Sam Eifling
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National editor at Voice Media Group. Formerly @patriotact, @ap, real Deadspin, @newrepublic. Alum @medillschool, @ubc. tips: sam.eifling@voicemediagroup.com
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Articles by Sam Eifling
Gorillaz dazzled Phoenix in a maximalist, genre-bending blitz
Anyone who got a wild hair to see Gorillaz on Friday could’ve walked up to the box office at showtime and found swell seats for roughly $190, a number that for most people makes live Gorillaz a luxury good. That a late-’90s band of ostensible cartoons is packing basketball arenas while charging airfare prices is among the wildest pop culture success stories of the year, not least because it’s not immediately obvious who is turning out for these shows.
Gorillaz dazzled Phoenix in a maximalist, genre-bending blitz
Now Tori Spelling is spending some quality time with her daughter. The 90210 alum, 53, shared an Instagram snap with her daughter, Stella, 18, as they posed for a photo stop at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios. The mother-daughter duo wore all-black outfits as they enjoyed the spooky-season …
Introducing Daryl Khan, Phoenix New Times’ news editor
Whoever runs the news section at Phoenix New Times must master journalistic arts ranging from the frivolous to the profound. No skill or tendency is more important than being a ripe pain in the ass for the people who would make the Valley a worse place to live — we’re talking the liars, abusers, mountebanks and predators of every genus and species. The work takes a strong stomach. And maybe a perpetual five o’clock shadow, it turns out.
José González gave Mesa’s rowdiest a light in the darkness
Jose Gonzalez performs at the Cambridge Folk Festival on Aug. 2, 2019 in Cambridge, England. At the intersection of melt-your-face Spanish guitaring and angel-feather lullabies you’ll find José González, looking back at you from a solo stage with his crop of curls back-lit. On his Against the Dying of the Light Tour, which brought him to the Mesa Arts Center on Sept. 18, he continues to hypnotize as a one-man road show.
Dream job alert: Phoenix New Times needs a hellraising news editor
Sam Eifling has been Voice Media Group’s national editor since July 2026. He joined the company in January 2025 as editor-in-chief of Phoenix New Times. From 2003-2006 he worked as a staff writer at New Times Broward-Palm Beach, where his stories won state and national awards from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Why audiences are tuning out the news — and how local journalism can win them back
Posted Friday, May 1, 2026 12:00 am Our coverage helps us offset the sense of doom and gloom that may be contributing to news fatigue. Focusing on news that’s close to Phoenix insulates us from news fatigue, because much of it is based on the feeling that terrible events are happening and you can’t do much about them.
We’re sweetening our fundraiser: Happy hour is on New Times
Readers who sign up for our membership program and send us a little dough get invited to parties. Oh, and they support a functional American democracy while they're at it. We’re aiming to raise $10,000 by April 26. Your support ensures New Times can continue watching out for you and our community. No paywall. Always accessible. Daily online and weekly in print. Progress to goal $10,000 The old adage that if you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention needs an update in 2026.
We need your help to keep New Times journalism fierce and free
If you know what this image is, you know how great it is to access quality journalism for free. We’re aiming to raise $10,000 by April 26. Your support ensures New Times can continue watching out for you and our community. No paywall. Always accessible. Daily online and weekly in print. Progress to goal $10,000 As I write this, the average price of gas in Arizona is soaring queasily close to $5 a gallon. Rents have been falling lately in Phoenix — mostly because they also had gotten absurdly expensive.
Review: Gogol Bordello spun a frenetic punk melee in Tempe
About halfway through the set, Eugene Hütz cracked a tallboy Modelo and announced to the crowd that he was taking a 15-second break. It was a packed house Monday night at the Marquee in Tempe, and he wasn’t the only one who could use a breather. He and the six other musicians in Gogol Bordello, Hütz’s incandescent — perhaps immortal? — Gypsy punk band, had for the past hour careened through every track with finale-level intensity.
You there! Reader! Take the Phoenix New Times reader survey
Since its founding in 1970, Phoenix New Times has been the independent voice of the Valley. We’re here to serve our readers — who are, we know, constantly evolving. Our goal is to meet you where you are, and to help you make your life fantastic. To do that, we need to know what it is you need. That’s why we’re inviting you to spend a few minutes on our audience survey. It’ll take you about as long as a round of Wordle, and you could win a prize: a ceramic pizza oven worth $400.
Kid Rock will Headline Turning Point USA’s Cynical Halftime Stunt
When the perfectly listenable Brit-rock quartet Coldplay headlined the Super Bowl Halftime Show, no right-wing group threw a competing concert to run against them. Ditto the Super Bowls that showcased Barbadian baddie Rihanna, Canadian sensation The Weeknd and Irish exports U2. But when the National Football League announced it was booking Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a.k.a. Bad Bunny, the backlash from the right came something fierce. Bad Bunny, you see, raps primarily in Spanish.
Kid Rock Will Headline Turning Point USA’s Cynical Halftime Stunt
In case you want an all-white, country rock alternative to official Super Bowl acts Bad Bunny and Green Day. By Sam EiflingFebruary 4, 2026 No one is particularly shocked to see Confederate-flag-waving Kid Rock lead this charge. Kid Rock photo. When the perfectly listenable Brit rock quartet Coldplay headlined the Super Bowl Halftime Show, no right-wing group threw a competing concert to run against them.
We're hiring! Phoenix New Times seeks a news reporter
January 12, 2026 New Times has been covering news and culture in the Valley since 1970. Phoenix New Times is hiring a news reporter to join our scrappy editorial team. For someone eager to break news, write with voice and authority, and make a deep impression on the Valley, it’s a fantastic opportunity. Since 1970, New Times has been a proving ground for some of the most ambitious, indelible journalists in the state.
Hottest December in Phoenix? Valley is set to shatter record
December 31, 2025 Sunset views at Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. Valley residents may have felt a sprinkle or two while getting some air after opening presents with the family this year, but amid the warmest December on record, it was far from a white Christmas. Phoenix isn’t the place for snow lovers anyway. But normally, with temperatures averaging just more than 54 degrees, residents use the holiday season to throw on that leather jacket, UGGs or maybe even a knitted hat.
Become a Phoenix New Times member and we'll buy you a drink
Folks who join our member program are invited to raise a glass with our staff this holiday season. Per tradition each December, the reporters and editors of Phoenix New Times take a moment to close our laptops, dust the crumbs off our T-shirts and ask the bosses: When, exactly, can we hit the bar? The answer is real soon. And as we log off and hoist a glass with our editors, writers and photographers, we’re also extending the call to our members.
Phoenix New Times kicks off end-of-year membership drive
We at Phoenix New Times are kicking off our year-end campaign. By December 31, we’re aiming to raise $30,000 to fuel our work into the new year. This is a bold goal for our newsroom. But we believe we’ll get there. Readers like you have been incredibly generous in supporting our reporters and editors. We’ve continued to pay you back in kind with aggressive, original reporting. And events in our community keep underscoring how essential this work is right now.
DeVotchKa died and came back as Rebel Lounge legends
November 1, 2025 Nick Urata and bassist Jeanie Schroder of DeVotchKa on stage at the Rebel Lounge on Halloween 2025. On Friday night DeVotchKa took the stage at the Rebel Lounge in the dark — which, if you know the venue, is saying something — and kicked off with the theme to the 2018 “Halloween” with frontman Nick Urata joining John Carpenter’s synth with a haunted-sounding theremin accompaniment.
Hey, newsies: New Times is launching a news newsletter
If you’re reading this, we at Phoenix New Times know you’re probably already a fan (and, believe me, the feeling is mutual). But unless you’re checking our homepage a few times each day or frantically refreshing your social feeds for our posts like some kind of local internet hero, you’re probably missing some of our best reads. While we have a few newsletters for you to subscribe to, we don’t have a dedicated newsletter for our news coverage. Until now.
Hozier’s Phoenix show delivered soulful songs, hopeful messages
“Cool name — Phoenix,” Hozier told a packed house at Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre on Tuesday night. “Pretty awesome to have a place named after a mythical bird that can’t die.” https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/music/talking-stick-resort-amphitheatre-concert-schedule-2025-shows-21570133/Few 35-year-olds anywhere have the bearing of Andrew Hozier-Byrne as he winds down his Unreal Unearth: Unending North American tour.
Trump turned an outpouring of respect for Kirk into a coliseum of hate
At noon on Sunday, Corinthian Loyless, a 46-year-old pizza delivery driver from Hixson, Tennessee, was sitting on a bench in the pounding sun, buttoned up in a solid-black dress shirt, holding a bottle of pink Gatorade on top of his bald head. In the seat next to him were a folded suit jacket and an American flag wrapped around a wooden flagpole.
Big Freedia, Todrick Hall will headline Phoenix Pride in October
Resistance and power are the themes of this year's Phoenix Pride, which announced its schedule and entertainment lineups on Friday. Big Freedia, Snow Tha Product, Todrick Hall and Debby Holiday will headline the two-day festival. DJ Jamie J. Sanchez will spin four hours of dance music on Sunday afternoon for anyone left standing after Big Freedia blows out the Saturday main stage. The worldwide ambassador of New Orleans bounce has been on a gospel kick lately — she's dropping a new album Aug.
Support Phoenix New Times' summer fundraiser, save American democracy
Earlier this month, Congress calmly voted to rip the guts out of public media. The 2025 Rescissions Act yoinked $1.1 billion away from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit that since 1967 has worked to fund Americans' public television and public radio. No one is going to mistake Phoenix New Times for NPR or PBS. We're at once more aggressive and more louche. We're more likely to have bags under our eyes and to smell faintly of last night's happy hour specials.
Introducing Amy Young, the new music editor of Phoenix New Times
For the past four weeks, the worst-kept secret in Phoenix music circles is that Amy Young has joined us to run the paper’s loudest section. And we couldn’t be more stoked to have her aboard. I first met Amy only after she’d submitted her application for the job.
We got a $123K investigative reporting grant. Here’s how we’ll use it
In the days after taking the job as editor-in-chief of Phoenix New Times, I reached out to reporters in Phoenix and elsewhere in Arizona. It was clear to me that many of the Trump administration’s stated aims were about to land hard on this state — in policing, on the border, in immigration policy, and in the fundamental workings of democracy. Our paper has a small staff. I knew I’d need freelancers to step up and meet the moment.
Phoenix New Times is raising money to cover the hell out of the Valley
You wouldn’t believe how far we can make a dollar go. That’s my simplest pitch to you as we at Phoenix New Times roll out our spring fundraising campaign. We’re asking for our readers to chip in to keep our work free and strong. Our promise in return is to put that money to good use. We publish hundreds of stories a month, to keep you up to speed on news, culture, food and music in the Valley. Ads pay for most of what we do.
Reimagining the Grid
UH Energy experts say emerging battery, microgrid and AI technologies could be the answer to fortifying Texas’ ailing power grid — at least in the short term. By Sam Eifling UH Energy experts say emerging battery, microgrid and AI technologies could be the answer to fortifying Texas’ ailing power grid — at least in the short term. By Sam Eifling The past few years have made one thing clear: The Texas power grid needs to get stronger and smarter if it’s going to keep up with the state’s needs.
Stuff people said at M3F Fest 2025
Admittedly, M3F Fest 2025 did have its share of ups and downs. But if there's one thing that the fest does especially well, it's serve as a vital source for totally nutso things uttered by its various attendees. Heck, we'd put it right up there with Innings Fest for sheer absurdity and humor. So what exactly is it about M3F that draws out people's most peculiar inner thoughts? The feel-good, hippie-adjacent attendees are probably just more free and unbothered.
The Freestyle Skier Designing Germany's Robotic Workforce
Tilman Tschoeke's first day at RobCo was in the spring of 2022. The small-scale industrial robotics company was still tiny, with just 25 employees in their Munich office. It was a challenging time for European startups-the characteristic precarity of early-stage entrepreneurship was exacerbated by rising interest rates and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Companies were counting every euro carefully.
Introducing Phoenix New Times music editor Chris Coplan
In the two-ish weeks that Chris Coplan has been the music editor of Phoenix New Times, he has already signed his name to a pair of cover stories. You might assume he's wildly prolific. To that we’d retort that technically one of those covers was a freelance piece he sorta rode into office. But then you look at his author page and note that Chris has racked up damn near four hundred bylines in this paper, dating back to 2018.
’Sup, Phoenix: An introduction from new Editor-in-Chief Sam Eifling
You and I are buds, so I’ll deal you one of those not-for-print tales. It takes place in the aughts, under the midday Florida sun on the patio of a fish-and-fries joint on Fort Lauderdale Beach. I was a staff writer for New Times Broward-Palm Beach, and I’d just written a cover story about a bull-necked anti-racist skinhead who went by the nom de guerre of Diablo. He sat across from me at a picnic table with an expression on his face like a thunderhead. In person, Diablo could be darkly charming.
China’s biggest AI model is challenging American dominance
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Alibaba’s Qwen AI model challenges U.S. dominance despite chip restrictions
So far, the AI boom has been dominated by U.S. companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta. In recent months, though, a new name has been popping up on benchmarking lists: AlibabaiAlibabaAlibaba, founded in 1999 by Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma, is one of the most prominent global e-commerce companies that operates platforms like AliExpress, Taobao, and Tmall.READ MORE’s Qwen. Over the past few months, variants of Qwen have been topping the leaderboards of sites that measure an AI model’s performance.
What It's Like to Circle the Earth Twice for Your Son's College Baseball Games
Crissy and Madison McEntire first started traveling to watch their son, Will, play baseball when he was in elementary school. They didn’t know at the time, of course, that he would go on to be one of the top high school pitchers in Arkansas, eventually securing a spot at the University of Arkansas and pitching in the College World Series.
Arkansas-bred director Lee Isaac Chung puts the fun in funnel with 'Twisters'
The disaster tentpole “Twister” was the second-highest grossing movie of 1996, earning nearly a quarter-billion dollars at the U.S. box office in a year that was, at the time, among the 10 hottest on record globally. Every year since then has been hotter. The current record-holder as the hottest year on record is 2023, by quite a lot.
From the Vault: Revisiting the Mayflower oil spill, 11 years later
The Arkansas Times turns 50 in 2024. To celebrate our golden anniversary, we’re looking back at the past half-century and sharing excerpts from some of our favorite pieces of reporting. On March 29, 2013, an aging ExxonMobil pipeline called the Pegasus burst open behind a neighborhood in Mayflower, sending noxious fumes into the air and 210,000 gallons of crude oil gushing down suburban streets and into nearby wetlands.
Turns Out Working for a Criminal Enterprise Makes for Great Journalism
When Mike Lacey’s newspaper company hired me as a reporter in 2003, I had no idea that one hot morning 20 years later he and I would be visiting his probation officer together. Last April I was in Phoenix to visit Lacey, the godfather emeritus of the New Times chain of alternative weekly newspapers, and interview him for a documentary podcast series my fellow creators and I named after the faded blue ink of the tattoos on his knuckles: HOLD FAST.
The Rise and Fall of Alt-Weeklies, and Backpage.com vs The Feds on Apple Podcasts
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The Rise and Fall of Alt-Weeklies, and Backpage.com vs The Feds
By Micah Loewinger Verified, Tricia Romano Verified, Trevor Aaronson, Sam Eifling Verified, Michael J. Mooney
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Apple Podcasts
What are the odds? Eclipse reflections from Hot Springs
For a weekend, the eclipse was everywhere. If you were making the drive from Fayetteville (98.5 percent coverage) to Hot Springs for its 4 delirious minutes of totality, you would’ve started picking up on eclipse vibes circa Alma. The local Valero was selling glasses at the counter, but you had to wait for the cashier to return from out back, helping someone buy minnows. The impression driving south on Saturday was of a state rallying to support and to milk a local attraction.
Hold Fast
Hold Fast is the uncompromising story of Backpage.com, the world’s most scandalous website, and the rise and fall of alternative weekly newspapers nationwide. Over four decades, Michael Lacey and his business partner James Larkin built the largest, most influential company in alternative media—a colossal chain of muckraking newspapers that included The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Phoenix New Times, , , and others.
The Stars Are Aligning for a Round of Eclipse Baseball
Welcome to NewsBreak, an open platform where diverse perspectives converge. Most of our content comes from established publications and journalists, as well as from our extensive network of tens of thousands of creators who contribute to our platform. We empower individuals to share insightful viewpoints through short posts and comments.
What Happens When a Solar Eclipse Interrupts a Baseball Game?
Minor league baseball players take in the 2017 total solar eclipse mid-game in Columbia, South Carolina. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images NewsMinor league baseball players take in the 2017 total solar eclipse mid-game in Columbia, South Carolina. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images News Travel Sports 2017 saw the first-ever eclipse delay in professional baseball history—and 2024’s total solar eclipse coincides with MLB’s Opening Day.
Roy Wood Jr. Talks Touring, Travel Tech, and Why He Overpacks
Travel Travel Tips The actor and comedian explores how to feel at home on the road. Design by Maitane Romagosa for Thrillist / Photo by Jim McCambridgeDesign by Maitane Romagosa for Thrillist / Photo by Jim McCambridge Have you ever wondered how celebrities pack for vacation? What go-to snacks are tucked away in famous people’s carry-ons? Or what beauty products they swear by to combat jet-lagged skin?
Open-Sourcing the Future of AI
In a fit of pique, Clem Delangue began live-tweeting. He was packed inside a lecture hall at the University College in Dublin, where Delangue was continuing a hopscotch of study abroad posts, from his full-time university in Paris, to Madrid, to Bangalore, and now in the fall of 2011 to Ireland. "Peter O'Neill, Country General Manager for IBM Ireland on stage @ucddublin for a guest lecture," he typed, and hit tweet. It was 9:01 AM on a Tuesday.
2. Duke Kahanamoku Beach, Oahu, Hawaii
Duke Kahanamoku Beach, located in the Honolulu tourist neighborhood of Waikiki, Hawaii, is pictured on May 21, 2014. Duke Kahanamoku Beach has been ranked No. 2 on the list of the nation's best beach for 2023, according to the annual ranking released Thursday, May 18, 2023, by the university professor known as “Dr. Beach.”
Rotten grapes: Cringe-worthy wine advice that’s well past its prime
An adage in a certain school of screenwriting holds that early in a film — maybe five or six minutes in — the writers ought to lay out the theme of the film, usually in a line of dialogue someone says to the protagonist. Sometimes the theme arrives slyly; sometimes it’s more obvious. For my money, “Sideways” introduces its theme with all the subtlety of a singing telegram.
Rotten Grapes: Cringe-Worthy Wine Advice That's Well Past Its Prime
An adage in a certain school of screenwriting holds that early in a film — maybe five or six minutes in — the writers ought to lay out the theme of the film, usually in a line of dialogue someone says to the protagonist. Sometimes the theme arrives slyly; sometimes it’s more obvious. For my money, “Sideways” introduces its theme with all the subtlety of a singing telegram.
Dramatic Readings of Wine Labels Turn Every Bottle Into a Party
This article is a part of our Matters of Taste series, essays from our favorite writers on the artifacts and abstractions they hold most dear in their drinking lives. You could use more laughs in your life. More warm memories with friends, more reasons to crack into old bottles clanking around your pantry. You may also be running Americanly low on rituals in your life.
The Greatest Drinking Game Is Not a Drinking Game
There’s only so much fun you can have at a party where you don’t speak the language. A few years ago, on a visit to Sicily to visit an Italian friend, I found myself at her good-sized apartment, surrounded by a dozen or so of her friends.
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