In the basement of a Cape Cod on a suburban street in northern New Jersey, a teenage boy turns to a friend and asks impatiently, "What did you get? I'll give you some of this"--indicating a bottle of Ritalin stuffed into the front pocket of his backpack--"for some of that painkiller." As a rap song plays just loud enough not to disturb the neighbors, his friend eyes the bottle suspiciously. "Is this generic, or is it the good stuff?" he ...

The spectacular success of Indians in the U.S. smashes old stereotypes and adds a dash of spice to the American melting pot By ANTHONY SPAETH When Manoj Night Shyamalan was growing up in suburban Philadelphia, his parents--both immigrants from India, both physicians--didn't hesitate to pile on the pressure. There was simply an assumption that I'd come in first in my class, he recalls. He was also expected to follow them into medicine. When he ...

Corrections and Clarification Appended: February 19, 2008Lawrence King, an eighth grader who identified as gay and wore makeup and nail polish, was 15 when he was declared brain dead on Feb. 13. The day before, he had been shot in the head in an Oxnard, Calif., classroom full of students. Police have charged a sweet-faced boy called Brandon McInerney, 14, with first-degree murder and with a hate crime. According to the Los Angeles Times and KTLA, ...

The hunt for a monster can warp the pursuers. The wanted man was one of the most loathsome creatures of modern times: "Ivan the Terrible," who hacked at his naked victims with a sword as he herded them by the thousands into the gas chambers he operated at the Nazi death camp Treblinka. American and Israeli officials were certain they had found him in John, formerly Ivan, Demjanjuk, a retired suburban Cleveland autoworker of Ukrainian descent. He was extradited to ...

Of all the revelations, this is the conversation I remember from a September day almost 10 years ago. I was driving home from school with my daughters; they were 4 and almost 7, and the news a few days after the attacks was relentlessly grim: body counts and a smoking, toxic ruin and cars unclaimed at suburban train stations because Mom or Dad never came home from work that day. So we listened to the oldies station on the radio. ...

Statement Appended: July 2, 2010I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to ...

It's a jungle out there. Well, not really: it's worse than a jungle. It's a stretch of roadway anywhere in America, and in place of the ravenous tigers and stampeding rhinos and slithery anacondas are your friends and neighbors and co-workers, that nice lady from the church choir and the cheerful kid who bags your food at the local Winn Dixie--even Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis. They're in a hurry. And you're in their way. So step on ...

When students went back to school last week at Permian High in Odessa, Texas, they wondered what had happened to the place over the summer. Gone was their old wide-open campus, now surrounded by a security fence with controlled entry points and clusters of surveillance cameras. Inside the school, they had to wear bar-coded photo-ID badges, and in many classrooms, "black boxes" with mirrored eyes stared implacably down from the walls, above signs that read, IT SHOULD BE ASSUMED THERE ...

For Laura Geraghty, April 1, 2009, started out just as any other day. It was sunny but cool, she remembers. The mother of two, also a grandmother, was at her job, driving a school bus for the Newton Public School District in suburban Boston, Massachusetts. Her passengers, special-needs children, were wheelchair-bound. Seemingly in good health and in good spirits, Geraghty was finishing up her late-morning run, transporting a student and teacher back to Newton South High School, when she realized ...

Six people were sentenced to death for murder and other crimes in riots that killed about 200 people in western China, state media reported Monday. The southern California artist rode the waves in Indonesia, India and Morocco, and on dry land, his curiosity piqued about the religion practiced there. He visited mosques and eventually, acquired a translated copy of the Quran, Islam's holy book. Then came the chilling attacks of September 11, 2001, and Birk realized that Americans knew very ...