Mainstreaming on the Reservation

(SANTA FE) — Harold Littlebird sits in his wood-heated studio near Santa Fe, New Mexico, drawing a design on a clay saucer, his long black hair hanging down his back.

Winning and Losing in Belfast

(BELFAST) — If everything had gone according to plan, Harry Toner would be a wealthy man today. At 60, he would be taking it easy, enjoying the profits from the hotel he and his wife built up from nothing, resting comfortably on his impeccable reputation in the industry.

Mornings in Magistrates’ Court

(CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND) — The medieval warren of buildings along the narrow Cambridge street known as Petty Cury was obliterated during the last decade to make room for a starkly modern commercial complex of glass, steel and brick. But the top floor, which opened this spring, was reserved for an institution whose origins are no less medieval than the townscape that had been swept away — a Magistrates’ Court. It is presided over by judges who are not lawyers, who serve without pay and who spend their non-judicial hours working as postmen, nurses, teachers and janitors. They are Britain’s Justices of the Peace, and the readiness of the urban planners in Cambridge to save a place for them in the new architectural order attests to the vital role that the lay person still plays in that nation’s criminal justice system.

Searching for a Seminary

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — They are older, bulkier now, though much else about them seems remarkably the same. We are what we were, but not quite. Sometimes it almost seems like a dream. There were maybe 120 of us spread over four years of high school and two years of college. We came from Catholic grammar schools in places like Bayonne and Dubuque. We were altar boys, daily communicants. We belonged to the only "the" Church, as Lenny Bruce once said. We wanted, all of us, to be priests. Some of us made it.

(AMARILLO, TX) — During any other year, those in attendance at the Texas Beef Conference would have gathered for a few seminars on grain processing and manure disposal, taken a break for cocktails before sitting down to a barbecue sponsored by the "T-Bone Club", and that would have been that.