Uncertainty In CERT

LANDER, Wyo.–Five years ago the 25 major energy tribes of the West created the Council of Energy Resource Tribes. With a bravado that soon backfired, the organization compared itself with OPEC, reporting that the tribes owned one-third of the West’s low sulfur coal; one-half of the nation’s privately-owned uranium; and huge reserves of oil, gas and oil shale.

Crazy Joe’s School

BELFAST–Just on the edge of downtown Belfast is a public housing project, populated entirely by Catholics, called Divis Flats. Though the flats were built less than 15 years ago, the site is now a slum. Rats run on balconies late at night, and are hunted for sport by dogs and children. Soldiers long ago put out the lights in some passageways because they made the troops better targets, and people occasionally defecate in the dark stairwells. The residents are looked down upon, even by their own kind from up the road, as a lower form of humanity. They are also looked down upon by the army, which has an observation post on top of Divis Tower, 20 stories above the ground

Peace on Dong Jiadu Street

SHANGHAI–Wang Chenwen is retired now. His closely cropped hair is stark white, and the smile that beams from behind the heavy eyeglasses furrows his face deeply. The few English phrases that have stayed in his memory were lodged there more than 40 years ago, when he worked for a wine merchant, one of the foreign businessmen who then dominated Shanghai’s brisk commerce. But, despite his years, if anything goes wrong on Dong Jiadu Street, in the city’s old section-if the neighbors began exchanging insults over a missing bicycle or blows over a leaky faucet-it is his responsibility.

Premonitions

DULUTH, Minn.–Getting in. Grammar schools were the seminary farm team in the Fifties, and sisters were the unpaid scouts. In a way getting into a seminary after eighth grade was like riding a river-all you had to do was go with the current. Usually this stream emptied out inside brick fortresses in burgs far removed from the world, the flesh, and the devil...

BOLINAS, Cal.–"OK. You see that discoloration here, that's caused by pneumonia;' says Dr. Thomas Harris, DVM, Inspector-in-Charge for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Meat and Poultry Inspection Program. He points at a large pink bovine lung, and slices into it with a butcher knife. Next to it are a jumble of other internal organs which have just been removed from a freshly butchered steer, which hangs upside down behind Harris minus its hooves, head, and tail on an overhead track.