The other day I was going through a pile of old travel sections (something I almost never do) looking for a story I had written about an Easter I once spent in Greece. The section, which I eventually found, carried my Greek Easter story along with a story by Tania Grossinger about Passover at her family's famous resort in the Catskills. The third story on the cover - we didn't think that a pair of interesting Sunday narratives would be enough for readers back then - was about Rio de Janeiro. The headline - "Girl from Ipanema no longer so lovely" - suggested that it was the generic story you sometimes saw about how the inspiration for the famous song had inevitably aged. The byline - of a local freelancer - suggested otherwise. Before the jump I came to this:
"Inflation is once again on the gallop and unemployment lines are lengthening. What's more, Brazilian voters say they no longer believe the government is willing or able to solve the country's seemingly intractable economic problems..."
I checked the date of the section - March 31, 1991 - and was almost as depressed by how American newspapers have changed as I was by how Brazil hasn't.
