tools for significant assignments, he’s more optimistic about AI in the classroom. In fact, he’s quite open about employing the technology himself. “I can just be like, ‘Hey, can you take this information and put it into a handout for a kid?’” he says. “Then I look over it, make sure that everything is legit, because I definitely recognize the limitations and the fact that it could make things up. But I just find it to be a tool for convenience.”

Madison and Sternberg represent a broader division on AI in education. The technology’s introduction—or imposition, depending on your view—has led to a Wild West scenario where rules and philosophies diverge dramatically from classroom to classroom. And as educators wrestle with the new reality, lines are being drawn, with neither side certain of what’s to come and students caught in the middle.

“I don’t think the administration knows what to do,” reported K, a senior at the Denver School for the Arts. “And I honestly think that has backed them into a corner, because I don’t think they can talk about it.”

K explained that, during their sophomore year, teachers and administrators took more of a hardline approach to AI. “There was a no-tolerance policy,” K said. “If you were caught using AI, it would be an automatic zero, things like that. But since then, things have softened, and I think it’s because teachers can’t really do anything about it. I was talking to my film studies teacher last year, and he said that he knows a lot of the work is written by AI, but that it’s just too out of hand.”

Interviews with other students and teachers in Denver confirmed K’s account. At the beginning, AI-assisted homework was treated like plagiarism. After all, a student using AI is passing someone else’s work for their own—even if that “someone” isn’t a someone in the traditional sense.

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The leasing professional (let’s call her M) had decided to be honest with me. We were sitting in the offices of one of Denver’s many new luxury apartment complexes—“luxury” a byword of the real estate world as meaningless as “premier” or “premium.” But it looked nice enough. Stainless steel fixtures and cream-white walls. I imagined turning the knobs of a kitchen faucet and unleashing a fat high-pressure stream instead of the sad, spindly dribble I was used to.

But beyond the amenities, M lamented, the place was cheap in the ways that mattered. “Whenever the people upstairs walk from their bed to the living room, I can hear every step,” she said.

She started venting about the market, explaining how some developers and contractors would cut corners in build quality, or rely on cheap, shortsighted gimmicks to attract tenants. There were complexes with built-in bars and clubs with rotating DJs—part of a movement to create a 24/7 party atmosphere in the place where you were supposed to rest your head, with varying degrees of success.

The prime example was X Denver—a complex opened in 2021 in the Union Station neighborhood west of Coors Field. Originally outfitted with a built-in restaurant, a large gym, a bar, workspaces, and a yoga studio, X Denver was marketed as a social paradise for young, attractive tenants who wanted to live the high life downtown, even if they had to be packed into co-occupied living spaces, with four or more residents sharing a single living room and kitchen. When I visited the complex to see the experiment myself, a different leasing pro (let’s call him K) gave me a tour and informed me that the experience was similar to living in a dorm.

“I think there was a bunch of trust fund kids drunk at dinner who thought of this,” K said, as we entered the complex’s abandoned dining area. It turned out that operating a full-service restaurant on the 12th floor of an apartment complex was a difficult enterprise. No longer serving meals, the space had been converted to yet another workspace. It was completely empty—like the pool area, also on the 12th floor.

K guided me outside. The bar by the pool was closed, as was the pool itself, under maintenance, K said. The vacant cement deck radiated with afternoon heat, and it was dead quiet as I looked around the giant slab, trying to imagine the party.

“That looks a little treacherous,” I said, gesturing to a sheer edge by the pool area—a sudden drop, with decorative concrete tiers and hard edges below. No railing.

“Super treacherous,” said K. “I think they were building this during COVID, and they maybe weren’t getting those same regulators coming through. I’m not exactly sure, but I totally agree.”

Fortunately, nobody was out poolside getting tipsy. As K and I took the elevator down, I wondered how someone could live in this building and call it home.

“You have no idea what’s coming down the pike,” M told me in her office, citing a new complex down in Phoenix—an entire building themed after the Mario Kart franchise. Developers, it seemed, were going to extreme ends to attract qualified tenants.

“But who would live in places like that?” I asked. “I can see someone in their early twenties maybe living there for a year or two as a goof, but you’re not going to stay long-term.”

“Places like that don’t care about you being there long-term,” she said. “If you move out after a year or two, it gives them a chance to hike up rents on the next person.”

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The voice on the line shocks me. For weeks, I’d been tracking down the person responsible for a message I couldn’t escape. I saw it in Baker. I saw it in Cap Hill. Behind a high fence rolled with razor wire, in the upper part of RiNo where the mural-rich neighborhood relapses into grit, there it was: OHURT.

A message. But also a name, a persona. Self-promotion is rampant in graffiti culture. The more your name is “up,” the better. As I’m later told, “It’s like marketing without a college degree.” Graffiti artists compete for wall space the same way corporate brands muscle for airtime—one of these isn’t trying to sell you something, and that’s the one that’s illegal.

So when I started exchanging messages with Ohurt, it was a criminal I pictured—an image my mind and the world’s penal systems mostly code as male. But speaking to me late at night, from a blocked number, is the bright voice of a young woman. She laughs at my confusion and agrees to let me tag along.

A month later, Ohurt and her husband pick me up in an SUV en route to zones of vandalism. It’s about midnight, and I’m wearing dark clothes, as instructed. The weeds in the planters outside my complex bend with late winter gusts. I feel the chill enter my fingers and worry I didn’t layer properly, as instructed.

“Are you excited?” Ohurt’s husband asks me from the driver’s seat. The whole sequence makes me feel like a kid. In Ohurt’s world, that’s what I am though—despite her being about a decade my junior.

Ohurt is in her mid-twenties, and there’s absolutely nothing about her appearance that strikes me as tough. As she turns her head, I notice a bow in her hair, white ribbons falling down her back—ostentatiously girlish, the kind of thing you’d see a fourth grader wear on a field trip to the state fair.

“Yeah, I’ve never done anything like this before,” I admit.

We joke a bit about the risks of journalism. The SUV and the good humor of my subjects put me at ease, but I’d sent screenshots of my interactions with Ohurt to a close friend before heading out, just in case. “Writing is a contact sport,” Ohurt’s husband had said after joining us on that first phone call. In this context, “writing” meant graffiti, with artists referring to themselves as “writers.” By “contact sport,” he meant that violence is always a possibility.

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“Your relationships may not last. But this Eternal Shooting Star Idol will!” reads the text beside her giant jellied eyes. At the bottom of the graphic, Ny…

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On the last day of May, a crowd huddled in the basement of a strip mall on Denver’s west side. In front of them was the Dem Deya Sound System, arrayed against the back wall of the basement’s innermost room and split by a flickering DJ console. The speakers were quiet as the clock neared midnight. 

Still, the sound system drew the buzzed and buzzy in from…

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