Every once in a while, one of us here at the office hears a comment from a St. Louisan expressing surprise that we indeed cover serious subjects like science, economics, race, immigration, poverty, homelessness, history, literature, disease, religion, the media, crime, politics, the environment.
We do. (Usually, the person in question saw a few pages of an issue several years ago.) Responding to one such St. Louisan earlier today -- the gentleman had enjoyed Jeannette Cooperman's homelessness feature in our January 2009 issue, but sounded startled that we'd given such a subject its due -- I decided to flip back through issues from the last year and a half and pull out some additional pieces he might enjoy in retrospect. A sampling of the meatier ones, one could say. Having created it for one, why not now share it with many. -- Stephen Schenkenberg
- The Missionary: The Reverend J.D. Clark has built a tight-knit congregation at his storefront church in North St. Louis. Is the neighborhood strong enough to sustain it? (08/07)
- Resurrecting the Rite: Some St. Louis Catholics would like to see Latin remain a dead language. Others say it's bringing the church back to life (10/07)
- Coming Home: What four St. Louisans discovered in Iraq—and what we can expect as they and their comrades return (11/07; sidebar)
- Veteran's Day, Every Day: We sure make a good show of remembering our history. So why do we seem perpetually doomed to repeat it? (11/07)
- Pulitzer 2.0: They took the buyout in 2005 and dreamed of taking journalism to a higher level, but will these former Post-Dispatch writers and editors succeed with their soon-to-launch news site? (12/07)
- The Second Death: In 2000, 15-year-old Vincent Greer was given a life sentence for shooting and killing his mother. His recent, mysterious death leaves more questions than ever for the father who lives on. (12/07)
- Shelf Life: One of St. Louis’ most eminent writers reflects on his seven-decade love affair with books and the 20,000-volume library in his University City home (12/07)
- Luddite's Delight: No car ... no TV ... no beer ... 30 days. How one writer survived a month of treading lightly on the earth (01/08)
- In Living Memory: Seven St. Louisans recall the days of segregation — and say that though we've come far, we still have a long way to go (02/08)
- A Conversation with Col. William Clay III, the First Black Chief of the Belleville Police Department (02/08)
- We're Sorry, Your Rescue Cannot Be Completed As Dialed: Seventy percent of St. Louis County's 911 calls now come from cellphones—and a lot of those calls are going unanswered (03/08)
- Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Horsemen: At least not in Illinois. Trainers at Fairmount Park are facing an uncertain future (04/08)
- The Wal-Mart Effect: How the biggest big box changed one small town—for better and for worse (04/08)
- Four-Part Series on the Kirkwood Shootings: Part I: Why Did Cookie Thornton Kill?; Part II: Kirkwood, Meacham Park and the Racial Divide; Part III: The Return to City Hall; Part IV: The Man Who Threw Chairs (05/08; Parts II-IV online only)
- A Conversation with Elsie Hainz McGrath: Woman, priest, excommunicant (05/08)
- The Amazing Waste: Trash has always been an ugly nuisance to be left at the curb and dealt with by someone else, but a hot mess of controversy in the county has thrown it right back in everyone's face. And what a crazy, complex, fascinating mess it is (06/08)
- The Year in Hell: Before finding his way to St. Louis in the mid-1940s, before medical school, before marrying and raising a family, and before a long and decorated career at Washington University, Gus Schonfeld was a young boy, a prisoner, at Auschwitz. Then another camp. Then another. Drawing on a series of interviews, Jeannette Cooperman reconstructs his experience (06/08)
- The Whole Town Was a Lake: It was arguably the most destructive flood in American history, inundating nine states over the spring, summer and early fall of 1993 and washing out homes and businesses to the tune of nearly $15 billion. Fifteen years after the toughest months for St. Louis, those who witnessed the disaster's effects and dealt with its aftermath — from the Monarch Levee break in Chesterfield to a near collapse of St. Louis city's flood wall — relive those waterlogged days and nights (07/08)
- Worlds Apart: Graceful and serenely egoless, a nonverbal 9-year-old girl in U. City floats in and out of what the rest of us call reality. In Kirkwood, a 10-year-old boy with a formidable mind and flash-fire temper manipulates video games for hours on end. Both kids have a form of autism. And the mystery's growing. (08/08)
- Betting on a Biomed Bull's-Eye: Years ago, clay bricks, Ford autos, cotton garments and fighter jets kept St. Louis alive. Now we're gambling on nanoparticles (09/08)
- Breathing Room: Talk about wide-open spaces, freedom and opportunity is so familiar, it lulls native-born Americans to sleep. But for many of the immigrants and refugees who've come to St. Louis, that sense of possibility changes everything, cutting through habit, family and custom until they truly can't go home again (09/08)
- Sidelined: As a college football star, Muhammad Abdulqaadir seemed destined for the NFL. But when the feds tagged his father as a possible terrorist after 9/11, the offers to play dried up. Is Abdulqaadir simply not good enough for the league, or has the image-conscious NFL blackballed him because of his father's past? |
- Mapping the Divide: A lifelong St. Louisan grapples with the city's racial disparity (12/08)
- Faith and Family: A Muslim woman, her Catholic grandmother and their overlapping lives (12/08)
- Halfway Home? St. Louis' fight to end homelessness has all the makings of an epic: shame, glory, scandal, triumph and an ironic twist of fate (01/09)
