Bill Donahue is a writer living in Portland, Oregon.

Kateri Tekakwitha was a seventeenth-century Mohawk Indian and a Roman Catholic ascetic who slept on a bed of thorns. On December 19, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI credited her with causing a miracle. She will soon be named a saint. But what exactly does that mean? How does someone become a saint? And why is a con artist Italian friar who faked his stigmata wounds already a saint?
Edited by Laura Hohnhold.

Six astronauts simulate a mission to Mars, by repairing to a Spartan basement in Moscow and isolating themselves in a fake spaceship for 520 days. Edited by Mark McClusky.

Can Antioch College return from the dead again? Edited by Dean Robinson.

A week among the Latino emigres working at one McDonald’s in Washington, DC. Edited by David Rowell.

In the late 1990s, NASA spent $250 million on a satellite designed to monitor climate change. The satellite has never flown. What happened? Edited by Seth Fletcher.