Despair

I know and can accept the fact that people are supposed to get the government they deserve. But please! This is getting ridiculous.More than a decade has passed since the Reagan-Bush administrations first enchanted the country with their "voodoo economics" and sure enough, millions of Americans are beginning to feel like little clay dolls -- pinched and pulled and perforated by malevolent witch doctors.The recession continues and may even be deepening. Unemployment remains high. Consumer spending remains low. Industries have been rocked by layoffs.

Brokers as JunkiesCongratulations to David Conn for his concise and clear explanation of how the retail brokerage industry really works ("Taking Stock of Your Broker"-- April 24).I am sure the industry will drag out the same old excuse as a defense: "Only a small number of the brokers are bad apples."If they do, they have missed the point that Mr. Conn so aptly has made.The root of the abuse lies in the way the brokerage firms compensate their brokers (read salespeople) solely through commissions.

THIS coming Saturday, there's going to be a big rally in Washington to try to galvanize the country into caring about what has happened to our cities.What has happened, of course, is that the cities have been abandoned, not only by government and politicians, but by lots of average citizens looking for a calmer, less abrasive life in places that have grass and backyards, out beyond the city limits. Some people forsake the city without actually going away, by cocooning themselves in secure city enclaves and pretending that the neighborhoods of blight and grinding poverty and racial isolation, being out of sight, are out of mind as well.

I turned 50 this weekend. And I find myself both more contented and filled with great expectations than any other time in my life. Old enough to have learned a few important lessons -- some simple and hard, others obvious but elusive - I am still young enough to benefit from them. Long ago, I gave up booze and its sibling shenanigans, but still break out the cast iron skillet around 10 p.m. - lifting it the extent of my exercise - to fry up hard salami and cheese like they used to do at DiNitti's back when Little Italy was Little Italy.

Sure as death and taxes, the Chesapeake Bay will get more crowded every year for the foreseeable future.The population within a day's drive will rise by several million in the next few decades. Recreational boats registered in Maryland and Virginia are increasing rapidly, having tripled already from 124,000 in 1967.But those who prefer their bay on the quiet and empty side should not despair -- rather adapt. Many wild creatures, far less facile than we, already have managed remarkable behavioral change in the face of a changing bay.Deer and black ducks have switched to nocturnal behavior in response to hunting pressure; and swans, geese and canvasback ducks made large and rapid shifts in diet, responding to declines in the bay grasses they preferred toeat.

NEW YORK - Grasping photographs and ever-slimmer straws of hope, family and friends of those missing since the World Trade Center attack spent much of yesterday going from hospital to hospital in a desperate search for loved ones. With phone lines hopelessly overburdened and information on victims scarce, New Yorkers did what they inevitably must do when they want something in the city: get in line and check the list. In this case, it was neither a line for show tickets nor the guest list for a new club.

Leaning into the table of writing students, Jean McGarry emphasizes a point with slender hands that seem to contour her thoughts. She's talking about the imagery of Virginia Woolf, leading the young writers deeper and deeper into the acuteness of literary detail.The students sit, bottles of Seltzer at the ready, as if the course, "Describing in Fiction," were a particularly rigorous form of exercise. It is. Through their own stories as well as carefully chosen texts, they are learning just how much work strong description can accomplish.

Jay North was supposed to stay 7 years old forever. As television's Dennis the Menace, he would remain frozen in time: a happy-go-lucky extrovert in striped overalls, his wispy blond locks flopping around as he made a mess of every situation.But while the TV series "Dennis the Menace" has aged into an antiquated and innocent piece of Americana -- canceled 30 years ago by CBS -- its star has evolved into someone quite different than we remember.Even during the four years he reigned as the adorable Dennis Mitchell, the image was an illusion.

ISIKVEREN, Turkey -- As night falls, so does the cold over the 75,000 Iraqi refugees who have escaped to this camp high in Turkey's Cudi Mountains.Fires light the mountainside. Smoke from burning wood stings the eyes. "Emine!" calls a blind old woman, lost on the muddy hillside with her friend. The two stand in complete darkness as the blind woman calls for her daughter."We know our tent is around here somewhere," says Salih, the old woman's friend.They cannot stop with strangers for the night.

OAKLAND, Calif. - They called it "the Promised Land," but 20 years later its real name, Jonestown, still sends an icy knife stabbing through the heart.In the tropical jungles of Guyana, more than 900 Americans followed their charismatic leader on a mission to build a utopian paradise. Instead, Jonestown became the site of the largest mass suicide in modern history.Deborah Layton lived in Jonestown but did not die there. Among the few members of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple to leave Guyana alive, Layton was a defector who raised an alarm over what was brewing in the cult's armed jungle camp.