"How do white people learn what to think about race? It's best not to think about it." That's the conclusion Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer comes to after delving into his own childhood and adolescent memories of growing up in the South. He worked months on this story after being challenged by an author who said black writers are always expected to write very personally about race, while white writers "always get to lie back a little." No more. Schutze went deep and came up with some weird and uncomfortable memories.
It's build a home, go to jail for Julio Sandoval and Beatriz Chavez, who face possible five-year prison terms for helping to house the poor in Baja California. But Mexican officials don't even enforce their own rulings when the culprit is Duro Bag, which illegally fired workers trying to form an independent union. LA Weekly's David Bacon reports that the common thread is a system that looks after Mexico's rich as well as foreign investors. And President Bush wants to expand this free-trade reality across the entire hemisphere.
Village Voice CEO David Schneiderman announces that former Seattle Weekly Editor-in-Chief Knute "Skip" Berger will rejoin the paper this week after a two-year "sabbatical," replacing Audrey Van Buskirk. Schneiderman also names 16-year Seattle Times vet Chuck Taylor as managing editor. Van Buskirk had been hired in Nov. 2000 to replace Berger.
Sometime around two in the morning of Dec. 17, 2001, 27-year- old Christian Longo allegedly killed his wife and three children, dumped their bodies into the river on the outskirts of tiny Waldport, Ore., and headed for the Mexican Riviera for a fun-filled vacation. In the conclusion of his two-part series in Willamette Week, Carlton Smith asks why a young father would deliberately kill his own family, and why law enforcement authorities failed repeatedly to act after Longo's nationwide crime spree gave them plenty of chances to stop him.
