During the dog days of last summer, when the New York City tabloids needed a breather from O.J. Simpson, <I>Newsday</I> discovered Gus the Neurotic Bear. He wasn’t too hard to find. A 700-pound polar bear, he lives in the Central Park Zoo, sharing a large slate-gray quarry of rock, both real and fake, with Lily and Ida. The females do what you might expect of bears in sticky 97-degree heat: roll on their backs to scratch fleas, pee in the stream, sit and watch the passing crowd in the windows of their habitat. But, in a deep pool, Gus swims short laps like a bear possessed. He surfaces with a neck like a giant fur buoy and falls into a back stroke to the other side, pauses, and dives back along the bottom with bubbles trailing by his whiskers. He repeats the same motions for hours on end, down to the way his tongue flicks across his back lips.

Yolanda Rivera parks her rusty two-toned Cadillac Seville on the cracked concrete driveway at the site of her future factory in New York City’s South Bronx. She may not be your typical capitalist entrepreneur, but then the Bronx is not your typical park. Manufacturers have been abandoning the brick factories for decades, leaving only the giant Hunts Point wholesale food market, and Rivera now stands in the 90-acre Harlem rail yards which have done little but grow weeds since the early 70s.

Sometimes medicine isn’t as glamorous as it sounds. Take Premarin, the leading estrogen replacement drug prescribed to about eight million women to prevent the "hot flashes" of menopause or the "dowager’s hump" of osteoporosis in old age. Wyeth-Averst Laboratories has made the drug for 50 years, but the basic ingredient remains a natural estrogen collected from the urine of pregnant mares.

Volunteers in the Louisiana Bucket Brigade monitor air pollution in the neighborhoods adjoining ExxonMobil’s Chalmette Oil Refinery.