Judith Lewis

In 1998, it finally happened: After nearly five years of dominating headlines, magazine covers and airtime, the Internet got dull. The utopian promise that the Internet would spawn communities independent of race and physical attributes had started to seem numbingly naive; even triumphs over censorship rang hollow. (Who remembers the......

“I like your attitude,” says the young man handing out contributor-information cards at the door of El Rey theater, where mayoral candidate Francis DellaVecchia is throwing his first fund-raising party. “Everyone asks me, ’Why do I have to fill these out? Why do you want to know where I work?‘......

I once knew an Italian mAN who, while sojourning in Minnesota as a college professor, would stand and stare out of his front window on Saturday mornings at the throngs of men working on their lawns. “Every weekend, they cut the grass!” he‘d exclaim, throwing up his hands, as perplexed......

A few years ago, Marisela Norte was trying to convince a young high school girl that her life was worth writing about. “I told her, ’You don‘t need to be famous, you don’t need to be important,‘” Norte remembers. “I said, ’There are incredible stories -- the most incredible stories......

Here’s a little experiment: Get out your college copy of Moby-Dick, sit yourself down in a crowded restaurant, open the book to a page near the middle and begin to read. Make sure you hold the book so passers-by can see the binding. Look transfixed. And count how many people......