Abortion might be illegal in Brazil, but that doesn't mean you can't get one -- a million people do every year. The rich pick up the phone and go into a fancy clinic. The poor go to the drugstore and buy an ulcer pill.

The pill is called Cytotec and...

We rolled off the Pasadena Freeway, Mapquest in hand. Turned right, then left, went a ways, another left, and the sign said, "San Marino." The houses were getting bigger, along with the lawns and trees. Stately, positively, some of them -- "Now it's starting to look right," my husband said....

The traffic is terrible, worse every day. It was always bad, L.A.-style--this is a modern city just like L.A. is, and the place grew with the car so there is no real center, just endless sprawl. What kept it under control till the 90s was the simple fact that there...

"On the bright green hills of Rio,
There grows a fearful stain.
The poor who come to Rio,
And can't go home again..."

That's how Elizabeth Bishop saw it in the '60s, and of course it's worse now. The "stain" is bigger, there are more poor, and...