Ben Ryder Howe

The peculiar hitches of a growing Third World trend: conversion to the dollar. "In bars and banks and at the airport people could be seen holding the new bills up to the light, turning them this way and that as they scrutinized the cryptic imagery and the portrait gallery of American leaders."

Why you still can't drive from the top of the Americas to the bottom

Colombia's capital, Bogotá, long seemed exempt from the lawlessness and violence of that country's chronic civil war. Not anymore.