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Nevada landscape Editor's Essay

The Local Optimists

Who is the local optimist in your town? Not the one posting hot takes about the latest national story, but the person who is genuinely fired up about what is happening right here.

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Courtyard Urbanism: The Missing-Middle Block Reno Should Be Building

Courtyard Urbanism: The Missing-Middle Block Reno Should Be Building

Many buildings, one block, a shared green courtyard. The old pattern behind the world's best neighborhoods is illegal in most of Reno. Here is how to change that.

Ormat Technologies: The Reno Company That Runs on the Earth's Heat

Ormat Technologies: The Reno Company That Runs on the Earth's Heat

A 60-year-old Reno company is one of the world's geothermal leaders. Now its 24/7 clean power is being signed up to run Google's and Switch's Nevada data centers.

Redwood Materials: The Battery Loop Built in Nevada

Redwood Materials: The Battery Loop Built in Nevada

Tesla's co-founder left to build a closed-loop battery supply chain in Carson City. Now it's worth $6 billion and runs an AI data center on used EV batteries in Sparks.

Sierra Nevada Corporation: The Aerospace Giant in Sparks

Sierra Nevada Corporation: The Aerospace Giant in Sparks

Two immigrants bought a small Sparks electronics shop in 1994. Today it builds the Air Force's next doomsday plane and spun off a company racing to orbit.

Positron: The Reno Startup Taking On Nvidia

Positron: The Reno Startup Taking On Nvidia

An AI chip company headquartered in Reno raised $230M at a billion-dollar valuation and put its hardware in Oracle's cloud. The bet it is making.

SendCutSend: The Reno Manufacturer Quietly Going National

SendCutSend: The Reno Manufacturer Quietly Going National

It started in the back of a Reno warehouse with one plasma table bought on credit. In 2026 it raised $110M at a billion-dollar valuation. A deeply reported profile.

Housing

Nevada mid-rise housing 2027 Session

Build Up, Nevada

Two building-code fixes, right-sized elevators and single-stair mid-rise, that make attainable housing cheaper to build in Nevada with no loss of safety. The same elevator costs about 3x more here than in Europe, and the second staircase we require is mostly dead weight. Both are fixable. Both have been fixed elsewhere.

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"The things that actually shape your daily life are almost always closer than you think. They are happening in your neighborhood, your city, your state."

The Silver Lining is a home for optimistic writing about Nevada's technology, infrastructure, economic development, and policy landscape. Personal, biased toward possibility, and rooted in substance. Not the news of the day -- the story behind it.

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Nevada Stories is now its own independent publication — 130 stories, 158 years of downtown Reno history, published every weekday.

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