Author:

State and local governments have known about it for 15 years. So why are Hopkins residents still living with gasoline-tainted water? Columbia Free Times' Amanda Presley looks into the lack of action on the potentially toxic water in rural Hopkins, S.C., which is predominantly black and low-income. "Rosa Nowell, who used to live in a home where [a state agency] found contamination, asks how long the wells have been affected. It’s a question no one at the meeting can answer. 'That’s where I raised my children, from babies,' Nowell says. 'We were there.'”

Joe Lieberman, a Democratic hawk for war in Iraq, keeps a crystal dove in his Hartford, Conn., office. This gave peace activist Christopher Allen-Doucot hope when he led a delegation to present Lieberman with their views. Allen-Doucot "unveiled his photographs of starving, bullet-riddled Iraqi children, gathered from his repeated trips to sanction-plagued Iraq, and Lieberman found himself face to face with the consequences of the policies he so vocally supports." The senator's response? Sadness in private, silence in public, Dan Levine writes in the Hartford Advocate.

"Nobody gives a shit what anti-war or pro-war writers think. Really. So shut up. That goes double for poets. Shut the hell up, poets. Everybody just shut up." First Rall, then Hitchens, now Neal Pollack lets loose on pre-war hand-wringing in The Stranger. "Do you really want to hear what any writer thinks about our upcoming war with Iraq? I don't," Pollack says toward the beginning of his 2,500-word piece. Of all the writing spewed forth after Sept. 11, Pollack finds only two pieces that will stand the test of time: the Onion's first issue after the attack and William Langewiesche's book on unbuilding the World Trade Center.