Peter Garrison

Art by Peter BennettMARK WAS A FORMER STUDENT OF my former college roommate. He was visiting Europe, I was living there. I was to hitchhike with him, introduce him to the world of happy squalor. We hooked up in Palermo. I had waited there two tedious days, walking around for......

The subcommittee also graded a number of agencies and departments separately. Social Security, which began fixing its systems in 1987, received an A+. Other agencies did not fare so well. The Department of Defense, with thousands of computer-controlled weapons systems, many of them quite old, got a D. The Department......

In a little less than a year and a half, something bad is going to happen. The world's computers, on which just about everything we eat, earn, spend and save depends, are going to suffer a seizure - or rather a snowballing series of tiny spasms, which in the end......

To walk into the rain forest is to enter an epoch before man existed. It is something one ought to do slowly and alone. I have visited the sultry tropical rain forests of Central and South America and the cool, fogbound ones of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. Each......

A decade ago, the California Department of Food and Agriculture was dropping malathion on us in order to kill medflies. Now they've changed their approach: They raise medflies and drop them on us. This may seem mad, but there's method in it. The ingenuity of the program is that the......