The Washington Post: Georgia Democrats Are Putting Their Confidence on Parade

​We bumped down a narrow lakeside path under pine trees, in a merry line of golf carts bedecked in red, white and blue. My two companions and I had been invited to ride along in the “Flip Fayette County Blue Golf Cart Rally” in Peachtree City, 30 miles south of Atlanta...

Mother Jones: These Scholars Lost Their Countries and Found Each Other

The doctor strides through Greenwich Village at rush hour on a December afternoon as if leaning into the wind. He is tall, lean, young—34—with longish wavy dark hair, charcoal eyebrows, a Roman nose. Carrying a raincoat and backpack, he appears vigilant...

The Atlantic: You Won’t Remember the Pandemic the Way You Think You Will

My plague year began on the evening of Wednesday, March 11, 2020, when I was compelled to cancel the Atlanta-to-Denver plane tickets my husband and I had purchased for the next day, for a long visit with our oldest son, daughter-in-law, and small grandson. I was all packed...

The Atlantic: 30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact

For his first three years of life, Izidor lived at the hospital. The dark-eyed, black-haired boy, born June 20, 1980, had been abandoned when he was a few weeks old. The reason was obvious to anyone who bothered to look: His right leg was a bit deformed. After a bout of illness (probably polio), he had been tossed into a sea of abandoned infants in the Socialist Republic of Romania...

The Cut: That Feeling When a Minor Problem Seems Like the End of the World

When, in November 2018, my son and his wife announced their plans to relocate from Atlanta to Denver, it soon emerged that they planned to take their 2-year-old son with them. The happy curly-haired boy, my first grandchild, was my special friend and sidekick. We had projects galore. On his street, at the edge of a creek, he gingerly picked up fallen sugarberry leaves...

CNN: When 2.6 Inches of Snow Made Hell Freeze Over

Here's where things went wrong: On Tuesday, January 28, 2014, at 1:30 in the afternoon, in response to the sparkle of several snowflakes in the air above Atlanta, virtually the entire adult population of America's ninth most populous metro area stood up, left their workplaces, got into their cars, and created a traffic deadlock of legendary proportions...

The Washington Post: The Wolves of Hate Are Loose. No One Is Safe.

​“At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”...

New York Magazine: ​The Last Person on Earth

He was a marvelous, graceful boy. We, his lucky family from the moment he arrived at age 10 from Ethiopia, weren’t the only ones to think so. A wide swath of local boyhood fell in love with him, too, migrating to our house, staying off and on, nights and weekends, holidays and road trips … staying, really, until he left us...

The New York Times Magazine: ​What Will Become of Africa's AIDS Orphans?

Four years ago, a fifth grader in my children's elementary school in Atlanta lost his father in a twin-engine private plane crash. The terrible news whipped through the community; hundreds attended the funeral. Even today, there is a wisp of tragedy about the tall, blond high-school freshman -- fatherless, at so young an age...

The New York Times Magazine: ​Reaching an Autistic Teenager

On a typical Monday morning at an atypical high school, teenage boys yanked open the glass doors to the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga. Half-awake, iPod wires curling from their ears, their backpacks unbuckled and their jeans baggy, the guys headed for the elevator...

The New York Times Magazine: The Flying Son

One June afternoon in 2004, my family and I hiked up a hill to a playground, taking along our newest member, Fisseha, a 10-year-old boy who arrived in Atlanta from Ethiopia the previous day. He seemed like a quiet, polite, regular child — with curly hair and a shy smile, trying bravely to absorb the change in his life — and so he was, until he took off...

Life Magazine: How To Raise Septuplets

Eight miles from downtown, Des Moines has one last fling, then expires. Beyond the last-chance miscellanea of Motel 6, Budget Storage, the airport, Dairy Queen, and a car junkyard, the city gives out and the great plains rush in...

Country Journal: The Protracted Decline and Inevitable Bankruptcy of the Savannah Food Co-op

An elderly gentleman in summer seersucker and white patent-leather shoes ducked into the store on my first morning behind the counter. He ducked, probably instinctively, because of the low, damp, and greenish ceiling...