Ben Ehrenreich

His feet were sticking out from under a bent sheet of corrugated metal. Should I tell you more? He died where he lay, face-down on the asphalt about 50 feet from the door of the Arthur Monday Jr. health clinic. The clinic was closed when the storm began and it’s......

In the Houston Astrodome last Saturday, I met a man named Robert. He invited me to take a seat beside him on a cot pushed against the wall — his home for the previous three days and the foreseeable future. Robert had lived in New Orleans for all of his......

New Orleans, September 8 Who Will Bury This Man? His feet are sticking out from under a bent sheet of corrugated metal. Should I tell you more? He died where he lies, facedown on the asphalt about 50 feet from the door of the Arthur Monday Jr. health clinic. The......

Glenn Spencer was late. I had been waiting for 30 minutes outside the Jumping Jack gas station in Palominas, Arizona, when his green minivan rattled up beside me. A ruddy-faced man of 67 with a dusty Army cap pulled over his white hair and a small bruise beneath one eye,......

Photos by Juan De Dios Garcia Davish Early one recent Sunday evening, standing in the shade of the oak trees outside the VFW hall in Campo, California, Sally wrung her hands. “I don’t understand why there isn’t more people out here. I really don’t.” A round woman with graying blond......

I first saw the fliers in March. I had parked my car on Bonnie Brae near MacArthur Park, and there it was, folded beneath my wiper, handwritten in English and Spanish and Xeroxed on white copy paper. “Jesus is coming,” the flier announced, “July 7, 2005 to Echo Park 8:00......

The riot gear won’t come out for another 45 minutes, but at noon you can already spot the cops on the roof of the old school auditorium beside the Baldwin Park city hall, and it’s hard to miss the two plainclothesmen in wraparound shades leaning against the wall of the......

Illustrations by Brooks Salzwedel The stories of Bill Smith and of a man whom, with all apologies for unoriginality, I will call John Doe, begin not in this bright age of sexual freedom, but beneath the shadow of decades gone by. Back then, from a distance at least, Bill Smith......

LATE LAST WEEK, with the Republican National Convention over and the city still remarkably intact, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was grasping at straws. Apparently smarting from the anticlimax, or cranky from having to pretend to be a Republican all week, Bloomberg tried to argue that verbally harassing Republican delegates......