I would point at the dinner my mother had served, an Italian dish. Manicotti. She had talked it up: hyped the difficulty of procuring the pasta; likened it to lasagna; boasted of its authenticity; and I had eaten. In fact -- horrible to recall my gullibility! -- I had praised it. We all did. My then-stepbrother engulfed platesful with cries of appreciation and galloped upstairs to top off his meal with a candy bar. Little did we suspect that we were about to become victims of sauce biarnaise syndrome.

As the night went on I began to feel sick and sicker, and finally crept to the bathroom to vomit. There was no question of leaving the bathroom, since it was clear that I would need to keep on vomiting, probably until death.

So I was thinking bad thoughts about manicotti (such an ugly word) when my stepbrother came stumbling in, also sick. After he had unburdened himself somewhat and slumped on the tiles next to me, I offered my sympathy to a fellow manicotti victim.

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After that, "The Stakeholder Society," Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott's bold new proposal in the form of a 229-page essay (plus notes), gets more complicated. The authors, both professors at Yale Law School, spend almost the entire book anticipating the arguments that opponents will wage against their idea. They devote a chapter to the liberalism vs. libertarianism vs. utilitarianism debate. They fill pages with discussions of such subjects as the philosophy of Tom Paine, the funding of the Head Start program, the truth about Social Security "insurance" and the constitutional implications of the North-South compromise that deemed each slave three-fifths of a person -- to name only a few.

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Harvard, it turns out, wasn't that different from Hollywood. At 8 a.m. on a Friday, 15 applicants were seated around a huge,
oval conference table and handed what looked like a TV network's press kit. While
other schools included course listings, curriculum information, research
news and financial aid forms in their packets, Harvard's shiny folder
featured a brochure with the cast of "ER" smiling on the cover.

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This diminished immediacy is due, in part, to the dancers. Twenty years ago, the troupe comprised eight or so eccentric modern dancers presided over by an idiosyncratic maestro who appeared every night in some corner of the stage. Now, at 80, Cunningham keeps to the wings, and the 15 or so ballet-trained dancers excel in flexibility and speed more than anything else. During the stark, slow 1959 classic "Rune," now in the repertory, they don't know what to do with their hyper-flexibility. When they extend their limbs in high, wide arcs and tilts, it doesn't look exciting, just easy.

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At the beginning of "Election," Alexander Payne's stinging follow-up to the 1996 "Citizen Ruth," Tracy ("Pleasantville" and "Cruel Intentions'" Reese Witherspoon) is running unopposed for what she envisions as the crown jewel of her high school career: student council president. But while her relentless perkiness and profound sense of entitlement hardly even register with her fellow students, they have not escaped the attention of teacher and student council advisor Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick). As Tracy ramps up her campaigning efforts, Mr. M.'s irritation blossoms into profound loathing, with just a hint of sick attraction. Politics is rarely pretty, but the students and faculty at Carver High are about to find out just how ugly it can get.

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A hole gapes in the floorboards, giving on to a naked abyss, a chasm that dives away into an unfathomable yawning space in the earth. A dank breeze plays at my hair. With a thudding heart I stare at what I've disclosed. Then I reach over and spread the carpet again as it was, and sink back on my haunches, my fists clenched at my thighs as I collect myself. This carpet appears to be the false cover to a trap. One naive step, one careless turn -- a person would plunge away into nothingness. I grunt to myself and shake my head with an intimate shiver. I run my hands through my disordered hair, and get to my feet and open the suitcase, to start putting some things in the chipped, flimsy bureau.

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I'm a kid, drying dishes for my mother. On summer evenings a slow caramel light plays across the yard and dapples the narrow two-lane out front. Cows stand in the north corner of the hilly field across the macadam, leaning up against one another in a velvet shamble and scratching themselves on the barbed-wire fence. All day the shade of a giant somnolent oak casts shadows across their broad, dumb faces. Evenings they stand as though sensually stunned, in light so thick and sepia gold they can't move.

In winter it's pitch dark by five and the cattle huddle in shelter on the other side of the hill. My brothers are wrestling across the twin beds in their room at the end of the darkened hallway; I hear their metal bed frames lurch on groaning wheels. We have a Maytag dishwasher but my mother prefers to wash dishes by hand; she says she gets them cleaner than any machine. And besides, this is our time to talk. It's when I hear all the stories about high school, her boyfriends and suitors, our town and everyone in it. I hear all she knows about my father's people and his other life, the one he led before he met her in 1948. I hear about her eccentric father, wealthy before the Depression ruined him, her much older sister and brother and the three siblings born after them, all dead before she drew breath: stillborn twins and a toddler who died of diphtheria. I hear about the woman who lost those babies and feared in the beginning that she would lose my mother as well. She was nearly 40 when her last child was born, as the Depression came on and the money was gone; the infant was scrawny and sickly, and her much older husband increasingly eccentric. I used to worry so, my grandmother told my mother, and the neighbor woman would tell me, "Don't you fret, she'll be the joy of your life." And it's true, you were.

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His professional demeanor was out of the ordinary, as well. Though he had the same pride and attention to detail as did other engineers, he didn't seem as highly invested in being an expert, or in being right all the time. In particular, he seemed to be aware of -- and to actually welcome -- Liz's point of view. Finding such cooperation in an engineer was a minor miracle in itself.

And he seemed to care about words. His mechanics were solid -- he actually diagrammed one of his sentences for clarification -- and he gave an unusual degree of consideration to tone. He was a chimera: a literate techie.

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Which was why Liz was not unhappy to find both she and Paul had arrived a few minutes early for Barry's weekly WHIP status meeting. They took chairs across from each other at the conference room's long table. Liz took the opportunity to express her gratitude for Paul's work:

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On Dawson's Creek (8 p.m., WB), Joey's father is paroled, Dawson learns about his dad and his film teacher and one character checks out of Capeside for good. Marie and Frank don't appreciate Ray's inspired Christmas gift on a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond (8 p.m., CBS). Elliot Gould narrates Shrug's autobiography on It's like, you know ... (8:30 p.m., ABC). Seven of Nine has a night on the town, courtesy of the Doctor, who's teaching her about human dating and mating rituals, on Star Trek: Voyager (9 p.m., UPN). And speaking of human dating and mating, Party of Five (9 p.m., Fox) starts its long-rumored "Julia has a girlfriend" storyline. Olivia d'Abo guests as the object of her affection. There's also an appearance by R.E.M. Great Composers (check local times, PBS) profiles Tchaikovsky and Puccini. Norm has no problem with the new boss's lax supervision on The Norm Show (9:30 p.m., ABC).

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Sports

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While no one can justify and certainly cannot condone the actions of
the boys in
Colorado this week, there are certainly mitigating circumstances
which deserve our
undivided and deep attention. As the mother of a young man who was
deemed
"different" all the way through middle and high school, I am outraged
at the knee-jerk
reactions of the media and professional pundits calling for less
freedom, more "tracking" of people who exhibit "antisocial" behaviors. The problem does not
lie with individual
students who don't follow the herd either socially or
philosophically. It lies with the
level of disrespect for and lack of civility to anyone who is
different from "us" that is so
pervasive in our society. The level of emotional violence and
physical harassment
directed at so-called outsiders in "idyllic" small-town America is
comparable to the
gang-related physical threat we so deplore in our inner cities.

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Stephen Skelley

La Jolla, Calif.

Dear Mr. Skelley,

Last week's horrifying massacre at Columbine High School in a suburb of Denver has brought widespread attention to clique-formation in high school -- a pitiless process that has remained amazingly consistent for the past 60 years. The arrogant jocks and debs still sublimely sail over the cowering nerds and wallflowers, who compensate by organizing their own pecking order, in minute gradations of status painfully obvious to everyone.

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Media Metrix measures Web sites' traffic by installing software on volunteers' computers (about 40,000 today), tracking their usage and extrapolating the results -- just as the Nielsen TV ratings do. The company blankets the Net with its survey results. Among industry insiders, ad buyers and journalists, it has become the de facto yardstick for who's up and who's down on the Web. And now it has acquired the ability to "move the market" -- the ultimate symbol of power in financial circles.

This is pretty heady stuff for a company that admits its statistics are incomplete -- they're missing significant numbers of users in the workplace and outside of the United States.

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That's what happened to me last weekend. I was flying to Los Angeles for a travel festival, and on the recommendation of a colleague I threw into my carry-on bag a new book called "Haunted Traveller," by Barry Yourgrau.

I had been planning to accomplish all manner of things during that journey -- get my life organized, make notes toward those unwritten articles on Paris, Japan and the Philippines, plan the kids' summer schedules -- but instead I opened "Haunted Traveller" in the airport.

Two and a half hours later, when we landed at LAX, I was still reading -- my life still disorganized, my notes still unwritten, the summer still a bright chaos.

When I first opened the book, I thought I would just swoop through it, like a bird winging through a wood to see if there were any branches worth perching on. But this is not a book you swoop through, a fact that was clear by the third tale, "Suitcase," which begins like this:

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But according to Feed editor Austin Bunn, who masterminded the issue, the timing was an "unfortunate synchronicity." Or, given some of the heated accusations against gaming in the past week, a fortunate one. A thoughtful piece by kids' CD-ROM auteur Theresa Duncan (Chop Suey, Smarty) on the positive side of video game violence -- she notes, for instance, that psychologist Bruno Bettelheim considered often-gruesome violence essential to children's fairy tales -- "was planned for months" before the killings at Columbine. In fact, Duncan had wanted to revise the piece to take the news event into account, which, Bunn said, raised a journalistic question: Do you rewrite the official record by revising the piece, let it stand or offer both the original and revisions?

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Korda is as vivid about all the stars he has edited as he is evasive about himself. Try as he may, though, he can't downplay his importance in the evolution of S&S. Much of the book is told from a faux-naive point of view, as when Korda's immediate superior at S&S, Robert Gottlieb, has left to take a job at Knopf. Gottlieb's office is vacant. No replacement has been named:

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"What can I do to show others that I, too, am deeply affected by this tragedy?" the anonymous e-mailer mused. After choosing the lights-on gesture -- as a way to metaphorically "turn on the light in your heart and soul" -- the letter's author decided to "use the Internet" to get the message out: "I'm sending this message to everyone on my e-mail list and am asking that you do the same."

Such attempts to "use the Internet" to spur real-world activism are hardly new. Chain letters have been circling the Net as long as there has been a Net. But in the last few weeks such earnestly infectious e-mails have been cropping up with increasing frequency.

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Any more victories like this one and it'll be dead.

Outnumbered by counter-demonstrators and police at every clinic, shunned by the high school students it tried to educate and ignored by the bookstore patrons it attempted to awaken to the threat of pornography, the pro-life organization Operation Rescue left in its wake a largely Catholic, conservative city that was remarkably glad to see it go.

"We're certainly relieved that it ended peacefully," said Peter Cutler, spokesman for Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello, who had given a cool welcome to the protesters the week earlier. Operation Rescue had chosen the city as an anti-abortion battleground only days after an abortion doctor had been slain there last October, a decision Masiello protested. The killer of Dr. Barnett Slepian is still at large, but indictments are expected to be handed down by a Buffalo grand jury any day.

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So it was with relief when Sunday evening, they heard something that sounded refreshingly true to ears weary of the spirit-boosting propaganda that the Milosevic regime has been serving up: The Serbs are losing their battle with NATO.

"The people should be told the truth: We are on our own," said Vuk Draskovic, the dark-bearded Yugoslav deputy prime minister, who, as an opposition party politician, led massive street protests against the Milosevic regime in 1996-97 before joining the government earlier this year. Draskovic was speaking in an interview on Studio B, a Belgrade television channel controlled by his political party, the Serbian Renewal Movement. "Our destiny is in the hands of leaders who invoke World War III and who are lying to the people, saying that Russia would be involved," in supporting the Serbs, he said.

At this point, Serbia's main national interest, Draskovic continued, is "understanding and realizing reality."

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Draskovic's three days of dissent began Sunday evening, in a live interview on Studio B television, which is controlled by Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement. The 52-year-old deputy prime minister told Serbian viewers that they were being lied to by Radio Television Serbia. He criticized terminology often used in RTS broadcasts, such as "criminal NATO aggression."

"Aggression is never friendly," said Draskovic. He told viewers not to deceive themselves in expecting Russia to help Serbia, and ridiculed the importance of the proposed Russian, Yugoslav, Belarus alliance. "Nobody is going to help us," Draskovic said.

Draskovic urged Serbs to face reality: that public opinion had turned against Serbia, and that it was impossible to defeat NATO or the new world order. As a possible solution to the Kosovo crisis, Draskovic said that United Nations troops should be allowed to operate in Kosovo as a peacekeeping force with a security council mandate.

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