Ordinarily the Piedmont region of North Carolina is a locale of steamy, shirt-stuck-to-your-back humidity. But on Sunday the skies over Durham were nearly clear, the air, almost crisp, not soggy. Temperatures were in the eighties, ten degrees below what’s to be expected.  People came out on bicycles in the streets, skateboards on the sidewalks.

But a handful of the friends of Peter Gilbert, a lanky civil rights attorney of 39, and his wife, short, blonde non-profit organizer Elena Everett, 37, spent the morning, not enjoying the weather, but helping re-order the couple’s house. As an old friend of the pair, I had flown into Durham just to see if I could be of service in the crisis at hand. More

Over the past several months, drug-related violence in Mexico has been soaring, accelerating an already alarming trend of rising drug-related deaths and contributing to what one former U.S. official has called “a decade-long bloodbath.” More

In the summer of 1975, I took off hitchhiking from the mountains of southwest Virginia to visit a college girlfriend in New England. Less than 300 miles into the trip, my thumb lost whatever magic it once possessed. After striking out for six hours on an Interstate ramp in Hagerstown, Maryland, I hoofed to the nearest Trailways bus station and bought a ticket to Connecticut. More