Author:

Deep in the Web underground are pro-anorexia sites and chat rooms where Ana and Mia (anorexia and bulimia) are goddesses. Many of these "pro-ana" sites were dropped from Yahoo and MSN last year due to heavy public pressure. Baltimore City Paper's Natalie Davis found that they are still out there, offering comfort to the anguished, tips on losing weight, triumphant messages about getting to 65 pounds and mourning for those who die. Davis, who has flirted with eating disorders herself, peeks into a hermetic world rarely seen by outsiders and even more rarely understood.

A century ago, working-class men hopped freights to get around. Today, a new breed of train-hoppers meet up at the annual Hobo Gathering. Ben Ehrenreich of LA Weekly catches a piggyback car north to Dunsmuir, Calif., gets thrown off by police near Stockton, meets Longhaired Donnie and Buzz Blur, Magoo and Tennessee, New York Ron and Crazy Angel (and his dog Meathead), and sees what America looks like from the open door of a boxcar. Photographs by West Coast Virginia Slim, better known to Weekly readers as Virginia Lee Hunter.

Whole Foods' Madison, Wis., store is the first to vote to unionize. What does this bode for the 133 other stores in the enormously profitable healthy foods chain, asks John Brewer of the San Antonio Current. CEO John Mackey, a native of Austin, Texas, once compared unionization to having herpes, so one suspects a hard fought anti-union war.

A New Orleans police captain tells Gambit Weekly's Katy Reckdahl that tent shelters would be a temporary solution to the problems of New Orleans' homeless. The city's homeless need something, say advocates, but not this, and street people are wary of the latest clean-up in the French Quarter. "Lately, seems like police have increased hatefulness toward us," a homeless man tells Reckdahl. "Sometimes I wonder if they're being told, 'It's us against the homeless.'"