The Price Of Fish
Our Nation’s Most Perilous Job
Takes Life and Limb in New England

Douglas Goodale, by the age of 32, had 8 years of commercial fishing experience behind him when his job literally took his right arm and very nearly his life. Goodale was working by himself on his twenty-two foot purple lobster boat, “Barney,” about one mile off the coast of southern Maine near Wells Harbor. The rope hauling up his third set of double traps went slack in the heavy six foot seas and snagged on his antiquated winch.

An Ant’s Life

Sunrise refracts over the Peloncillo Mountains, sending tendrils of light along the ground where biologist Deborah Gordon kneels in the dirt with an aspirator, sucking up dozens of ants. We’re in the desert a few hours drive from Tucson, where Arizona meets New Mexico, a sandy intersection that has provided the material for Gordon’s career-long quest to understand the social structure of this particular species of harvester ant, pogomyrmex barbatus. “Hitler could come to power and I wouldn’t know it,” Gordon murmurs, adjusting her wide-brimmed straw hat. “I’d be out here, sucking up ants.”

Importing Nuns to Save American Monasteries

PHILADELPHIA - The monastery's gray stone mother house stands stoically amid lonesome pine trees and statues of saints. At one time, the Sisters of St. Basil the Great on Fox Chase Road numbered about 150. Today most sisters have quietly retired from the monastery's college and high school. Others have died and are buried in the nearby cemetery. For decades few women joined the monastery, causing the sisters to worry that their Ukrainian legacy would end with them.

Secrets Of Aging Well In Norway

Cruising the Norwegian coastline in September is a way of buying time, of getting my emotional and geographic bearings before reentering Shangri-la.

That’s how I remember Stryn, the pastoral idyll deep within the shrouded glacial mists of the Nordfjord, Norway, discovered via seaplane, no less, in April, 1971.

The Blackfeet’s Lost Acres

Adozen Blackfeet Indians and one white man sit in an aspen grove up against the backbone of the world watching a horse die.

This is a land of spirits and portents. Things that happen here take on a heightened significance. The slow, agonizing death of an injured pack horse is not a sign to be ignored. The Thunder God is supposed to live in a cave up here, and he has little patience with blasphemers. As the Blackfeet and I sit in gloomy silence, I wonder if the Indians still worry about such things, and if they now think bringing in a white man was a big mistake. We have plenty of horses to carry packs and people, but I fear the trip is over.

The Third Grade Answer

During a recent visit to a maximum security prison in Virginia, where some 2,000 men are caged, I asked the warden to describe his most troublesome problem. I expected the usual answer – shivs, drugs, rapes, cellblock violence. Sure, he replied, all that is here. But his major problem is illiteracy. As many as 75 percent of the prisoners read at a third grade level. On release, he said, they won’t be able to find even unskilled jobs. Almost two-thirds will return to prison.

Homophobic Killings in Texas

As soon as Manuel Zuniga heard the news, the fate of his younger brother, Pablo, flashed before his eyes. A television station in Austin, Texas, was reporting that a young Hispanic man had been stabbed to death in the middle of the night on a secluded bike path that parallels Town Lake, the scenic river bisecting the city, just south of the state capitol building.

The ‘Special Period’ In Cuba

In November of 1992, I made my first trip to Cuba. I had bought a super cheap tourist package in Merida, in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. It was $350 for a flight and a week’s worth of food and lodging.

Masking the Face of Battle

Overlooked in 20th century war-making is that blatantly corrupt leader of a Balkan backwater who blazed a trail that faltering democratic leaders would follow in reviving domestic political fortunes on foreign battlefields. I speak of Rufus T. Firefly, installed as president of Freedonia on his promise to transfuse the nation’s resources into his personal bank account. “Just wait ‘til I get through with it,’’ Firefly said on taking office. Firefly’s contribution has been overlooked because of the ridicule of his record in the 1933 film, “Duck Soup.’’ Firefly will forever be considered something of a laff riot since the casting of Groucho Marx as the tiny country’s leader. But the film accurately preserves that moment when the blood lust seeps into the veins of a nation ready to launch an attack on enemies real or imagined. It is the Grand Ballroom scene with Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo, joining the multitude and a heavenly choir in, “We’re Going To War.”

Hispanic Workers Health Needs are Overwhelming Southern Poultry Towns

Everyone’s time is set to four thirty in the afternoon in Siler City, North Carolina. It’s the hour when everyone comes home. Children come home from school and toss their backpacks on the floor. Parents come home from the chicken plants and leave their black boots on the doorstep. And Maria comes home and picks up her nine-month old daughter from the babysitter next door.

Native Americans in Museums: Lost in Translation?

SUITLAND, Md. — The George family traveled to the nation’s capital from their northern California reservation this July with a clear agenda: To inform America about the Hupas’ continuing battle to preserve their land and culture against environmental threats.

Women Entrepreneurs in Poland

An unexpectedly large number of new businesses in Poland today are owned by women. Many are doing quite well, in manufacturing as well as in the service sector, helping propel Poland on its fast-track path toward a competitive market economy.

Tlacuitapa Journal: Family Networks Defy U.S. Efforts To Discourage Immigration

Tlacuitapa, Mexico — For a dozen days a year, Tlacuitapa, a depressed Mexican village so small and isolated that it doesn’t appear on any official map of Mexico, comes to life. That’s when hundreds of former residents now living in the United States come to Tlacuitapa to connect with the family members — mostly elderly grandparents and young children — they’ve left behind, to fix up houses which stand empty for most of the year, and to taste a life they miss only for its memories.