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.

Mongolia strikes it rich on gold and coal. Edited by David Rowell.

The Elwha was dammed a hundred years ago. The river’s salmon runs all but ceased. Then late in 2011, the feds began tearing down the river’s two dams, to the delight of the Lower Elwha Klallam Indians, who have fished the river for centuries. Edited by David Rowell.  

When a few stalks of rogue, genetically modified wheat sprouted on an Oregon farm, dire secrecy ensued. The US Department of Agriculture would not disclose the whereabouts of the wheat, which had never been approved for human consumption. Monsanto, which engineered the seeds, was likewise keeping mum. So I began searching. Edited by Brad Weiners.  

In August, 1913, a pudgy middle-aged man named Joe Knowles stepped naked into the woods of Maine, to see if he could live as a primitive man. When he returned to his home in Boston two months later, clad in a bearskin,  200,000 people greeted him at North Station. Edited by Toby Lester.

Inside the arcane world of competitive stair racing. Edited by Dean Robinson.