New York Times Magazine, Dec. 27

(posted Thursday, Dec. 24, 1998)

Two articles and a photo essay chronicle Russia's bleakness. The grimmest piece describes how Russians in a small city survive without money: They skip rent payments, grow food in garden plots, and go without butter and meat. (The local shoe factory employs 800 people and makes only 3,000 pairs a year.) Underlying theme: Moscow is a Potemkin village of prosperity, and the rest of Russia is dying. ... The magazine publishes a sublime guide to America's doomsday prophets and other assorted millennialists. Among the many highlights: Morningland, whose high priestess preaches that Christ will land a UFO "the size of Texas" in Long Beach, Calif.; Richard W. Noone, who says the Earth's crust will shift on May 5, 2000, turning oceans into "maelstroms of death"; and Meade Ministries, which believes the "world will soon be engulfed in a sticky white substance." ... The cover profile of Sean Penn gushes over his cowboy independence, his gruffness, and his refusal to compromise his artistic principles for high-paying roles.

The New Yorker, Dec. 28 and Jan. 4

(posted Thursday, Dec. 24, 1998)

The winter fiction issue includes short stories by Richard Ford, Ken Kesey, and Annie Proulx. ... Vladimir Nabokov reviews his own autobiography. (He wrote the review of his book in 1950 but never published it.) It is a superb review, though he's a bit too fulsome in his praise for himself: "Mr. Nabokov is to be congratulated for having performed a very capable and very necessary job," writes Mr. Nabokov. ... A fascinating article tells the real story of Billy the Kid. He was not "William Bonney" and was not a killer of Indians and Mexicans. Instead he was "Henry McCarthy," and he was a soldier in a vicious war between Irish and English ranchers in New Mexico. A convert from Catholicism to Presbyterianism, Billy took the English side and murdered fellow Irishmen. ... The annual Christmas poem closes with the wish "may our inmost selves aspire/ to higher things, like Mark McGwire!"

Harper's, January 1999

(posted Thursday, Dec. 24, 1998)

A prosperous writer spends a month in the low-wage work force, waitressing at a cheap hotel's bleak restaurant. She describes how difficult it is to survive on $7 an hour and how nasty working conditions for low-wage service employees are and explains why it costs more to be poor than to be rich (e.g., her co-workers can't save enough for a security deposit on a monthly apartment, so they must rent week-to-week at exorbitant rates).

Esquire, January 1999