Tracks

Lives in Looting

How professional grave-robbers are destroying the past

Roger Atwood

"Once you start doing this, you never want to stop. The huaca keeps calling you back," said Robin..

The Mystery of Cancer in Alaska

Diana Campbell

Jennifer Probert has been wondering for several years now why she knows so many people with cancer.

The 28-year old mother grew up in Tok, Alaska, a small community of 1,500 people, on the Alaska Highway, about 200 miles southeast of Fairbanks. “What really made me curious is that really healthy people were getting sick,” she said. “People that don’t smoke, don’t drink, lead very healthy lives.” She relayed her concerns to her mother and sister and together they made a list of cancer patients and tried to see what they had in common.

Sweeping out the Plains

Text and Photos by Jack Coffman and George Anthan

In 1890, the federal Census Bureau announced that the nation's frontier was closed. It's opening up again.

The great wave of population, which swept homesteaders onto the Northern Great Plains with the promise of free land and hope for a bright future around the turn of the last century, is sweeping back out again at the beginning of this one. A culture that has been central to the history of America's westward expansion and whose virtues of simple living, honesty, hard work, and religious faith became the core of how the United States came to see itself, is close to disappearing.

Brother’s Keeper
One Family, Two Suicides

Benoit Denizet-Lewis

On the afternoon of Saturday, May 4, 2001, the cast of the Monadnock Regional High School production of Ordinary People gathered in the school auditorium in Swanzey, N.H., for its first dress rehearsal. Opening night was only four days away, and the mood was strained and occasionally hostile. The problem, most of the cast agreed, was an angry Greg Kochman, who played the lead role of Conrad, a suicidal teenager coping with the death of this older brother.

The Cultural Broker

Donatella Lorch

A Catholic, Russo called her local diocese and asked what they were planning to do for Vietnamese refugees. She was told that about 600 were coming to Grand Rapids that year to be resettled by Catholic Human Development Outreach, a local affiliate of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops. So she volunteered. Petite and freckled with bright red hair that curls around her face and shoulders, Carol Russo literally bounces with energy and never seems to lose her temper. “I really can’t tell you why my relationship with refugees is so special,” she mused. “I don’t understand it. It’s just there. It’s just part of my life. It’s defined my life since 1975 and it’s my purpose.”

The Fake Crisis over Lawsuits:
Who's Paying to Keep the Myths Alive?

Stephanie Mencimer

A Over the past two years, the average media consumer would be under the impression that the nation is awash with lawsuits, greedy trial lawyers and out of control juries eager to punish corporate America with million-dollar verdicts. The airwaves and newspapers have been flooded with hundreds of stories on the legal system, with common references to the justice system as a lottery for the undeserving and most lawsuits as "frivolous." And many of the stories carry glaring factual errors. A few examples…

Aquaculture Moves Offshore

Paul Molyneaux

The white spires of the Algonquin Hotel towered above the coastal town of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, the center of aquaculture development in Canada’s Maritime Provinces. Government officials and aquaculture industry representatives from Canada, Norway, and the U.S. met at the Algonquin on June 11, 2003 to discuss fish farming’s future. Among the speaker, offshore aquaculture pioneer, Chris Duffy explained his company’s plan to grow cod in extensive submerged cage systems in the open ocean.

Secret Land Swaps Taxpayers Help Finance

Ken Olsen

Across the West, a handful of environmental groups are persuading Congress to bestow wilderness protection on their favorite stretch of country by trading away public land.

Such deals are the only way to protect the last unspoiled territory from development in the face of increasing political hostility, they say.

Classmates: Portraits of a Chinese Generation

John Pomfret

Song Liming lost his virginity on a chilly day in February 1982 to an Italian temptress named Antonella in Building 10 of the Foreign Students Dormitory at Nanjing University, while Antonella's ex-, an avuncular German named Uli, was knocking on the door outside.

Song was 21 and China was changing.

When Conflict Focuses on Citizenship

Frances Stead Sellers

War is all about taking sides – unless, of course, you can't because you belong on both sides. That's the sort of conflict that citizenship laws were intended to avoid. But that's how Haider Thamir, a citizen of both Iraq and the United States, felt during Operation Iraqi Freedom. "It was like watching your mother and your father having an ugly argument," the Maryland-based insurance broker says quietly, "and there's nothing you can do about it."

The Work of a Pullman Porter

Larry Tye

A Pullman porter was, before anything, a man who made beds. Or, as they said, made down beds, since the most taxing part was popping the upper berth from the ceiling. The lower was formed by folding down opposing seats, fastening curtains, affixing the headboard, and adding blankets, pillows and linen. An experienced porter could do all that in 3 to 5 minutes; some claimed to finish in just 90 seconds, with their hands working independently of their toilworn bodies. Which would be handy since they had to do it dozens more times a night.

Beyond Stereotypes:
Globalization’s Winners and Losers

David H. Wells

To discuss the winners and losers in globalization in developing nations such as India, most people reach for a cliché. "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is a widely held misnomer about globalization. Well-documented declines in poverty in poorer countries that are integrating into the global economy argue to the contrary. Research further shows that globalization reduces poverty generally, since more globally integrated economies grow faster.