I'd always been curious about this Native American blood flowing in my veins, but like most Americans, I felt confused trying to make sense of the legacy of the people who lived in the Americas before Europeans showed up. The stories we were fed as kids, starting with the tale of the happy local Indians showing up in Plymouth for the first Thanksgiving, always had a bogus, Disney-filtered feel to them, yet there was no alternative narrative beyond the famous image of a proud old Indian, Iron Eyes Cody, shedding a tear at the rape of his people's land. This weeping-Indian image, too, presented pity and guilt in lieu of a real understanding of who these people were and how they lived. There was always a sense that Native Americans had been robbed not only of their land, but of their historical importance as well. Yet, any such thoughts got lost in a gooey, dreamy kind of Indian chic, summed up by those phantasmagorical peyote scenes Oliver Stone tossed into his "Doors" movie.

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Okrent was not an obvious choice for the highly visible role of second-guessing the Times in its own pages. He had only minimal newspaper experience, although he had been the managing editor of Life magazine and the editor of new media for Time Inc. He is also the author of "Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center" and the baseball book "Nine Innings." No Times public editor could escape criticism and confrontation, but Okrent never shied away from controversy.

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The New York Post did its best to stir up a lynch-mob mentality with its front cover on Friday, "Boot the Bum," featuring a vintage picture of a young Giambi, shaggy-haired and tattooed, showing off the steroid-enhanced biceps that turned him from a talented doubles hitter and RBI man to a leading home-run threat capable of seducing Yankee owner George Steinbrenner to the tune of $120 million.

The Post used red ink for emphasis, adding: "Why the Yankees MUST fire ugly drug cheat Jason Giambi TODAY."

An accompanying editorial, beginning on the front page, blasted Giambi in terms usually reserved for the likes of Saddam Hussein, saying he has "disgraced the Yankee pinstripes and made a mockery of everything that is wonderful and good and pure about the game of baseball."

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-- Spike Lee

No one who set foot in the Red Sox clubhouse just after Aaron Boone's Game Seven, eleventh-inning homer at Yankee Stadium will ever forget what it was like to be there. It almost hurt to be in the room with the Red Sox. It almost hurt to step into the line of sight of hunched-over players staring galaxies away. They all sat around morosely, replaying the mental pictures of that Tim Wakefield knuckler that did not knuckle, the crack of Aaron Boone's bat and the instant certainty that the ball would land in a throng of bouncing, grinning Yankee fans.

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There is almost no support in European capitals for a military strike against Iraq, and even less backing for moves against Iran or North Korea, Iraq's putative partners in the so-called axis. The spectacle of normally consensus-building Secretary of State Colin Powell suggesting to Congress Tuesday that the U.S. might have to go it alone in a military action to topple Saddam Hussein pushed many partners over the edge.

On Wednesday, Turkey warned the U.S. it would "not tolerate" a strike against Iraq. "We do not want to experience chaos on our borders with unpredictable consequences," Deputy Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz said in a speech. Turkey has been a key ally in the Afghanistan-based war on terror, a majority Muslim country lending not just verbal support but soldiers to U.S. efforts there. Turkish leaders -- along with other NATO allies -- are angry that the U.S. hasn't even shared whatever intelligence led Bush to threaten to widen the war beyond Afghanistan.

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That could be especially true in the ice hockey competition, which in any objective terms will be the best hockey tournament ever staged. It will borrow top talent from the National Hockey League and showcase great hockey, pitting star-studded national team against star-studded national team. It will also offer the forever-underachieving NHL a chance to reinvent itself, and emulate Olympic hockey, if only it can seize the unprecedented opportunity.

One of the great disappointments of the Nagano Olympics was the way the American hockey team embarrassed all of us -- both on and off the ice. The Americans' listless performance, coupled with their subsequent trashing of their dorms, helped ensure that the U.S. television audience would see as little actual hockey from Nagano as possible, which may have been the most unfortunate development for hockey in decades.

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How did Howe handle that? His first move was to do nothing, and I mean that literally. It was my job back then to cover the A's for the San Francisco Chronicle, but I was gone in the off season, so the Chronicle's slash-and-burn columnist Glenn Dickey was handed the task of writing up Howe's arrival in town. Dickey had wrongly speculated in print earlier in the week that a likable bullshit artist named Jim Lefebvre, a former A's hitting coach, was the leading candidate to replace La Russa. In his article announcing Howe's hiring on the front page of the Chronicle sports section -- the morning Howe arrived for his welcome press conference -- Dickey went on at length about Lefebvre and made clear his low regard for Howe. He even ridiculed his hiring as "just another step toward anonymity for the A's, once the most colorful team in baseball."

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Vollmann offered this sobering warning in that New Yorker piece: "Americans worry that Afghanistan has become a petri dish in which the germs of Islamic fanaticism are replicating -- soon Afghans will be hijacking American planes and bombing embassies everywhere. And their fears are not necessarily unfounded. The Taliban are unemployed war veterans, ready and even eager to return to the battlefield. 'In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once,' Afghans often told me. 'In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we'll beat the Americans!'"

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That probably will begin with military action in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban. One likely scenario will be for a renewed campaign by Afghanistan's umbrella rebel group, the Northern Alliance, reinforced with American and Russian weapons. In such a move, the Northern Alliance, which controls a stretch of Afghanistan's northern border region, would grind its way south, backed by American air power, and take the Afghan capital of Kabul, throwing the Taliban into disarray.

Monday, Russia announced it would step up its efforts to arm the group, which Russia has supported since the 1990s. One likely benefactor would be Mohammad Zahir Shah, the 86-year-old former king of Afghanistan, who lives in Italy and who has been in touch with the Northern Alliance about forming an anti-Taliban coalition.

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The internationalist tone of Bush's speech to a joint session of Congress Thursday night no doubt helped his cause. The loss of so many thousands of lives from dozens of countries in the World Trade Center attack has Europe determined to take tough action along with the United States. That applies even to the leaders of the generally pacifist Nordic states.

"Solidarity, that is important, that we stand united for democracy and open society," said the Swedish prime minister, Goeran Persson. "We have a very strong mandate to take military action and if the United States does so, they have our support."

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Is it for real? Will it last? Impossible to say, of course. But it's not too early to welcome the rejection of the go-it-alone foreign policy of Bush's first nine months in office. Bush has in recent days opened the door to the rest of the world, diplomatically and in some sense personally, and there seems no going back to the days when he seemed eager to tune out everyone but Mexico and Russia.

Last week was a confirmation, if the Bush administration really needed one, that the problems festering in foreign countries really matter. Now top officials have set about lining up foreign leaders behind the effort to fight the terrorism sponsored by Osama bin Laden and his allies, in a way that previously seemed unthinkable under this president.

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Many Germans saw Tuesday's events as an attack against them as well, since the terrorist strike was clearly intended as a blow to the West. But Germany's sense of being closely involved with the American drama was heightened Thursday when news broke that three of the men involved in the hijackings lived in Hamburg and may have planned part of the attacks from here in what is being described as a terrorist cell.

Mohammed Atta, the 33-year-old who likely flew American Airlines flight 11, and his cousin, Marvan Al-Shehhi, 23, who was on American Airlines Flight 175, lived in a $500-a-month apartment in Hamburg's Harburg neighborhood, according to the Bild Zeitung newspaper. The two men left Germany in March 2001 for Florida, where they enrolled in flight classes at Huffman Aviation in the Gulf Coast town of Venice. German commandos reportedly stormed eight apartments in Hamburg and arrested one suspect after being tipped off by the FBI Wednesday night.

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Bush blurted out an awkward joke, retreated into his familiar non sequiturs -- "I have a representative at the Bonn summit; I saw her on TV the other day" -- and curtly brought the press conference to a close, seeming a little too eager to escape follow-up questions on this difficult issue.

But Bush cannot escape the issue of global warming, as Monday's surprising news out of Bonn, Germany, demonstrated. Despite widespread predictions of failure, negotiators were able to pound out an agreement on a watered-down version of the Kyoto Protocol, paving the way for ratification next year.

Bush may indeed choose to stand by his March rejection of the protocol, as he repeatedly vowed in recent days. But he faces a bleak new set of political costs to pay if he sticks with that decision.

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It didn't have to be this way for Bush. His many bewildering missteps and political miscalculations on environmental policy have already pointlessly eroded an already shaky public confidence. The same New York Times/CBS News poll that found Bush's job approval rating dipping to 53 percent late last month found that two-thirds of those polled, including a plurality of Republicans, believe that both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are "too beholden to oil companies." But that was just the start of the bad news for the administration: Only 39 percent of those polled approved of Bush's handling of the environment; more than half favored ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, which would impose targets on industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, even if nonindustrialized nations like China and India get off easy; and 72 percent believed immediate steps were necessary to fight global warming, rather than pausing for more study.

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If that sounds merely flippant, it shouldn't. Neither Bush nor his advisors have made much secret of the fact that this is a president who had a lot to learn about the world coming into this job. He's had a memorable education in recent days, even if his caution-to-the-wind cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the last day of the trip reinforced all the most extreme views of the man's never-never grasp on reality.

The smiles often looked forced in Brussels and Gvteborg earlier this week as heads of state scrunched together for the cameras during Bush's first trip to Europe. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice often sat rigidly behind Bush as he spoke, her gaze as fixed, her jaw as set and her imagination seemingly as filled with dark possibilities as any Secret Service agent ready to dash in front of a coming bullet. But as much as newspaper accounts are playing up the rift between Europe and the United States, in fact, this trip had more to do with easing that rift than widening it.

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That does not mean last week's media frenzy on gays in sports moved us closer to that point. Only Brendan Lemon, editor in chief of Out magazine, knows for sure what his agenda was in going public with his contention that he has been in a relationship with a well-known baseball player the past year and a half. Could it be he's just trying to boost circulation?

Or maybe a baseball columnist friend of mine has it right: "It's like that joke where the guy is on a deserted island with the supermodel. In this case, the guy is sleeping with a big-time athlete who's good-looking, and he is pissed because no one knows about it. He wants to be able to tell his friends who his lover is. He probably does it now, and no one believes him."

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Even as the potentially explosive situation has dragged on, and reaction in official Washington has been generally supportive of Bush and his foreign-policy team, there has been a notable lack of support from European leaders. That silence should not be ignored. It reflects genuine alarm over what is seen as a revival of Reagan-style unilateralism and high-handedness. No one should make the mistake, that is, of taking the new European anti-Americanism as the simple, shallow, knee-jerk sentiment of past years. This is something potentially more serious.

"The Americans and the Chinese are playing Cold War with each other, which is very strange," Dominique Moisi, a French political analyst, told the New York Times this week. "No one wants to support the Chinese. But they don't want to encourage the United States either. The silence is partly a measure of indifference and partly a measure of the embarrassment of the diplomatic elite."

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Eleven countries in Europe (plus Greece, early next year) peg the value of their currencies to the euro, and starting next year the common currency itself will be introduced. But the euro has had a rough time of it since being introduced in January 1999 at a value of $1.17. Since then, it has lost 30 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar, and threatens to dip still lower.

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Angell, who turns 80 this year, has been writing about baseball for the New Yorker since 1962, though until recently he devoted much of his time to other tasks at the magazine. A fiction writer whose collected volumes of New Yorker-published work include "The Stone Arbor and Other Stories," published in 1970, Angell was for years chief fiction editor. He made a name for himself as a champion of clarity, and nurtured such major talents as Garrison Keillor, William Trevor and John Updike.

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Navratilova, once too controversial for TV ads because she talked openly about her love of both men and women, is today as well known for her intelligence and willfulness as for her tennis game. This is the joke behind the TV spots, in which Navratilova plays off the idea that only men know cars. "What do I know about performance?" Navratilova says with easy, tart sarcasm, and then, at the close of the commercial, featuring her and other prominent female sports stars: "What do we know? We're just girls?"

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