Special Reports

When Elizabeth Carlson was a toddler in the mid-1950s, her parents nicknamed her Little Miss Fluff. Later on, she made up an imaginary playmate named Susarena, and when she was old enough for kindergarten, she befriended a classmate named Pamela Pink. "I thought her name was so cool," Carlson remembers.

Years later, however, all of these innocent childhood memories became part of a living nightmare for Carlson, who came to believe that she had unknowingly endured horrendous childhood sexual abuse – rape and torture in a satanic ritual cult. The abuse had been so awful that her conscious mind had been unable to cope with it, so she had "split off" alternate personalities in order to survive. One of them was Little Miss Fluff, a tearful infant alter who couldn’t speak. Pamela Pink was a footloose, carefree alter. Another was Susarena, a self-destructive personality who made repeated suicide attempts. And there were many, many more. read more

Midway through HBO’s recent series on the U.S. quest to reach the moon, an installment titled "1968" proposes that the six-day orbital flight by astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders in December was about all that rescued the year from disaster. At a distance of three decades, that time of rebellion and polarization was epitomized by stock footage of riots, assassinations, and war. But in celebrating the space program, this docu-drama missed the bigger picture.