How to Be a Woman in Tehran
The author reflects on what it’s like to be a female journalist working in Iran.
The Art of Agenting
A conversation with literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb about the state of the publishing industry and the problem with NaNoWriMo: “I frankly think that initiatives like National Novel Writing Month are insulting to real writers. We don’t have a National Heart Surgery Month, do we?”
The Limits of Jurisdiction
Kidnapping, adoption fraud and the battle over a little girl known as Karen to her adoptive parents in Missouri and Anyelí to the Guatemalan couple who are convinced that she is their kidnapped daughter.
Humane Endeavor
An interview with doctor and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande about end-of-life care, his writing career, and his early days on Bill Clinton’s political team.
The Rise and Fall of Public Housing in NYC
A “subjective overview” of the history of public housing in New York City from the novelist Richard Price, framed through the lens of his own upbringing in the North Bronx’s Parkside Houses.
Freedom Mandate
When the religious right co-opts the push to reinvigorate civics education, dubious legislation reveals the most powerful people in public schools: teachers.
The Heart You Save Won’t Be Your Own
A young social worker fights Medicare to cover a homeless teenage boy’s medication, forfeiting her own idealism in the process.
The Life Sentence of Dicky Joe Jackson and His Family
In order to pay for his son Cole’s life-saving surgery, he transported meth. But he got caught. Eighteen years later, his family, and the man who prosecuted him, are still working to set him free.
Jackson married his wife Yvonne in 1979 and they had three children, April, Jon, and Cole. Cole was born in 1990 with Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, a rare and potentially life-threatening immunodeficiency disorder characterized by a reduced ability to form blood clots. It almost always affects boys. Treatments include bone marrow transplantation, transfusions of red blood cells, and the use of antibiotics.
About the same time, the Jacksons lost their health insurance when an automatic deduction of the monthly fee did not clear the family’s bank account. The Jacksons sued but the case dragged on for years.
The EST In Me
On a mother’s embrace of the teachings of 1970s self-help guru Warner Erhard.
Perhaps because Jill, a little older, was less susceptible, it was I whom my mother saw as the subject on which to apply her own alchemies. Erhard’s techniques involved trust games, and she taught me several. We enacted the stare-down, in which we peered into each others’ faces until we learned to think about seeing and not being seen. We lay on the ground and visualized feelings of anger and feelings of love and then exhaled them in screams and shouts. There was a “truth process,” a “danger process,” a “headache cure.” For this one, we lay on the ground and imagined the ache as a floating object, drifting away from us. We also fixed our concentration at a point on the wall and led each other into trance-like journeys on which we met wise beings in caves. Who is the wise being? What is the wise being telling you? we asked.
I was my mother’s pupil, but we participated in these exercises as equals. Often, our mystical probings revealed me as my mother’s mentor. One time the cave-bound oracle told my mother to follow any guidance she might receive from me; I’d been her teacher in a past life, the oracle told her.
The List
A former USAID employee starts a list and a campaign to help resettle hundreds of Iraqis whose lives were threatened for working with the U.S. coalition. An excerpt from Kirk Johnson’s book To Be a Friend Is Fatal:
“I returned to Boston to find a dozen voicemails from journalists and Capitol Hill staffers whose names I had never heard before. I had no idea how everyone was getting my number. When I logged into my email account, I thought at first that my address had been sucked into some Middle Eastern spammer’s list: three out of every four emails were in Arabic.
“I saw a familiar name and opened the message. Ziad had always stood out in the USAID mission as someone with great ambition and an acidic sense of humor. His ambition had bested him, though: he was fired for trying to organize an informal union of the Iraqi employees to fight for better treatment and more protection. One day we noticed he was gone, and that was the end of Ziad, as far as we knew. He wrote to inform me that he was scheduled to flee within a couple days by way of a smuggler’s network and might need my help.”