DECEMBER 1999 \| Volume 284 No. 6
	On the Rez The author of Great Plains describes the time he has spent on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota, and the Oglala Sioux Indians he has come to know. Do not call this place bleak: it is poor, yes, and permeated by tragic memories. But it is also a place that still produces heroes. One recent hero was an athlete who died just before she turned eighteen. "Words fail me," the author writes, "when I try to say how much I admire her." by Ian Frazier
The Health-Care Economy Is Nothing to Fear (This article is not available online.) America's health-care costs, it is said, are in a "runaway" state; the health-care sector is abysmally unproductive, eating up wealth and hurting competitiveness. But hold on, the author argues: that indictment is completely wrong. by Charles R. Morris

Reports

Notes & Comment:
Streamlining My Life
America seems to be filled with companies that offer time-saving services. But the parts of your life they want to organize may not be the ones you want to give up.
by Alex Beam

Urban Affairs:
Divided We Sprawl
People flee the central cities -- causing even more people to flee the central cities. No wonder suburbs can't cope with sprawl. The solution is something called metropolitanism, the authors say. We must embrace the idea that cities and suburbs are related rather than antithetical, and make up a single social and economic reality.
by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley

Fiction & Poetry

Fog
A poem
by Greg Pape

Assistance
A short story
by Roxana Robinson

Young Apple Tree, December
A poem
by Gail Mazur

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Arts & Leisure

Travel:
The Near North
Iceland has its eye on the millennium -- it's just not the millennium everyone else has an eye on.
by Cullen Murphy

Movies:
Gone With the Wind and Hollywood's Racial Politics
David O. Selznick's classic movie opened sixty years ago this month. Documents from the studio's archives reveal behind-the-scenes debates over how African-Americans should be depicted in the movie -- and how the movie's black actors should be treated in real life.
by Leonard J. Leff

Food:
Smoky Scotch
"I wanted to walk through a bog and steep myself in the smoke of a peat fire." Our correspondent visits the distilleries of Islay, in Scotland.
by Corby Kummer

Books

The Plight of the High-Status Woman
Getting dumped is the defining theme of a new popular genre.
by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

A Third Way for the Third World
Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen
by Akash Kapur

Brief Reviews
by Phoebe-Lou Adams

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The December Almanac

The Puzzler
by Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon

Word Watch
by Anne H. Soukhanov