Browse Topics

Flight

Amid Plenty

Anuradha Mittal On The True Cause Of World Hunger

The United Nations estimates that around 830 million people in the world do not have adequate access to food. Numbers, though, distance us from the real pain felt by the hungry. Hunger is a form of torture that takes away your ability to think, to perform normal physical actions, to be a rational human being. There are people in my own country, India, who for months have not had a full stomach, who have never had adequate nutrition. This sort of hunger causes some to resort to eating anything to numb the pain: cats, monkeys, even poisonous roots.

Third Planet Operating Instructions

This planet has been delivered wholly assembled and in perfect working condition, and is intended for fully automatic and trouble-free operation in orbit around its star, the sun. However, to insure proper functioning, all passengers are requested to familiarize themselves fully with the following instructions.

Still Life

Lemons

March 2001

How I yearn to be a better man, though I know that’s just a different kind of greed.

Selected Poems

Green

Katrina had been talking about the garden for years, as long as he’d known her. Some women dream of white weddings, or sandy beaches, or new diamond rings; she dreamed of spinach and lettuce, garlic and tomatoes, and tall native grass in the spring. Each day, the man looks out the window above their bed and sees that there is more to be done, that her garden is green but not green enough.

Payday

It’s summer, and I’m taking two women from a foundation that helps fund my work to see where the money is being spent, and if the money is being turned into productive, life-sustaining gardens.

Blind Faith