Browse Topics
Crime
When Thieves Break In
Such peaceful, isolated rural houses, obscured by woods, miles from the nearest police, are sitting ducks for thieves. My neighborhood had ten burglaries in a single summer. Before robbing an area, burglars often take pictures of the houses, watch the residents, and make hang-up calls; they might pose as door-to-door evangelists. They hit most often in the early morning.
April 1993Impossible
It is Christmas Eve and I am visiting my dying father. He has been in bed since the robbery. The smell in his room is dark green, the odor of fermenting vegetables and flesh.
March 1993Straight From The Mouth
I didn’t think I’d hear again from my grandmother’s second husband, Uncle Benny, and then he called one Wednesday afternoon, three years after my grandmother had left him. I was stacking money on my bed at the time — ones on the pillow, fives at the foot, and tens in the middle where I could see them easiest.
August 1992Poor And Poorer
Growing Up In The Projects
The endless rows of cramped units were designed to house the maximum number of people in the smallest, most underdeveloped side of town. Most families were black. There were only two categories — the poor but not yet without hope, and the poor without any hope.
August 1992Reopening The Wound
Reflections On Oliver Stone’s JFK
I’ve never been as strongly affected by a movie as I was by Oliver Stone’s JFK. Although Stone takes artistic liberties in weaving together the disturbing facts surrounding Kennedy’s assassination and its subsequent investigation, I found his central thesis — that Kennedy’s death was part of a well-orchestrated plot reaching into the highest levels of our government — not only plausible, but compelling.
April 1992Minding The Equipment
It is interesting enough, you might suppose, that a man goes out every winter, in the very worst of the Northwest weather, and lives out there alone for months at a time, all to take care of someone else’s heavy equipment.
August 1991Tales Of Lord Shantih
A seeker approached Lord Shantih with a question. “My Lord,” he said, “what special task do wise men perform in honor of the gods?” Lord Shantih struck him with his staff. “A wise man,” he shouted, “performs all his tasks in honor of the gods!”
February 1991Cosmic Mysteries, Cosmic Hype
A Hard Look At The New Age
There is no “new age,” or every age is a “new age.” Every randomly defined period of history is (of course) “new” when it is happening; yet all periods of history are subject to the eternal return of events and meanings. If we try to name the features by which observers declare a present new age, we find only some of the oldest and most conservative human activities: millennialism, the sacred earth, channeling and mediumship, communication with nonhuman entities, ritual participation in food and medicine, faith healing, and shamanism. These were also hallmarks of the so-called Sixties revival, a new age which was partially eclipsed by the materialism of the late Seventies.
February 1990
