SELECTED WRITINGS
30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s What’s Become of Them.
The Atlantic. July/August 2020 print issue, June 18, 2020 online.
For his first three years of life, Izidor lived at the hospital.
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The Wolves of Hate are Loose. No One is Safe.
The Washington Post, November 2, 2018.
Thoughts following the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.
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The Last Person on Earth
New York Magazine, June 24, 2018
A mother considers her son’s final thoughts and a type of suicide we don’t fully understand.
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What Do All Babies Need, Yet Aren’t Getting Equally?
Readers Digest, October 2014
To break the cycle of poverty, young children need something that’s as free and abundant as air. An extraordinary program is giving it to them.
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Can David Milarch Save Endangered Trees Through Cloning?
Readers Digest, April 2014
In America, there is a powerful optical illusion at work. Sure, we think, giant
pandas, Siberian tigers, and polar bears might be disappearing, but you can look
outside and see trees.
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Bodie
Bark Magazine, March 20, 2014
That first weekend, we weren’t sure we were keeping him.
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When 2.6 Inches of Snow Made Hell Freeze Over
CNN.com, January 30, 2014
Here’s where things went wrong…
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Wonder Dog
The New York Times Magazine, February 2, 2012
In May 1999, Donnie Kanter Winokur, 43, a writer and multimedia producer, and her husband, Rabbi Harvey Winokur, 49, beheld the son of their dreams, the child infertility had denied them.
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Melissa Fay Greene Riffs on Five Books, Nine Children
inReads, June 20, 2011
You really don’t have favorites.
There’s something special about that first-born though.
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The Flying Son
The New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2011
“He seemed like a quiet, polite, regular child… and so he was, until he took off.”
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I See America’s Diverse Future: In My House
CNN.com, May 6, 2011
All this Census Bureau talk of “aging whites” and “minority youth” inspires in my husband and me a feeling of: “Been there, done that.”
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Love Medicine
Good Housekeeping, February 2011
Last April, Torry Hansen, a single adoptive mother in Shelbyville, Tennessee, quietly bought a one-way ticket to Moscow for her 7-year-old Russian-born son, Artyem Saveliev. Adoptive and foster parents of neglected, abused, or traumatized children had a better-than-average hunch about what had gone wrong in Shelbyville.
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The Photographs of Esther Bubley: An Introduction
THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF ESTHER BUBLEY
The Library of Congress
Amy Pastan, editor; Melissa Fay Greene, introduction, 2010
It was, to judge from the photographs, a fatiguing era for women. All that drab, oft-mended, and practical wartime clothing—wool dresses and long wool overcoats, girdles and sweaters, felt hats with small veils, and boxy suit blazers with padded shoulders—made a girl just want to lie down.
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I Must Save My Child: The Axelrods, Lauren, and Epilepsy
PARADE, February 2009
When Susan Axelrod tells the story of her daughter, she begins like most parents of children with epilepsy: the baby was adorable, healthy, perfect.
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Reaching An Autistic Teenager
The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2008
“Edwick’s not scared of tornados; he’s scared of leprechauns.”
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How To Bully-Proof Your Child
Wondertime Magazine, September 2008
The secret? It’s a game. The only rule is: if you get upset, you lose.
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Our Children’s Crusade
THE AMERICAN JOURNEY OF BARACK OBAMA
by the Editors of LIFE
New York: Little, Brown and Company; 2008
I have not seen our children so united around a single purpose since the rush to get midnight tickets for the opening day of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
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Hope, Volume 1
Good Housekeeping, October 2007
How A Children’s Librarian and his Donkey-Drawn Bookmobile are Saving the World, One Kid at a Time
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Do I Love Him Yet?: Post-Adoption Panic
Adoptive Families, 2006
reprinted with permission from:
A LOVE LIKE NO OTHER
Pamela Kruger & Jill Smolowe, editors.
New York: Penguin/Riverhead Books, 2005.
When I found myself weeping in the laundry room over being forced to put my children’s sheets on the interloper’s bed, I knew I was in trouble.
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Savoring the Good Times
Good Housekeeping, October 1, 2006
The last time we saw Elizabeth Edwards, her husband, John, had lost an election…and she’d been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. How she’s battling back and what she’s grateful for now.
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Sandlot Summer
The New York Times Magazine, November 28, 2004
Last summer, in the bright, buggy late-afternoon heat, a few Druid Hills High School baseball players taught a bunch of little kids how to play the game.
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What Will Become of Africa’s AIDS Orphans?
The New York Times Magazine, February 2, 2002.
Virtually all of these children have lost both parents, most to AIDS…But no single one has been isolated by tragedy: being orphaned is one of the common experiences of their generation.
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Back to School Rituals
Good Housekeeping, August 2001
I love Mondays! I do. I love Monday mornings. I like the buzz of an alarm clock at 6:55 on a Monday morning. This puts me at odds with my children who prefer, for example, Friday afternoons.
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The Family Mobile
The New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2001, cover story
The Kayes family, with its 17 children, has survived by two mottos, Nancy Kayes tells me. She is 57, friendly and relaxed, with soft motherly skin, a head of dark curls and the sort of wonderful laugh that sounds as if she is overcoming reluctance…
The first motto is ”Better Dead Than Camping.”
The second is ”If It Will Fit in an Aquarium, You Can Have It.”
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Praying for Time: Early-Onset Alzheimer’s
Good Housekeeping, November 2000
“What’s going on?” Dave Giere asked sharply.
Linda drew up short at his tone. “What do you mean, ‘What’s going on?’”
“When were you planning to serve dinner?”
“Oh.…” she said vaguely, and laughed.
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The Orphan Ranger
The New Yorker, July 17, 2000
In the half-dark of a small Greenwich Village living room crammed with lithographs, woodcuts, and books, Dr. Jane Aronson sat watching videos until well past midnight. .. Each film, which lasted between three and four minutes, had been inexpertly made at an orphanage in Russia or Eastern Europe and featured a child available for adoption.
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Poetry, USA:The Favorite Poem Project
LIFE, October 1998
In 1997, Robert Pinsky of Boston University was named the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States and thus placed in charge of a realm more vast, ancient, and inscrutable than any jurisdictions assigned to his fellow officials at the Pentagon, CIA, or Bureau of the Census. Unlike theirs, his territory appeared on no map, though descriptions of it drifted down to him from the millennia. The style of these reports, however — “The garden flew round with the angel,/ The angel flew round with the clouds,/ And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round/ And the clouds flew round with the clouds” were such as might make a practical-minded civil servant weep.
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How to Raise Septuplets
LIFE, May 1998
Carlisle, Iowa, population 3400—or 3407, as someone amended the sign after a recent six-minute baby boom—is a town so small that Mayor Schlicher recently received a phone call from a teacher who planned to show a rented video to her classroom: “She phoned here first to get a legal reading on the situation. She’d been alarmed by the FBI warning.”
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No Rms, Jungle Vu
The Atlantic, December 1987
“The Egyptians have been civilized for four thousand years, my own ancestors probably a lot less,” Jon Charles Coe says. “We evolved over millions of years in the wild, where survival depended on our awareness of the landscape, the weather, and the animals. We haven’t been domesticated long enough to have lost those senses. In my opinion, it is the business of the zoo to slice right through that sophisticated veneer to recall us to our origins.”
read>The Atlantic–NO RMS JUNGLE VU December 1987
The Protracted Decline and Inevitable Bankruptcy of the Savannah Food Co-op
Country Journal, February 1981
An elderly gentleman in summer seersucker and white patent-leather shoes ducked into the store on my first morning behind the counter. He ducked, probably instinctively, because of the low, damp, and greenish ceiling.
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