The article focuses on an ex-cop named Rick Strawn, who will come and take your kid -- in handcuffs if necessary -- to a place that will whip him into shape. Nadya Labi, a senior editor at Legal Affairs, followed Strawn as he snatched Louis, a 16-year-old, out of his bed in Tampa and took him to Casa by the Sea, a school in Mexico that specializes in American teens who are, Labi writes, "talking back, getting poor grades, staying out late, drinking, having sex too soon, or taking drugs."

Louis's parents hired Strawn -- for $1,800 -- because their son's grades had plummeted, he kept sneaking out after his 9 p.m. curfew, and they suspected he was smoking pot.

When Strawn arrived, at about 2 in the morning, Louis was fast asleep, clueless about his parents' plans. His father popped open Louis's locked bedroom door with a dinner knife and Strawn stepped into the room, where the boy's teddy bear sat in an armchair. Louis woke up, his face swabbed with acne cream, and he fumbled for his glasses, utterly baffled.

His parents kissed Louis goodbye and left. Then Strawn and an assistant handcuffed the boy, flew with him to San Diego, then drove him to Mexico.

After he dropped Louis off at Casa by the Sea, Strawn ignited his traditional victory cigar and blew out a celebratory smoke ring. Another job well done.

Or maybe not. Labi, a dogged investigative reporter, reveals some disturbing facts about the foreign "schools" that cater to troubled American kids, and about the unregulated "teen transporter industry" that includes Strawn's company and about 20 others around the country.

For instance, Casa by the Sea, which costs $30,000 a year, offers, Labi writes, "no traditional academic instruction." Instead, the students watch self-help tapes and attend behavior modification seminars. Kids who break the rules are punished with solitary confinement. "I had to sit with crossed legs in a closet for three days," one Casa alumna told Labi.

Labi also uncovered that, in 1997, Strawn pleaded guilty to reckless conduct and DUI after an incident in which he was accused of kicking his stepdaughter, choking his wife and firing his gun in a drunken rage. A judge sent Strawn to an alcohol treatment program for six months, and he was permitted to retire from the Atlanta police force the day before he would have been fired.

Strawn is sober now, a religious man who never takes off his "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelet and likes to pray with the kids he transports. Still, there are problems sometimes. Three years ago he took a 17-year-old Alabama girl to a school in Jamaica that is run by the company that owns Casa by the Sea. The next day, the girl ran out of a classroom and committed suicide by leaping off a cliff.

Wanna get rid of your kid? Believe me, I understand the feeling. But don't do it before you read this very disturbing story.

The Road Less Traveled

These days, you can drive on interstates from sea to shining sea and not see much of America except guardrails, billboards and rest stops. Writer Charles Graeber decided to try something different.

Graeber and his girlfriend, photographer Bree Fitzgerald, drove a Jeep from Canada to Mexico -- entirely on dirt roads. They've chronicled the long, strange trip in a delightful piece in the August issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine.

Starting at the northern tip of Idaho's panhandle last October, they spent 20 days slogging through 3,168 miles of Oregon, Nevada and California on wretched rocky roads over mountains and across deserts. It was a tough trip but the scenery was spectacular -- huge rocks that look like "a sea of melted Hershey's kisses," a sunset "resembling rhubarb pie with peach ice cream" and a valley of Joshua trees that "spike the desert like millions of happy green feather dusters."

Traveling off-road, they met some wonderfully offbeat Americans. There's Tosh, a cowgirl who used to be a promoter for rap musicians. And Sue, who has been cooking for a crew of power-line builders in Hells Canyon, Idaho, since her fourth divorce: "Last Sue saw of her number four was over a shotgun barrel, him running naked through the trailer court, still covered in soap."

And then there's Rose, who works in a motel near the bombing range at the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, Calif. "I've lived near the bombing range all my life," Rose says. "I won't get out of bed for anything less than six on the Richter scale."

Yale Men

By some strange quirk of art history, the man who inspired Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau to draw his first cartoon was . . . George W. Bush.

Trudeau tells the story in a rare interview in the Aug. 5 issue of Rolling Stone. He met Bush at Yale in the '60s, when Bush was a junior and Trudeau a freshman. "He was just another sarcastic preppy who gave people nicknames and arranged for keg deliveries," Trudeau says.

The following year, Bush became the rush chairman of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. "I do believe he has the soul of a rush chairman," Trudeau says, acidly. That year, the Yale Daily News ran an exposé of hazing techniques at Deke -- initiates were branded on the butt with a red-hot coat hanger -- and the paper's editor asked Trudeau to illustrate it. "So the very first cartoons I did for the Yale Daily News," Trudeau says, "were about Deke and George Bush."

As Doonesbury readers know, Trudeau was no fan of the first President Bush, but he's really scathing about the second.

"George Bush was a competent public servant but no leader," Trudeau says of our president's father. "Now, of course, he seems to me a paragon of decency, moderation and thoughtfulness, everything his arrogant, radical, proudly ignorant son is not. What a shame the world has to suffer the consequences of Dubya not getting enough approval from Dad."