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The House Over Hades
In June of 1996, Kathi Loughlin’s phone rang at work. It was her child’s nanny, and she was frantic. “Something is going on here, you need to come home,” the nanny said, a note of panic in her voice. Loughlin had trouble understanding
The Unique Art of Sign Painting in Los Angeles
Known for its sweet potato pies, the long-established 27th Street Bakery at 2700 S. Central Avenue, also is distinguished by its red and white exterior and painted signage, done in all caps san serif black letters shadowed in gray.
Living on the Fence Line: A History of Chemical Threats to Black Communities
West Virginia State University, a 125-year-old historically black university, rested for decades on the fence line of a pesticide manufacturer, a stone’s throw from tanks holding lethal amounts of one of the world’s most dangerous and infamous chemicals, methyl isocyanate. The chemical, known
Death by Dust
Tammy Miser got the call late at night from a family friend. Her brother Shawn may have been injured in a work accident and it might be serious. Shawn Boone was a maintenance man at the Hayes Lemmerz plant in Huntington, Ind., a
Coachella Valley Farm Workers
I had been working on making photos about farm workers very slowly over the years and in 2015 l received a Fellowship from The Alicia Patterson Foundation which allowed me to dedicate the time, focus and thought to the work that it deserved.
America’s Industrial Accident Investigators: Their Uphill Battle to Prevent Disasters
Fellowship Year Before dawn, Jim Gannon kissed his sleeping wife and kids goodbye and drove to work at the Napp Technologies chemical plant near his home in Lodi, New Jersey.
Arctic Treaty Nears 100 in Heated Climate
The Svalbard archipelago sits halfway between Norway and the North Pole with strategic access in the Barents Sea to vital sea lanes linking Russia, Western Europe and North America.
The Scientists Who Created America’s War Gases
SONORA, Calif. — In a back room of L. Philip Reiss’ condominium, the retired chemical engineer has covered the walls and filled his drawers with mementos of a long life in science. In one corner, he’s hung keepsakes from years volunteering with a
“History is Repeating Itself:” A Century of Chemical Warfare
IEPER, Belgium — The breeze blew in from the east as Simon Jones crossed a newly mowed field in Flanders. It was a brisk April morning. He followed a green ribbon of grass that stretched across the pasture and ended at a marble
Methane: Arctic Promise and Peril
Consigned to my bunk all night by gut-wrenching seas, I wistfully thought back to terra firma on mainland Norway a few days earlier. Before boarding the University of Tromsø’s research ship, R/V Helmer Hanssen,
Dying Inside
Teenage murderer James Morgan didn’t go the electric chair. But is his life worth living? In 1987, when I first interviewed James Morgan, he was on death row in Florida, sentenced to die in the electric chair for murdering a widow in a
On The Edge: Reindeer and Climate Change
Female reindeer stands protectively beside her calf. Text and photos by Randall Hyman TROMSØ, NORWAY – “When I got married two years ago, we invited 1400 people,” Berit Oskal-Somby told me as we stood in an icy coastal pasture in northern Norway surrounded
BOOM: North America’s Explosive Oil-by-Rail Problem
U.S. regulators knew they had to act fast. A train hauling 2 million gallons of crude oil from North Dakota had exploded in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, killing 47 people. Now they had to assure Americans a similar disaster wouldn’t happen south of the border, where the U.S. oil boom is sending
Forgiving Someone Who Kills Your Loved One Seems Impossible. Until It Isn’t
October 14, 2015 It was the perfect campsite, a place where the five kids in the Jaeger family could skip stones in a drifting river and wake up to views of the Montana Rockies. Marietta Jaeger and her husband, their three teenagers
Freedom, Finally, After a Life in Prison
WHEN she was 15 years old, Paula Cooper and three high school classmates in Gary, Ind., decided to cut school and steal some money to play games at a local arcade. They drank some cheap wine, smoked some pot and walked to the
Meltdown: Vanishing Polar Ice
“What you are looking at,” lamented marine biologist Haakon Hop of the Norwegian Polar Institute, “is the melting of the Arctic Ocean.”
Nearing 82 degrees north latitude aboard the research ship RV Lance in late July 2013, we were just 500 miles shy of the North Pole.
Losing Sparta
Last August, more than a year after the Philips lighting fixture plant in Sparta, Tennessee, closed its doors, Bo McCurry and Ricky Lack stepped out of Lack’s beat-up Ford Ranger and walked up the sloping, tree-lined drive to the plant’s padlocked gates. It was the first time either one had been back since the closure.
Could a LA-Style Threat Assessment Team Have Thwarted Elliot Rodger’s Shooting Spree?
A few hours after the May shooting rampage by Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista, CA. that left seven people dead, Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) drew attention to his controversial mental health reform bill that is stalled in Congress. He declared, “How many more
How America’s Fishing Councils Balance Investors with Players and Prices
The fishermen in the room are standing. More prone to long hours on their feet than sitting, they stick out at these meetings, rising after a few hours, hovering behind chairs. This is the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. One of eight regional
Will All African Rhinos be Dead in Twenty Years?
The flat bone had a bullet hole through it wide enough to fit the tip of a pinky finger, and was caked in a dried mix of Kruger National Park’s rusty clay earth, and blood. Two cracks had propagated outwards from where the
A Union Once Again Woos Underpaid Farmworkers
“Gone Time” Lives Anew in Alabama
Revisiting The Appalachian Coalfield
America’s Young Detainees
A Citizen On Paper Has No Weight
The Blackfeet’s Lost Acres
The Challenges and Growth of Progressive Muslims
Good Germs Gone Bad
Sweeping out the Plains
Lives in Looting
When Conflict Focuses on Citizenship
Brother’s Keeper: One Family, Two Suicides
Classmates: Portraits of a Chinese Generation
Aquaculture Moves Offshore
The Work of a Pullman Porter
The Mystery of Cancer in Alaska
The Cultural Broker in Refugee Resettlement
The Fake Crisis over Lawsuits: Who’s Paying to Keep the Myths Alive?
On The Americana Road Again
Disease: Shrimp Aquaculture’s Biggest Problem
America’s “Give While You Live” Philanthropist
Gateways of India’s Globalization
Choosing Servility To Staff America’s Trains
Murdering Women For Entertainment
The Curse of Cancer
How Long Will It Last?
Of Birds and Bombs
“The Monkey’s Head”
The Dichotomies in Indian Women’s Lives
Stopping the Pillage
A Judge in Coal Country
General on a Tightrope
Haitians in New York
A Letter from Baku: The Story Behind the Oil
The Life and Legacy of Paul de Kruif
An Amazon Preserve
What Bodies?
Belly of the Beast
A Son Confronts Oil Poverty in the Niger Delta
When the Sea Calls
A Museum In Black and White
Look Over Here
Convicting the Wrong Man: Part One of Two
Fighting Battles for Grizzlies
A Land of Madrassahs
