Dan Barry

A look into the lives of Culinary Union members ─ the 57,000 largely Latino workers who clean Vegas hotel rooms ─ who are an increasingly powerful Democratic force.

The tragic story of two superflyweight boxers who enter the ring to face each other in their first professional fight.

A look at a struggling diner in northeastern Ohio. This is the first of five columns by Dan Barry about Elyria, Ohio, a town which is “the kind of place where Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each hope that his promise of a restored American dream will resonate”:

“‘Is she O.K.?’ a customer asks one difficult day.

“‘My mom?’ asks Kristy, the waitress.

“‘Yes,’ the customer replies.

“‘No.’

“Sometimes you can see why, as Donna hunches into the desk space she has carved from the back-room clutter and works through the mound of mail. ‘I’m looking for shut-off notices,’ she says, half-joking.”

A couple of years ago, a subsidiary of Massey Energy, which owns a sprawling mine operation behind and above the Richmond home, bought up Lindytown. Many of its residents signed Massey-proffered documents in which they also agreed not to sue, testify against, seek inspection of or “make adverse comment” about coal-mining operations in the vicinity. You might say that both parties were motivated. Massey preferred not to have people living so close to its mountaintop mining operations. And the residents, some with area roots deep into the 19th century, preferred not to live amid a dusty industrial operation that was altering the natural world about them.

Known as Annie, she was a fixture for decades of the Fulton Fish Market. Few knew her real name, Gloria Wasserman, or of her past.