She has a piece in this week's New Yorker, but only in the mag. They did link online to her piece out of Oklahoma City from 2003 -- The Marriage Cure. (Print it before it's gone, or read The Best American Magazine Writing of 2003.)
It's pertinent to the dialogue about access and getting out of the office. Obviously, time is probably the biggest challenge here, but hanging out is priceless. The passage below is a tiny piece of this story, but it gives you a sense of the benefits of this massive reporting effort that only comes one way -- by being there:
A slim white woman emerged from Dillard’s department store with four shopping bags, a Burberry satchel, and, dangling from her wrist, a silver peace-sign charm. Kim suddenly grew still. “I’d like to be elegant someday, too,” she said quietly. “But if I ever did get a healthy, wealthy life, I wonder if my children would grow up looking down at people like me.”
When a bus that would have taken her home accelerated past, Kim practiced answers to potential interview questions: “I have a genuine interest in fashion and have been working a cash register since I was fourteen.” When the next bus cruised by, she tried a trick that she’d recently invented to manage depression, recalling in detail the happiest days of her life. “Here’s one I like—my mom’s birthday, in April, 1990. We had nothing to eat, we were suffering at the time, and the thing to know about my mom is that the only pleasure she ever really had in life was bingo—Lucky Star Casino, Will Rogers Bingo Hall, she played everywhere, and sometimes took me along to play a card, too. One of those places had a special deal for regulars—you play free on every Wednesday in the month of your birthday. She went out, and when she came back we were going to bed. She rustled us up and told us to open the door. She’d played U-Pick-Em and won twenty-five hundred dollars in cash and a big old stereo, which was sitting there outside. All eight of us busted out crying. Back then, we thought a hundred dollars was everything, so with twenty-five hundred dollars we could hardly imagine it, we thought we were millionaires. I got a pink-and-blue winter parka, and jeans from the old Fifty-Percent-Off Store. Mom bought some serious groceries and then gave us each ten dollars to spend however we wanted. I went to the 7-Eleven and bought Good & Plenty.”
Another bus was coming through the shopping plaza. Kim stepped forward, signalling furiously. When it swerved around her, she sank to the curb. The bus was not only the seventh one to pass her that day; it was the last bus to Sooner Haven until morning. In terms of landmass, Oklahoma City is the third-largest metropolis in America, and she was a five-hour walk from home.
A pretty woman in a tear-and-sweat-soaked blouse will eventually be noticed by somebody. A Chevy Impala pulled over, driven by a black woman not much older than Kim. “I know, I used to have to take the bus, too,” said the driver, who, as it turned out, was an assistant supervisor at a gift store in the mall. “I’ll drive you home.” She went past the alabaster state capitol and into the northeast quadrant, where Sooner Haven is situated, and where TV crews were covering a shooting from the parking lot of a carryout called Leo’s BBQ. “It as bad as they say around here?” the woman asked Kim when they reached the project’s gates.
“If you go outside and try to be known, you’re going to have trouble,” said Kim, her optimism not yet flattened by the Buckle manager, who would not keep her appointment. “But if you live all low and invisible you’ll more than likely be O.K.”
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