Joel LeBlanc, a 34-year-old quiet, gray-haired intellectual, stared through his glasses at a doctor lighting a cigarette. “Why is he doing that?" Joel wondered. Suddenly he thought he knew. “He hates me. That’s why. He hates me.” Joel saw another doctor smile. “Why is he smiling? Because he hates me too. They all hate me. They want to hurt me.” Joel wanted to hurt them first. He saw a stool “I'll bash that smiler's head in,” Joel decided. He rushed to the stool. Then he stopped short. Have you guessed what was wrong with Joel? He was showing symptoms of schizophrenia — a dread mental disease. If Joel was a real schizophrenic, he probably would be taken to a mental hospital like 350,000 other victims in this country. His chances for full recovery would be slight. But Joel’s symptoms disappeared in less than two hours. He was not a schizophrenic. He was a subject in a dramatic experiment that may point to a cure of the illness that accounts for half of our mental patients and one-quarter of all those who lie in hospital beds...

“NOBODY outside of New Orleans gives a hoot about Ewing Poteet,” claims Ewing Poteet, a smiling, rumpled ex-fiddler, as he goes about his business of trying to whirl the excitement of theatre into the heart of New Orleans. He plies one of the odd American trades. About 1,500 miles from Broadway, Poteet, drama critic for the New Orleans Item, covers the waterfront of theatre — the amateur clubs, the touring companies, the college shows. He covers the stuff few give a hoot about. No one seems to care if Poteet dulls or excites taste for theatre. No one cares if he is foolish or brilliant, if he upholds theatre or sneers at it, if he knows how to write. Yet most Americans turn to writers like Poteet when they want news and comment about theatre. At least 140,000,000 Americans do not read Brooks Atkinson every morning. The words of the New York Times drama critic or his Broadway colleagues make no impression on millions who, by harsh chance, live outside metropolitan New York. The forty-four-year-old Poteet, in his seventh year as Item critic, is more than just his newspaper’s theatre man. Most non-New York critics are the drama-music-movie-radio-television-nightclub-book-phonograph-art editors of their outfits. While Poteet does not dabble in all these beats, he does have an added chore: he spends half his journalistic hours covering the civil courts of New Orleans...

“Ants, mommy, ants” whimpered three-year-old Sonny as he scampered from the front lawn into his home. Sonny's face was twisted into a strange white. His frantic mother searched his little body. On his left foot swelled three ant bites. Twenty-nine hours later, Sonny was dead. The boy had become the rare victim of an allergic reaction to the vicious bite and sting of an imported fire ant. There is a treatment for the reaction. But few doctors even know the Imported fire ant exists. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recognizes the ant as an economic pest, hurting crops, land and birds. Now two Tulane University scientists have recognized it as a medical pest irritating many people sometimes killing. Dr Rodney C. Jung, a specialist In tropical medicine and Dr. Vincent J. Derbes, an allergist, do not believe the imported fire ant makes a huge or unusual medical problem. But until doctors understand the problem they may give wrong, useless treatment...