The Show for July 21, 2026: Inside a data center, new Valleywise Health CEO and more

Data centers have become controversial across the state and country. The Show begins a new series on data centers, with a tour of one to see what happens inside. Plus, we’ll meet the new head of Valleywise Health.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit health care system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona. bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, we start a new series on data centers by going inside one to find out how they work and what exactly they do. And the new head of Valleywise Health on what the system’s future could look like.

But first, today is primary election day in Arizona, although residents have been casting ballots for several weeks already. There are a number of competitive primaries up and down the ballot on both the Republican and Democratic sides. And today’s primary day comes in the wake of months of conflict between Maricopa County supervisors and its recorder.

With me now to talk about how things seem to be going so far is Sasha Hupka with Votebeat. Sasha, good morning.

SASHA HUPKA: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: How do things seem to be going so far?

SASHA HUPKA: So far, so good. All looks smooth out there. We had some storms throughout the state last night, and there was some concern that that might cause some delays or flooding issues with poll centers today. But generally, everything seems to be opening up all right. Wait times are low across the state, and some really interesting trends that we’re starting to see with voters that I’m excited to talk about.

MARK BRODIE: What are some of the trends that we’re starting to see so far?

SASHA HUPKA: Well, the big thing that’s been very interesting for me to watch is how many voters are taking advantage of and using this new ID verify option for mail ballots. This is something that’s new to the state this year. Republicans in the Legislature pushed for it, and the goal is to speed up election results. But in order for it to work, a lot of voters have to use it.

What we’re seeing, at least in Pima County, what I heard from them this morning, is that a lot of voters are using it. They said that they had had about 150, 160 voters use it in the first hour that polls were open. That’s about 20% of their turnout in the first hour that polls were open, so a significant number. I’m curious to see if that’ll continue throughout the day and if it’ll carry over to other counties across the state, particularly Maricopa.

MARK BRODIE: And am I right that this is an effort to cut down on the dreaded so-called late earlies, people who drop off their early ballots on Election Day?

SASHA HUPKA: Yes, and the entire reason we have these late earlies is because of exactly that. People wait until the last minute, they take their ballot in, they drop it off on Election Day, but then that mail ballot still has to go through signature verification. That process of getting it through the signature verification and then getting it counted can take a while. It can take a few days.

And so this process essentially gives voters an alternative. It is optional, but if they choose, they can show ID and bypass that signature verification process.

MARK BRODIE: Sasha, what are you watching for specifically in Maricopa County today? I referenced the monthslong conflict between the supervisors and recorder. They came to an agreement not that long ago. What are you watching for today to see sort of how that’s all playing out?

SASHA HUPKA: Today I actually just want to see how well can they work together throughout this election. I want to see if there’s any fighting, any issues that sort of rise to a certain level. Those are sort of the things I’m looking for today.

I think the agreement, though, is really interesting because it does not actually apply to today’s primary. This agreement only applies to the general. And so the general election will be the first test of it. That’s a high-stakes thing, particularly in a midterm year.

And so I really have two questions as it relates to this agreement. The first is it puts up this wall between the Recorder’s Office and the Elections Department, agencies that traditionally, historically, have worked pretty closely together to run voting here. And so can Maricopa County, with as many voters as it has, one of the largest voting jurisdictions in the country, can it run a smooth election when there is that wall, and we’re not going to see that hand-in-hand maybe working together that we historically have?

And then second, I’m curious as to what Recorder Justin Heap, who obviously is MAGA-aligned, will do with some of his new-found authority here in that general election.

MARK BRODIE: And so far, you kind of alluded to this, it sounds like you haven’t really heard of any issues in Maricopa County with either confusion over who’s supposed to be doing what or, sometimes printers don’t work, sometimes folks don’t show up and buildings aren’t open on time. You haven’t heard of any issues of that so far?

SASHA HUPKA: No, nothing outside of the ordinary. And I think that’s the thing I’m going to be keeping an eye on throughout the day, is does something become not ordinary? And hopefully, for the sake of all the voters in Maricopa County, hopefully not. Hopefully it goes amazingly smoothly. But I think that I know that internally, just because this agreement resolved the legal battle, that doesn’t mean that it resolves the rest of it, right? The tensions are still pretty high here.

MARK BRODIE: Did election officials have any estimates as to what kind of turnout they were expecting today? How many folks would either show up to turn in their early ballots or show up just to vote today?

SASHA HUPKA: So the turnout story has been really interesting in this election because what we’ve seen so far is that it’s been a somewhat lower turnout year or primary. In particular in comparison to 2022, which in fairness was record-breaking, but still it felt like moving that primary up two weeks. I’ve heard many political strategists on both sides of the aisle remark that the early ballot returns were down from what maybe they were expecting to see.

And so it’ll be interesting to see if there is kind of more of a surge on election day, if voters, this earlier date sort of caught them off guard and so now you’ll see a lot of people going into the polls to drop off and to vote in person on election day, or if this just will end up being a lower turnout election.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, that’ll be really interesting to watch. And I assume that they were planning for as many people to turn out as possible so they could be prepared for that. Is that a fair assessment?

SASHA HUPKA: Yeah, they generally overestimate to a certain extent the number of people who are going to turn out because they want to make sure that they are prepared. Particularly during those really busy times at the polls, we know that it’s not just a steady stream throughout the day.

Typically, you’ve got some peak times from like 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. when people are going to work and the polls are first opening. You sort of get another little spike around lunch and then toward the end of the day when people who work 9-to-5s are returning home from work. That’s typically when you see things are busiest at the polls, and so usually they over-prepare a little bit to make sure that when those folks are all there trying to vote, they don’t see any type of really crazy lines.

MARK BRODIE: Right. All right, that is Sasha Hupka with Votebeat. Today, of course, primary election day. If you’ve not yet voted, today is your day. Sasha, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

SASHA HUPKA: Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: The Tucson City Council today will hear a presentation about a new pilot program called the Focused Deterrence Quality of Life Initiative. It’s a six-month pilot and appears to be focused on the city’s Northwest side.

Yana Kunichoff is a reporter for Arizona Luminaria. She’s written about this and joins me to talk more about it. Yana, how will this program work? What is exactly the plan here?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, what we know so far is that the Tucson Police Department will be looking at their data to make a list of people who have had a high number of what they call quality-of-life offenses. So these are misdemeanor offenses, with examples like trespassing, loitering, drug paraphernalia, public urination.

And they’re going to figure out who is doing these the most. And then they’re going to send out a team, mostly Tucson Police Department folks, but also street-outreach people, to try to target those people, offer them services. Or if they say no, or if they don’t choose to go, if they’re a drug user, but they don’t choose to go to rehab, it sounds like there could be harsher criminal penalties.

MARK BRODIE: And what does the Police Department, and maybe the City Council, what do they say are the goals of doing this? What do they hope to achieve?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, it’s kind of an interesting place that after months of discussion, the city has basically wanted to be able to more harshly charge people who — I think it’s particularly who they see as using substances in public in a way that they’ve gotten a lot of public response or concern about.

And they’ve tried to work with the Pima County Attorney’s Office to encourage them to charge people and try to kind of make those cases stick, essentially. ... They’ve also tried to consider whether they would have a new type of charge that would come through the city of Tucson and the city of Tucson’s courts.

And none of those things have really been able to stick for reasons of whether the public bodies have agreed or the costs. So I think this is part of a larger effort to show residents that they are responding to what people perceive as concerns about visibly homeless people in Tucson.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so it’s interesting that instead of just doing that, they are first offering services. It’s almost like there’s a carrot and a stick approach, all in one here.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, and I think that that has really characterized Tucson’s approach to engaging with the reality of having — I think the numbers are over 2,000 unhoused people in the city. I think even under their Safe City initiative, when they send out street deployments of Tucson police officers, they will also send out street outreach to help people find housing, to maybe help people get into other supportive programs.

I think where it becomes a little bit more complicated is that the numbers show that most people that they’re engaging with end up with charges, more than they go into supportive programs. So that’s sort of the preponderance of what comes out of these efforts ... but they are doing both from what I’ve seen.

MARK BRODIE: Do the services exist? Like if they contact somebody and the person says, “Sure, I will accept assistance,” is there assistance to be had?

YANA KUNICHOFF: I think it really depends on what kind of assistance that person needs. There are options, in my understanding, for folks who are looking for support with substance use. The county now runs a safer center. So I think there’s opportunities for detox spaces, and there’s been an investment in that over the past year.

I think when we’re talking about housing, it gets a lot more complicated. There’s emergency shelter and different shelter options. A lot of those have very specific rules. There’s transitional housing, but there’s just honestly, there’s not enough of those services for everyone that wants them to get them.

And the reality is also that to access those, a person needs to often have a working cellphone, they need to be reachable in some way, they need to respond to messages. Or they’re going to fall back off that — not exactly that list, but off that sort of conveyor belt towards those services. So I think the reality is that to actually successfully receive them is just not happening as often.

MARK BRODIE: So Yana, you alluded to this, but I want to ask you more specifically about how this initiative fits into the broader picture in Tucson with how officials have been trying to deal with some of the issues that residents are facing —both those who are looking for housing or need help with addiction, and also the residents who are complaining about those people.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I think there’s a real tension happening. Several years ago, a Supreme Court decision called Grants Pass allowed localities to say that they could restrict people from sleeping outside in public spaces, even if those people had nowhere else to go. And Tucson is among a number of localities that has used that to help drive their policy.

So Tucson over the past two years has passed ordinances limiting where people can sleep in washes and parks. They’ve also responded to kind of an ongoing level of concern about seeing people at bus stops and a sense that people don’t feel unsafe there.

I think at the same time, Tucson has worked to invest in affordable housing, in emergency shelter. But those are much longer-term projects. And I think those things have sort of, to me, created a conflation with the idea that everybody who is homeless is also suffering from drug addiction.

But I think there’s also just the reality that we have a huge housing gap. So I think there is a reality that there’s both not enough housing and that there are folks who are on the streets and not able to access it. And they are often met with enforcement tools as often as help, is what I am hearing from people who are living on the street.

MARK BRODIE: So you reported that neither the Tucson City Council or the Police Department responded to requests for comment. What do we still not know about this? What do you still feel like residents in Tucson need to find out about this?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I think there’s some practical questions here, like when will this start? How the Tucson Police Department will report to the City Council about it. I think there’s kind of broader questions. The people that are going to be on this list have already had a lot of criminal legal system engagement, that is why they are on this list. And has that in other instances led to them changing their behavior or shifted how often they engage? And if it hasn’t, what will this pilot do that is different?

And I also think that what is different with this effort compared to several months ago when the city was trying to pass an ordinance that would have potentially changed how they charge people with public drug use, is that this is really the only time before this program starts, in my understanding, that it’s going to appear in front of the public.

So this isn’t going to go to a City Council vote. There’s no ... specific voting action that’s expected from mayor and council. So this is kind of like the public moment to engage before implementation. So I’m also just wondering how they’re going to bring public response in to a program like this.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Yana Kunichoff with Arizona Luminaria. Yana, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, thanks for your time, Mark.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Mark Brodie.

Millions of words have been written and said about data centers, but for lots of people, they may as well just be a series of four-letter words. The Phoenix area is one of the biggest markets for data centers in the country, and proposed new developments have raised questions in communities across the state. Many of those questions focus on water and power, and there’s been a lot of reporting on data centers’ environmental impacts. But the questions don’t end there. How do data centers work? Why do we need them? What do they do?

Over the next few days on The Show, we’ll try to answer those and other questions about data centers, in some ways by taking a step back, in a series we’re calling Centers of Attention. We’ll look at how data centers work, why some communities want them and others don’t, and the impact they can have. We start on the inside.

This is the inside of a data center run by Iron Mountain. You may remember them as a paper storage company; they now also store data. This particular center is one of three buildings at roughly 48th Street and Loop 202, pretty close to the airport, a few freeways, and downtown Phoenix. And it’s big, really big, like 540,000 square feet big.

JASON PFAFF: So the building that we’re in today, it has upwards of 300 customers. Some of those range from a single cabinet all the way up to custom suites that are built for them.

MARK BRODIE: That’s Jason Pfaff, Iron Mountain’s General Manager for North America and today’s tour guide. This building is what’s known as a colocation facility, meaning there are different companies of different sizes with different needs that have servers inside. It could be telecommunications companies or health care organizations. The names of those firms, by the way, were not part of the tour. We were told clients like their anonymity when it comes to this kind of thing. Those companies basically rent space for cloud storage, AI, and processing transactions, among other things.

JASON PFAFF: So what we try to do is take away those things that aren’t inherent to what they’re trying to do, right? So they have their business they’re running. We want to take all of the electrical, mechanical, security, all of those worries off of their plate so that they can just run their business.

MARK BRODIE: One of the other warehouse-sized buildings on the campus has only one customer, while the third has a few. Pfaff says data centers have been around since the early days of computers and servers. But back then, he says, data centers were shoved into closets or wherever else a company could find space. Now, some companies, think Amazon or Microsoft, have big data centers like this one all to themselves, while others share space.

JASON PFAFF: So what you’re seeing now, this gives you a really good view of what a colocation facility looks like. So what we’re looking at now is open room here with cabinets, cages, private suites, all of those that allow customers to come in and take space. And then right in front of us is what we call a main distribution frame. One of the things that people come here for is connectivity. Well, this is how we do that connectivity out to the data center. So every one of those cables that you see on all this goes to a customer and that’s how they connect to the internet, connect to each other, all of those types of things.

MARK BRODIE: To get a sense of it, picture a space even larger than your typical big-box store. But instead of TVs or refrigerators, there are cables, cabinets, and cages. There’s also a lot of security. You really can’t get anywhere without proving you’re supposed to be there.

DATA CENTER AUDIO: Thank you. You have been identified.

JASON PFAFF: This is our what we call phase two, which was modular data centers.

MARK BRODIE: This section is less massive open room and more small cabinets, and it’s much quieter. Pfaff says these were built specifically for customers’ needs.

JASON PFAFF: Everything’s contained within these the modules that we’re looking at, whereas the data center we came out before, you were in the open area, in the data center. The data center is now inside of the box that you’re looking at. So that’s why you don’t hear it.

MARK BRODIE: And does the same kind of thing happen in here as the other room?

JASON PFAFF: Absolutely. I mean, no matter what data center you have, you’re removing heat, right? So you’re bringing power in and you’re using the chillers and the cooling to remove that heat. So I’ll open the door here and you can see that it’s noisy inside, just like before.

MARK BRODIE: These modular facilities more closely align with how Iron Mountain says it’s building new data centers: smaller space, more efficient. This building was originally a bottling facility, so the specs aren’t exactly ideal for a data center. Higher ceilings, for example, mean more space to cool. This particular facility also has something called the Meet-Me-Room. Pfaff describes this as where all the carriers bring their fiber so data center customers can connect to it. And that connectivity is really key to the whole operation.

Standing inside the data center, it’s not hard to see and hear all the cables, wires, servers, and other equipment doing their thing. But what exactly is their thing?

YZ YANG: In a nutshell, a data center is basically a farm of computing hardwares.

MARK BRODIE: YZ Yang is an associate professor in ASU’s School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. He says the machines in the data centers are doing the heavy lifting for a lot of what we do on our phones and computers every day.

YZ YANG: The input and what you are interacting on your cell phone is just the front end. So the front end takes in the question that through the internet send to the data center, and data center in some of the machines is doing the processing for you.

MARK BRODIE: The amount of processing or storage space you need depends on what you’re doing, whether it’s opening a Google Doc, asking AI a question, or storing all those vacation photos in the cloud. And that’s just the stuff we’re doing on our own personal devices. Iron Mountain’s Jason Pfaff points out there’s other technology out there that also needs lots of processing.

JASON PFAFF: One self-driving car creates somewhere between 1 and 15 to 20 terabytes of data per day. So if you think in 10 years, you know, how many cars might be on the road that are self-driving, all that data has to sit in a data center.

MARK BRODIE: To put that into some sort of perspective, online estimates suggest 15 terabytes would get you enough space to store nearly 4 million photos.

Pfaff gets why people feel nervous or worse about data centers ending up in their communities. They’re big, they use a lot of power, they’re noisy, there are concerns about water use. But he says we like our tech and our conveniences, so...

JASON PFAFF: I heard something one time, you know, somebody said, he says, “Why do we need data centers? I can do everything I want right here on my phone.” Well, everything you do on your phone or your computer at home all happens in a data center. All of that data, every selfie you take, every social media post you do sits in a data center. So unless we can figure out how to store stuff not on physical equipment, which I don’t see how you ever are able to do that, you’re going to need data centers.

MARK BRODIE: Pfaff says we just keep creating more demand from our phones, AI, and smart devices, and that data has to go somewhere, at least it does if we want to keep it. And he says ideally, that somewhere should be relatively close to where the demand is coming from.

JASON PFAFF: Anytime you go on your phone, anytime you do a search, anytime you’re streaming on your thing, the closer you are to where that data sits, the less latency you’re going to have, the faster it’s going to work, the faster things are going to perform for you. So the closer you can be to it, the better.

MARK BRODIE: But how close is close enough? Could we end up with neighborhood data centers? Pfaff didn’t say yes, but he also didn’t say no.

MARK BOWER: is vice chairman at the real estate firm JLL in their Data Center Solutions Group. He doesn’t think the idea is so far-fetched.

MARK BOWER: I think we’re going to see more data centers, but smaller data centers spread out through a community.

MARK BRODIE: And those communities will likely continue to be in the Valley. Iron Mountain’s JASON PFAFF says Phoenix is probably the second biggest market in terms of data center demand behind only Virginia. And JLL’s Mark Bauer says one reason why is another of the area’s growing industries.

MARK BAUER: We’ve now got some of the largest technology companies, you know, right here. Then you, you know, add on our, you know, you’ve got the semiconductor industry. I think that’s a big proponent. The semiconductor industry is producing these chips for companies all over the world, but many of them are right here, too. These chips go into data centers that serve. So I think that’s why Phoenix has just exploded.

MARK BRODIE: That explosion is happening very differently on opposite sides of the Valley. More on that tomorrow as our series Centers of Attention continues.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show here on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Mark Brodie.

Coming up, how do you feel about posting and tagging on someone’s Facebook page after they’ve passed away? We’ll hear Robrt Pela’s take on the practice.

But first, Valleywise Health is getting a new leader. Dr. Michael White has been the county’s public hospital system’s chief clinical officer since 2019, but he’ll assume the roles of president and CEO on August 1st. I spoke with White earlier and asked what he thinks will be the biggest challenges or things he’ll have to get used to in moving from his current role and being a practicing physician into the new job.

MICHAEL WHITE: Certainly it’ll be — as we continue our relationships and really building those relationships with the community, you know, being embedding those conversations with our community leaders and our community stakeholders on a strategic level, looking at the challenges that we serve and have as a county, as a community, to make sure that we’re listening.

We’re able to then craft the services that we provide in Valleywise Health in ways that we are going to best be able to meet those needs and make sure that we’re growing in the ways that are going to serve the citizens of Maricopa County and the state of Arizona.

MARK BRODIE: How do you try to balance the growth with continuing to be sort of what your mission says that you are?

MICHAEL WHITE: We want to make sure that we are there to provide that access to care. And we know as people’s circumstances change, that we may see increased numbers of patients that may not be able to access other healthcare systems across Maricopa County.

As we’ve seen the changes in Medicare and Medicaid that are on the horizon, there will likely be an influx of patients that may be needing to seek services in a public safety net healthcare system. We need to make sure that we’re able to grow to meet that need.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, how do you try to plan for that? I mean, we’ve seen already the number of Arizonans who have dropped their Affordable Care Act policies because of the increase in cost, and we know that a lot of Arizonans who are currently on Medicaid will not be on Medicaid in the coming months. So how do you try to plan to treat those patients that might come to you in those circumstances?

MICHAEL WHITE: We need to look at our capacity. We need to look at our capacity in our Federally Qualified Health Centers, how do we have access to primary care, to begin to focus on prevention within the community so we have those resources available. We need to provide that education and help folks create those relationships, so they don’t end up having to only have care in our emergency department facilities. That’s where we’re likely going to see an overload or a bolus of patients that come in.

So how do we get patients to understand their symptoms, establish those relationships and have the availability and the access from there? As you note, we are going to see a number of our fellow Arizonans that are not going to have the same access to health insurance, whether it be Medicaid, whether it be through the ACA plans as they have had in the future.

Time will tell as we see some of these items get implemented, but we’re already looking at ways that we can be more efficient, ways that people can access us differently through virtual means, through telehealth and those ways to expand that capacity to be able to best meet the needs of our community.

MARK BRODIE: Does that involve, for example, like Valleywise expanding its services? Is that more of Valleywise partnering with other organizations to talk to their patients and maybe expand their services? What might that look like?

MICHAEL WHITE: It’s going to be a combination of both. We certainly know with the passage of Prop. 409, the citizens of Maricopa County have entrusted us with additional bond dollars to expand our facilities and expand our footprint across Maricopa County with additional behavioral health beds, with additional ambulatory clinic locations.

So there will be some natural growth that occurs as we move forward with those projects over the next three to five to eight years with these bond dollars that we’ve been entrusted.

In the short term, it’s going to be how are we efficiently, you know, getting patients in, partnering with those community organizations, providing those ability to have that education and complement services to make sure we’re best meeting the needs of our individual patients.

MARK BRODIE: Is it your expectation that for Arizonans who at some point down the road or maybe already have lost their health insurance, that more of them will be coming to Valleywise Health than perhaps other healthcare systems in the state for care?

MICHAEL WHITE: My answer there is going to be time will tell as this occurs. Do I think that people are going to need to seek healthcare in alternative means if they do not have coverage? The answer is yes.

How patients choose to do that, they may engage their already relationships with their healthcare providers, and those providers may be able to continue to provide those services in different ways. They may look to other services that have a different cost structure, or may have to seek care in those emergency department settings. So we are sort of looking at different ways that people may end up accessing, healthcare and healthcare delivery as we’re going forward.

MARK BRODIE: So, obviously Arizona has been in a provider shortage for quite a while now in terms of physicians and nurses and nurse practitioners and all sorts of other healthcare providers. How is Valleywise Health doing in that regard, especially as you’re talking about expanding the services that you’re offering in the locations you’re offering it?

MICHAEL WHITE: Valleywise Health, it has been a pillar of education and health professions education in our community since its inception. We had the first graduate medical education program for physicians in the state of Arizona back in the 1950s. We’re deeply committed to this academic mission and expanding the areas where we can educate healthcare professionals as we need to grow those.

We’ve seen expansion in our family medicine residency program, we’ve seen expansion with creation of subspecialty fellowship programs in cardiovascular disease, with newly around anesthesiology and in orthopedics. We continue to see areas where we need to grow clinicians to join the workforce practice here in Arizona, to continue to meet the healthcare needs of our community.

MARK BRODIE: So as you are getting set to take over as president and CEO of Valleywise, I’m curious what you think are the biggest opportunities, healthcare and health-related, that you’ll be facing as leader of this organization, and what you think will be the biggest health or healthcare-related challenge as leader of this group?

MICHAEL WHITE: I think with the changes that we’re going to see with Medicare and Medicaid that are on the horizon, I know that that is going to be a challenge for Valleywise Health and with healthcare delivery across the state of Arizona. I think the strong leadership and the foundation that we’ve built here within the organization over the last decade is going to allow us to navigate this and be able to make sure that we can continue to provide access to care and continue to provide these, you know, healthcare services to all of those that need it across the county.

As we look forward, we need to continue to expand areas in specialty care, especially in our behavioral health population. We’re looking, you know, again through the dollars we have with Prop 409 to expand our behavioral health capacity even further to meet that need of that vulnerable patient population that’s dealing with severe and serious mental illness and how we’re able to make sure that we have all the resources that are needed for that patient population to access care.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Dr. Michael White. He will become the president and CEO of Valleywise Health on Aug. 1. Dr. White, thanks so much for your time, I really appreciate it.

MICHAEL WHITE: Thank you, Mark. I appreciate the time as well.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Mark Brodie.

Most of us have a complicated relationship with death, and the same goes more and more these days for social media. With that in mind, it might come as no surprise that KJZZ contributor Robrt Pela has something to say about Facebook posts and the afterlife.

ROBRT PELA: So this is nothing to be proud of, but every time I see someone post a message to a dead person on Facebook, I have to resist the urge to throw my phone into traffic.

I don’t mean the gentle, reflective posts, the “thinking of Mom today” posts, which are perfectly sane and, frankly, something I’ve done myself from time to time. I mean the posts that are directly addressed to dead people. The “Happy heavenly birthday, Uncle Stan! I hope you’re eating cake with the angels!” posts, written as though Uncle Stan is up there refreshing his feed between harp lessons.

I read these and wonder, do the people who are writing these posts imagine the dead are on social media? Are there push notifications in the afterlife, like, “Your granddaughter tagged you in a memory from 2014”? Is there a ghostly version of Instant Messenger where Grandma can heart your tribute from beyond the veil? And if so, what’s the Wi-Fi situation up there? Is it better than mine?

And if the dead really are reading social media posts, can they also see the rest of what we’re posting? The political rants, the vacation photos, the memes about cute kittens? Is that really what we want for them in eternity?

My Aunt Lucille, a paralegal who spent her entire life policing impropriety, would be horrified to discover what her descendants are up to on Instagram. She’d be filing celestial complaints.

What gets me the most is the tone of these posts. They’re always so earnest, as if the deceased are just temporarily offline. “Dad, I miss you every day. I know you’re watching over me.” Watching over you? He couldn’t figure out how to use the television remote when he was alive. Now he’s monitoring your digital footprint from the astral plane?

And then there are the comments, things like, “She’s smiling down at you,” or “They’re reading every word.” Are they? Because if the dead are reading every word, then half the people I’ve buried have seen some things I’d prefer they hadn’t. I don’t need my late grandmother scrolling past my snarky posts about the neighbors, or the photo of me in a tank top I should never have worn.

I know, it’s grief. It’s ritual. It’s the modern version of talking to a headstone. But at least the headstone doesn’t pretend to be interactive. No one leaves a bouquet and waits for the tombstone to comment, “Thanks, sweetie. Love you more.”

What really bothers me is that these messages are written to the dead, but very clearly meant for the living. It’s grief as public content, optimized for engagement, a kind of emotional SEO. And I’m supposed to scroll past without wondering whether we’ve all quietly agreed to pretend that heaven has a data plan.

Because every birthday, every death anniversary, every holiday offers another post addressed to the deceased. As though these nice dead people are saying, “Oh good, it’s March 12! I hope someone posts a blurry photo of me from 1978 with a caption about how heaven gained an angel.”

And why are so many of these posts written to pets? I mean, yes, there’s nothing worse than losing a beloved pet. I’m sorry that Fluffy died. But when he was alive, did he have an Insta account? Did Rover routinely check her Facebook feed? No, because they were animals. And now they’re deceased animals. Why are you posting messages to them?

Yeah, I get it. I’m a crank, someone who doesn’t understand how we mourn now, in this era where everything—joy, outrage, breakfast—is meant to be shared. Maybe this is just what grief looks like in the age of algorithms. But I can’t help thinking that if the dead really could read Facebook, they’d tell us to knock it off. They’d say, “Sweetheart, I’m fine. I don’t need a post. Log off and go read a book.”

I just can’t believe that dead people are sitting on clouds scrolling their social media feeds. But clearly the living are, which, I suppose, is the point. Maybe these posts aren’t for the dead at all. Maybe they’re for us, folks trying to make sense of loss in a world where even grief has to be public, polished, and posted.

Still, I can’t help imagining some celestial tech support line. “Thank you for calling Heavenly Help Desk. If you’re trying to access your earthly Facebook account, press 1. If you’re having trouble logging in because you’re dead, press 2.” In which case, I suppose Aunt Lucille is on hold, listening to harp music, wondering why people keep tagging her in things.

MARK BRODIE: That was KJZZ contributor Robrt Pela. You can hear this essay and more by Pela at kjzz.org.

MARK BRODIE: Picture this: a separatist community in the middle of the desert made up entirely of women. It was a real place outside of Tucson called Adobeland, and the no-men part was one of the only rules.

Adobeland was what’s called a women’s land. They were also called lesbian lands, and some still exist today. The movement began, according to author Penelope Starr, in the 1960s when back-to-the-land movements, feminism, and radical lesbian separatism all converged. Women’s lands gave lesbian women a place where they felt safe and gave them some control over their own destiny.

Adobeland was founded by a woman named Joan Pepper, aka Adobe. She bought 10 acres in the desert outside Tucson and invited other like-minded women to come and live with her.

Starr is a Tucson author and storyteller who first heard about the community from a storytelling event and tried to create a documentary about it that never came to fruition. Her novel, “Desert Haven,” is inspired by Adobeland. Starr joined my co-host Lauren Gilger back in February to talk more about it.

PENELOPE STARR: Their conditions were fairly primitive at first. They didn’t have any amenities. She kind of organized it as a campsite and she had to put in water and electricity.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us about the philosophy. What would draw women there when they would come?

PENELOPE STARR: Well, it was kind of a national phenomenon at the time. There were books published on lesbian lands that had listings. You know, there’s always been an underground network, so people would find out about it from all over the country.

So they would come there and the philosophy was basically: Do your own thing. Don’t get in anybody else’s way. And no men.

LAUREN GILGER: And no men. [LAUGHS] Describe for us what the reaction was from the broader culture to this idea of women’s lands at the time. Like, did people think they were crazy? Did people think they were interesting? Was it sort of a novelty?

PENELOPE STARR: I don’t think very many people knew about it. It was pretty much an underground thing. When I talked to people about the fact that we were trying to do this documentary film, people would say, “What is Adobeland?” And they’ve lived in Tucson all their lives. It’s a half-hour drive from my house, you know.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. Yeah. So tell us that story about how you heard of this and why it kind of piqued your interest.

PENELOPE STARR: Well, I was working at Wingspan, which was Tucson’s LGBTQ community center, and I was running the senior program. And one of the programs we had was called a Colorful Life. And we would interview seniors and let them talk about their lives for a little while. I was doing storytelling at the time, so this was kind of a natural for me.

And someone suggested that we go out and interview Adobe, because she was getting older and this is all the history that we were trying to preserve. So two friends and I, Luann Withee and Pat Wolke, decided that we would take a camera and go out to Adobeland and see what we could see.

And by the time we got there, Adobe was no longer on the land. She was in a nursing home —

LAUREN GILGER: What did you find on the land?

PENELOPE STARR: Some trailers, some underground houses. Some very ambitious projects that were finished or not finished.

There were people living there. One woman had been in a trailer there for, I don’t know, 30 years or something. One woman had built a cob house, like Adobe, only it’s cob. So it was a real mixed bag.

And the people who were there was a real mixed bag, too. People were there for a variety of reasons.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us about them.

PENELOPE STARR: Well, I went through some of my papers, and I realized that at least, oh — one, two, a dozen people that we interviewed aren’t alive anymore. I feel very privileged that I had the opportunity to talk to some of the old timers and find out about what their lives were like.

A lot of them were pretty transient. They were dropout — that’s what we used to call it. I don’t know what they call it now.

LAUREN GILGER: Not high school dropouts, like society dropouts, right?

PENELOPE STARR: Yeah, yeah. It was people who just didn’t want to live in the culture the way it trying to define them. So they’re trying to define their own lives. They lived what you’d call alternative lifestyles. They were much more willing to give up certain amenities in order to have the freedom.

So, it didn’t cost a whole lot of money to live out there. Adobe never really asked people — you know, they were supposed to pay a few dollars to stay there. Some people did. Some people couldn’t afford it. She would never ask anybody to leave. She was a very open hearted, very loving person.

An old garden at Adobe Land, outside of Tucson. (604x454, AR: 1.330396475770925)

LAUREN GILGER: So you did a lot of interviews, as you’re describing here, with some of the folks who lived there and some of the folks who had lived there earlier in an attempt to make a documentary about it that never came to fruition. But you did use a lot of those interviews, I understand, as inspiration for a book that you wrote.

So, I mean, tell us a little bit about your impressions of this and why it was something you were so interested in and pursued for so long.

PENELOPE STARR: Well, I think one reason was I was so inspired by these women who were brave and kind of crazy to go off and try to create a new society. ... Something that was separate and had different values. They honored the earth. They honored relationships.

That’s not to say there weren’t problems. You know, anytime you get people together, there’s always possibility for conflict. But their guiding principles was pretty much to be independent women and take control of their own lives ... outside of the patriarchy, outside of the rules that have been been imposed upon them.

There was a woman who was there just because she wanted to be away from the world and didn’t really want community, but it was a safe space for her to be.

There was a woman who had been there through various partners, you know, so she stayed. ... Her partners would come and go, that kind of thing. There was somebody who left because they couldn’t afford to stay there anymore. So all of those stories are part of the bigger story of womyn’s land.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you lastly about the state of some of these womyn’s lands today. There are, as you said, some that still exist, but it sounds like there’s, they might be having a harder time keeping going in today’s world.

PENELOPE STARR: Well, part of the problem is that if these lands were started 40, 50 years ago, these women are aging out. They might need care or they might need to be closer to medical facilities. And they’re trying to attract younger women, and there’s a certain amount of success that comes with that.

But, you know, the future of these are all pretty precarious. The ones that are land trusts have a plan for the future. But sometimes a womyn’s land could be a couple of acres that somebody had and let other people live there, and that person has to move on. And then what happens to the land?

Yeah, but there’s a directory, and there’s dozens and dozens of lands in various states of solvency. And some of them, or a lot of them actually, are saying, “Come on, you know, we have space. Come here, find this out. See how, how important it is. See if it’s for you.”

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban. Our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created for audience accessibility. Transcripts are created on deadline with the assistance of AI tools and then edited, and may not be in their final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio segment.