The New Yorker

A year ago in September, strangeness was afoot in Boston. A gorilla roamed the streets of Dorchester, and the Red Sox made the playoffs. Water droplets on the window of an ophthalmology clinic coalesced into the shape of the Madonna and Child, and forty thousand pilgrims came to marvel. A burly seventeen-year-old from Roxbury named Rousseau Mieze, a child of Haitian immigrants, welcomed any climate obliging to miracles. His family was poor, his high-school grades were… more

In 1977, Roy Meadow, a British pediatrician, published an account of two children whose symptoms had, for a time, baffled him. Initially, there seemed to be no similarity between the cases. Kay, a six-year-old, had what appeared to be a recurrent urinary-tract infection. In the course of consultations with sixteen doctors, she had been admitted to the hospital twelve times, catheterized, X-rayed, and treated unsuccessfully with eight different antibiotics. Charles, a fourteen-month-old, had suffered for more… more

One Monday this spring, a forty-three-year-old salesclerk at the Home Depot in Plano, Texas, scribbled some updates onto an old resume and took it to his local copy shop. To his education and work history -- a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and technology, service in the U.S. Marine Corps -- he added a recent moonlighting job as a handyman and a new "career objective." Ten minutes later, in southern India, a middle-aged Hindu man in a cavernous… more

Last August, in a corner of South Texas where local newspapers still call businesses "corporate citizens," an emergency vehicle paid a visit to a highly fortified underwear mill. The hundred-and-fifty-three-year-old Fruit of the Loom company, owned by Warren Buffett's Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway, had just announced that its Cameron County factory would close by the end of the year. Much of its production would be shifted to Honduras. The news brought the county government's mass-layoff response squad to the scene.

The… more

One July morning last year in Oklahoma City, in a public-housing project named Sooner Haven, twenty-two-year-old Kin Henderson pulled a pair of low-rider jeans over a high-rising gold lamé thong and declared herself ready for church. Her best friend in the project, Corean Brothers, was already in the parking lot, fanning away her hot flashes behind the wheel of a smoke-belching Dodge Shadow. "Car's raggedy, but it'll get us from pillar to post," Corean said when Kim climbed… more

To hear American politicians tell it, nothing matters more to good public policy than the family. Bill Clinton campaigned under the slogan "Putting Families First." George W. Bush promised to "Leave No Child Behind." John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Howard Dean are squabbling over what they will do for "working families." And in the past two weeks Washington has shown its high regard for parenting by sending out twenty-five million tax-credit checks to people with kids. Roughly speaking, this means… more