You knew the article was going to be good when up front you saw the Contributors list: "Katherine Boo ("Opening Night" p. 22), a staff writer, has spent the past fourteen months reporting from the Mumbai slums, for a book to be published next year."

If you've kept up with your New Yorkers better than me — easy to do — you've read the piece in the February 23 issue. If you haven't read it, "Opening Night" is what you have to read after you've seen Slumdog Millionaire. The article is based on the night of the movie's premiere in Mumbai, but the setting is across town in the slums where Boo writes reality the way Danny Boyle's movie carried out a script. 

[Thirteen-year-old Sunil looks for good metal.] The ceilings of the garage were low. All the lights were off, including some blue ones that looked like spiders. During the day, sparrows skittered around the garage; but sparrows didn't skitter at night, so he wasn't sure which animals were making sounds. Not rats, he decided; he had never encountered them here before. Guards he had often encountered, but tonight he couldn't hear where they were. He moved carefully to a stairwell, which, instead of exterior walls, had steel slats with spaces in between them. The slats let in the white light from the newly renovated terminal, where families were still waving to departing passengers. The light increased the risk of his being seen by one of the guards, but it was essential to making an appraisal.

Also a must-click: The fiction piece from the same issue, Italo Calvino's "The Daughters of the Moon," where naked girls go chasing the moon as it dies, previously unpublished in English. You reach a certain point in the story, about a page in, where you can't help but run alongside.

Will Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium make it off my counter this week, after sitting there the last few months? We hope and wait.

New Yorker, Aug. 18 and 25, 2003. The Family Issue.

James Surowiecki writes in Talk of the Town's Financial Page.

Economists have long argued that a child is analogous to a "consumer durable," like a refrigerator. Parents invest time, energy, and money in the child, and in exchange, as the child grows up, they get what the economist Gary Becker has called "psychic income"-as opposed to the real income that children in, say, an agrarian economy could bring in when they grew strong enough to help with the harvest. Becker observed a correlation in the United States between birth rates and the business cycle. When the economy is bad, people tend to have fewer kids. When it picks up, they have more. Although there are obvious limits to this point of view (we're evolutionarily programmed to want children but not refrigerators), it does suggest that, as with most goods, if kids are more expensive, people will accumulate fewer of them.

Great narrative journalist Katherine Boo writes "The Marriage Cure." She also does an interview with the magazine's Web site.

Washington Post reporter Katherine Boo won a MacArthur "genius" grant last month, and she's deserving of it. Michael Miner, the Chicago Reader media critic, can tell you why. "The passion of the artist irritates an audience that isn't persuaded to share it," he writes. "A great reporter isn't someone who cares; it's someone whose readers care."

Read some of her great work when you have time. In 1999 the Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for her two series, "Invisible Lives: D.C.'s Troubled System for the Retarded," and "Invisible Deaths: The Fatal Neglect of D.C.'s Retarded." Both are available here. Her other major Post series addressed welfare reform in 1996-97 from the perspectives of two different Washington women.