The Subterranean World of the Bomb 

By Ron Rosenbaum Harper’s March 1978 Did anyone ever tell you about the last letter of Our Lady of Fatima? It’s more than a dozen years since the night it was revealed to me, but I remember the circumstances exactly. I was in an all-night place called the Peter Pan...

The Stacks Chat: John Edgar Wideman

By Alex Belth Esquire Classic October 26, 2016 The story of Emmet Till is embedded in our public consciousness as one of the most notorious hate crimes of the century. What is lesser known—and what novelist John Edgar Wideman tackles with candor and humility in his...

The Young and the Homeless

By Stacy Title New York Woman September 1987 There is a subculture of the homeless in this city whose membership is growing at an alarming rate. Like their more familiar elderly counterparts, they live off the city’s excesses—unwanted canned food, jangling change, and...

Getting it Straight

By Sue Woodman New York Woman January/February 1987 Last year, 1,806 women in America had AIDS, 794 of them were from New York City. Most of us may not yet be aware of this grim new reality, but it is becoming increasingly pervasive. Today, AIDS sufferers are no...

The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones

By Ron Rosenbaum Esquire September 1977 Take a look at that hulking sepulcher over there. Small wonder they call it a tomb. It’s the citadel of Skull and Bones, the most powerful of all secret societies in the strange Yale secret-society system. For nearly a...

Travels with Doctor Death

By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair May 1990 Three lives hang in the balance this morning as Dr. James Grigson pulls up in a gleaming white Cadillac, ready to make his rounds. The tall Texan with one hand on the wheel and one hand on his flamboyant golden cigarette holder,...

Truth and Consequence

By Sue Woodman New York Woman February 1990 Almost no one knows that twenty-eight-year-old Melanie Oakley* is gay—not her family, not her colleagues at the law firm where she works as a legal secretary, not her friends in the Queens neighborhood where she grew up and...

Bellevue

By Stacy Title New York Woman 1990 Bellevue Hospital, on East 27th Street, has a staff of over 6,000 doctors, technicians, nurses and orderlies. The hospital’s medical facilities are among the best in the city. It boasts three emergency rooms and 134 out-patient...

The Land of the Permanent Wave

By Edwin Shrake Harper’s February 1970 For about five hours I had been drinking Scotch whiskey and arguing with a rather nice, sometimes funny old fellow named Arch, who was so offended by my moderately long hair that he had demanded to know if I weren’t actually,...

The Man Who Held Robert Kennedy In His Arms

By Elizabeth Kaye The Village Voice June 1972 A very big sign in red, white and blue reads, “Kennedy.” It is nailed across the front of a building three blocks from another building with another, smaller sign. This second sign is a map marked with numbers, and what I...

The Duke of Deception

By Pat Jordan Southern Magazine October 1987 “We had to get David out of the Klan. He was seducing all the wives.” —Ku Klux Klan member, July 1986  It was a stroke of genius. The Presidential candidate had been denied a platform to announce his candidacy by two...