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Focuses on so-called gold bugs, a small but avid subculture in the American financial community who perceive gold as the one true money. Idea that paper money issued by governments, when not redeemable for actual gold, is fraudulent; Why these people find gold appealing; Views of gold bugs Doug Casey and Gary North; History of gold in the U.S.; Question of whether the U.S. can manage its currency responsibly, without having that currency backed by gold; Topic of returning to the gold standard; Outlook for the U.S. dollar, according to the gold bugs; How gold is a commodity whose price is established by supply and demand.

Presents author's struggle to gain access to records and files about his capture and incarceration in Lebanon. Poorly named Freedom of Information Act (FOIA); How President Reagan issued an order in 1986 which reversed FOIA advances; Requests sent by author to ten agencies; Research assistant, Claudia Kalb; Typical responses; Reasons for filing the requests; Sum total learned from released documents; Recommendation for new executive order on classification; More.

Discusses how the publication, '20 Years of Style: The World According to Paper' details fashion trends and cultural fads throughout history. Reference to the commodification of street art in New York City; Differences between art exhibits in the Lower East Side and Upper East Side; How an exhibit on the East Village will be on display at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Focuses on the manufacture and marketing of the Sip Sac, a container for a cold can of beer. The Sip Sac, a brown paper bag lined with insulation; Weekend 2000, the manufacturer in Austin, Texas; Views of Blake Snow, Weekend 2000's sales manager.

Reports that Philip Cushway's gallery Artrock in San Francisco, California displays blotter paper soaked in liquid LSD as folk art. Description of several blotter paper works.

Andrew Marc Greene e-mails: ''My son's fourth-grade class was debating whether paper on which one scribbles offhand notes is scrap paper or scratch paper. Scrap paper describes where it comes from, and scratch paper defines what it's used for. We were wondering if the phonetic similarity is just coincidence, or if one term was derived from the other.'' For speakers of American English, at least, the dividing line between scratch paper and scrap paper is none too clear. The linguist Bert Vaux conducted an online survey of American dialects from 2000 to 2005, and he included this question: ''What do you call paper that has already been used for something or is otherwise imperfect?'' More than 10,000 people responded, and the overall results were evenly split, with about 31 percent saying scratch paper and an equal number saying scrap paper. A third survey choice garnered 36 percent: ''Scratch paper is still usable (for example, the paper you bring to do extra work on a test); scrap paper is paper that isn't needed anymore and can be thrown away.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on working with prestigious persons as an indication of social status among math and science researchers. Comments by Elizabeth Marincola, executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology; Training in laboratories of famous scientists and writing papers authors and prize-winners as a way to win instant prestige; Comments of Lee M. Silver, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Focuses on political writer Carl Oglesby. His 15-year attempt to retrieve documents from the United States government concerning its relationship with Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen; Observations on the Freedom of Information Act; Oglesby's lawsuit against the government.

Focuses on Florida attorney Norwood Wilner's assault on the cigarette industry. His victory in an August 1996 lawsuit against Brown & Williamson, maker of Lucky Strike cigarettes; The number of tobacco lawsuits he has filed in Florida; His strategy; Advertisements he has put in Florida newspapers; Comments from tobacco-industry analyst Gary Black and lawyer Stanley Rosenblatt.

Presents the cover story on the sex-trafficking trade which begins in Eastern Europe and finds its way through Mexico to the U.S..Example of an ordinary house in Plainfield New Jersey which was raided by police; Finding of four female Mexican nationals without papers who were sex slaves not prostitutes; Difference between the two; Belief the house is just one of dozens of stash house and apartments in the New York metropolitan area which mirror hundreds more in other major cities; Renting of the girls for sex; Occasional sale of the girls to other traffickers; First U.S. law, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000; Belief that nearly 20,000 people are trafficked annually into the U.S.; How the girls are abducted; How they are broken in for the sexual slavery; How they get across the borders; Imprisonment and submission tactics; What happens to them when they are of no use to the traffickers.

Focuses on research that suggests that many vegetative patients are more conscious than previously supposed. Possibility of curing vegetative patients; Case of 24-year-old patient, Daniel Rios; Results of brain scans on vegetative patients; Implications of the research on medical ethics and practical policy; Work of neuropsychologists at the Center for Head Injuries in Edison, New Jersey; Work of Joseph Giacino, the lead author of the Neurology paper that defined the minimally conscious state.

Focuses on physician Gary Ogden and how the community of Wellsville, New York, ignored his mounting drinking problems. Ogden's popularity among residents; Mistakes he made during a delivery where the infant died; How citizens and the local paper protected him; Career background; Decision of nurse Rose Mary Vossler to report Ogden to the authorities; Consequences for Ogden; Ogden's life and career since he gave up drinking.

Focuses on wallpaper displayed in an exhibition called 'Rooms With a View: Landscape and Wallpaper,' at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in 2001. History of wallpaper and its uses in interior design; Photo essay by Kelly Ryerson.

Discusses the renewed interest in the 1990s in wallpaper. The popularity of hand-printed wallpaper; Wallpaper history; The influence of the Arts & Crafts Movement; The interest in hand-painted wallpaper; Examples of businesses involved in producing and selling wallpaper. INSET: Wallpaper sources.

Presents various proposals for re-designing paper money of the United States on exhibit. Aesthetic and practical reasons for re-designing money: Foiling counterfeiters, indulging the artistic spirit, commenting on the social implications of money, and celebrating America.

Profiles memorabilia collector D.D. Smalley and his Hyde Park Miniature Museum in Houston, Texas. Artifacts collected and made by Smalley, which are on display at Brazos Projects gallery in Houston; Examples of his inventions, including tiny train engines made of toilet-paper rolls; Public perception of Smalley.

Reports on the interior decoration at the Italian restaurant 'Gino' in New York City. History of the restaurant; Comments by well-known patrons; Use of zebra-embossed wallpaper; Color scheme; Lack of pretense; Success and longevity of the restaurant.

Focuses on the state of the stock market trading community in the United States. How traders are becoming indifferent to warning signals that once would have panicked Wall Street; Market fluctuations; Author's experience with Black Monday in 1987 in comparison to the market losses in April, 2000; Attitudes about paper losses compared to paper gains.

In the days ahead, managers and employees of the Hyatt hotel chain will be doing favors for some of their customers. Maybe they always did them, but these favors will be different: they will be what Hyatt Hotels' C.E.O., Mark Hoplamazian, has called ''random acts of generosity,'' like unexpectedly picking up the tab for your hotel-bar drinks or hotel-spa massage. ''Random'' seems slightly off as a description, in that Hoplamazian announced this pending outburst of hospitality, and the months of consumer research that preceded it, in a guest post on a USA Today business-travel blog. But the idea is that the unexpected nature of the gifts will leave the customer not just pleased but also grateful. Gratitude is a powerful, and potentially quite profitable, emotion to inspire. A coming paper in the Journal of Marketing addresses that very subject. Building on past research on the role of gratitude in human relationships, it argues that a customer who is made to feel grateful most likely becomes enduringly loyal as a result. Gratitude, as the paper bluntly puts it, can ''increase purchase intentions, sales growth and share of wallet.'' Robert Palmatier, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Washington and an author of the paper, says that making a customer feel truly grateful toward a business is harder than it might sound. And the hard-wired feelings of reciprocity that can trigger gratitude can just as easily trigger the sense that you're being treated unfairly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The magazine you are holding is 9 percent smaller -- a little off the top, a little off the sides -- than the issue you held last week. This is not the first cut of the ''trim'' size of The New York Times Magazine in its 100-yearplus history. That makes it no less regrettable. We liked being one of the tallest and widest magazines in America -- and actually, we remain so (just less so). But the Great Recession, coming at a time when newspapers and magazines were already struggling to adjust to the Internet age, has put tremendous pressure on print publications to and savings that do not threaten the essential things they offer their readers. Global demand for paper is high; thus the cost of paper is high; thus using less paper in each issue we produce will save millions of dollars, money we can use to continue to pay for the long-form journalism and ambitious photography we call our pages with each week. And speaking of those pages, the cut in trim size does not mean there is 9 percent less room on every page for words and pictures. This week we are introducing a new typeface, Lyon Text, that was designed by Kai Bernau and Christian Schwartz and will be used exclusively by the magazine. It is more condensed than our previous typeface -- with the result that the words-per-page tally has hardly been affected. Perhaps if we hadn't mentioned it, you would hardly know the difference. What you are sure to have noticed is our new design. When we were told last winter that our dimensions were being downsized, we took a cue from Rahm Emanuel -- we muttered lots of words we aren't allowed to print, then saw how our ''crisis'' might present an opportunity: a redesign. The magazine's look had not changed much during this decade, and for at least one good reason: We have annually won a raft of design awards, including the 2007 magazine-of-the-year-award from the Society of Publication Designers. But every object can use a bit of refurbishing now and then, and that is what our art director, Arem Duplessis, and his staff have done -- they've given the magazine a cleaner, more modern feel without changing what we are and do. We are introducing new display-type faces -- Knockout (by the studio Hoeffer & Frere-Jones) and Nyte (by the Portuguese designer Dino dos Santos) -- along with a brighter and more contemporary color palette. You will notice new design elements in our front-of-the-book columns, a new table of contents and the introduction of a series of icons to guide you to our Web content. On the puzzles page you can now play KenKen. And you will find our food pages at the front of the magazine, where they belong, as the Way We Eat is surely an aspect of the Way We Live Now. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focuses on Justice of the Supreme Court Harry Blackmun, whose papers regarding Roe v. Wade and abortion were released in 2004. Presentation of two abortion cases, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, months after Blackmun was appointed by then U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1970; Belief that abortion laws prevented doctors from using their judgment to decide if an abortion was medically necessary, and led to their prosecution if they performed an abortion when medically necessary; Efforts of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to highlight sex discrimination as a relative to racism, and bring the government's attention to sex discrimination; Blackmun's unfavorable opinion of Ginsburg's paper on a sex discrimination case.

Reports on a class devoted to the study of Oprah Winfrey taught by Professor Juliet E.K. Walker at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Description of the class; List of term paper titles; Samples from term papers.

Presents the regressive nature of Alabama's tax structure in light of Biblical instructions on how to treat the poor in a paper by Susan Pace Hamill, a University of Alabama law professor. Subsequent proposal for tax reform by newly elected governor, Bob Riley, a Southern Baptist; Failure of the measure in September voting.

Looks back at the court battle over the Pentagon Papers and wonders if the press, the government and the public has learned anything from that case. Details of the Pentagon Papers battle; What should be marked Top Secret; View that only a few temporary confidences are really needed to conduct foreign policy and that everything else should be out in the open; Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy headed by Senator Moynihan; The need to justify secrecy orders.

Depicts a paper silhouette by artist Kara Walker, representing the reshaping of American culture by an African hand. History of slavery in the United States; Survival of African culture; Manifestations of African influence.

Offers opinions on the popularity of the American dollar in foreign countries as of May 23, 1999. Its recognition around the world; Changes to the dollar, including its conversion to a coin; History of paper money; Author's suggestion that the change will affect America's role in defining what money should be.

Focuses on the tar-paper shack in Tennessee rented by Rosie and Frank Cousins. Display of religious images; Use of a portable heater; Lack of hot water; Use of three of the four small rooms.

Features environmental consciousness in furniture-making. Use of discarded wine vats; Recycling of wood; Use of chlorofluorocarbon-free foam; Use of chlorine-free paper for catalogs.

Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School -- which is odd, because he's the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City's most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx. On the discussion boards of UrbanBaby.com, worked-up moms from the Upper East Side argue over whether Riverdale sends enough seniors to Harvard, Yale and Princeton to be considered truly ''TT'' (top-tier, in UrbanBabyese), or whether it is more accurately labeled ''2T'' (second-tier), but it is, certainly, part of the city's private-school elite, a place members of the establishment send their kids to learn to be members of the establishment. Tuition starts at $38,500 a year, and that's for prekindergarten. Randolph, by contrast, comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric. He dresses for work every day in a black suit with a narrow tie, and the outfit, plus his cool demeanor and sweep of graying hair, makes you wonder, when you first meet him, if he might have played sax in a ska band in the '80s. (The English accent helps.) He is a big thinker, always chasing new ideas, and a conversation with him can feel like a one-man TED conference, dotted with references to the latest work by behavioral psychologists and management gurus and design theorists. When he became headmaster in 2007, he swapped offices with his secretary, giving her the reclusive inner sanctum where previous headmasters sat and remodeling the small outer reception area into his own open-concept work space, its walls covered with whiteboard paint on which he sketches ideas and slogans. One day when I visited, one wall was bare except for a white sheet of paper. On it was printed a single black question mark. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The temperature was hovering near 90 degrees on the afternoon of Memorial Day when James O'Keefe III emerged from the woods and ambled over to my car. He was tall and thin, with pale skin and matted reddish hair. When his mug shot ran in the papers, some people told him he looked like Matthew Modine. Others said Lee Harvey Oswald. On the day I met him, he wore muddy work boots, filthy jeans and, despite the heat, a long-sleeved shirt. ''Keeps the mosquitoes off,'' he said. All day he was in the outback of a regional park just west of the Hudson, breaking rocks with a pickax to construct a trail. As a boy he was an Eagle Scout, but this wasn't a nature project. O'Keefe, the man whose video stings helped take down high-ranking people at National Public Radio and led to the demise of Acorn, the nation's biggest grass-roots community organizing group, was doing federal time. Eighteen months ago O'Keefe and three confederates, two dressed as telephone repairmen, walked into the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. This was during the debate over President Obama's health-care plan, and angry opponents of the bill, which Landrieu supported, claimed their calls weren't being answered. Landrieu's staff said the voice-mail system was not working properly because of high call volume, and O'Keefe's guys were out to get her staff to say that the phones were really fine while he captured the exchange on film. Similar strategies worked well in the past, but this time he was arrested and brought before a federal judge. In the end, he pleaded to a misdemeanor charge of entering federal property under false pretenses, paid a $1,500 fine and was sentenced to three years of probation and 100 hours of community service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My daughter was looking at President Obama's picture in the paper the morning after the midterm elections. ''Daddy,'' she asked, ''why does he look so frustrated?'' Explaining divided government to a 3-year-old turns out to be harder than you'd think. But she did seem to get the point that, while Obama was still the president, his job was about to become much more difficult. Historically, presidents thwarted by the loss of a Congressional majority have turned their attention to foreign policy -- no doubt the reason that Obama left for Asia within a few days of the election. The explanation for the shift in focus is constitutional as much as tactical. The founding fathers, convinced that diplomacy could not be conducted by committee, gave the executive substantial discretion in conducting foreign affairs. Although Congress can ask questions and conduct oversight hearings, a president who wants to have an impact internationally can act more or less on his own. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Podcast Scheduled to appear this week are Kate Zernike, discussing her book about the Tea Party movement, ''Boiling Mad''; Julie Bosman with notes from the field; and Gregory Cowles with best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, is the host. Paper Cuts The Book Review's blog covers books and other forms of printed matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been three decades since Business Week proclaimed ''The Death of Equities'' on its cover. That 1979 obituary for the stock market, published when the Dow Jones industrial average languished at a mere 875, became a symbol of an age of doubt. So shattered were ordinary Americans by gas lines, recessions and double-digit inflation that they resorted to pulling cash out of equity mutual funds -- for eight straight years. Investors in the '70s were stunned by an alarming rise in volatility. The comfortable, ordered system of international exchange, in place since the Bretton Woods accord at the end of World War II, had come apart, leading to violent fluctuations in currency values. Grain shortages sent food prices soaring, and memorably, OPEC put the squeeze on oil. The cumulative effect was a loss of faith in money itself. (Doomsayers urged redeploying assets into metals, oils -- anything other than paper.) Inflation, a virulent form of instability, terrified investors, who duly stayed on the sidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Last August, as midnight approached on a Friday, two Treasury Department staff members sat in a cramped basement office in the Treasury Building next to the White House and watched as their e-mail in-boxes filled up. The aides worked for Kenneth Feinberg, the government's special master for executive compensation, and they were awaiting submissions from companies that had received (and not yet paid back) billions in what federal regulations call ''exceptional assistance'' from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. The government had the authority to set compensation levels at those seven TARP recipients, and this was the companies' opportunity to plead for salaries and bonuses for each of its top 25 executives. Chrysler Financial and General Motors submitted their proposals -- about 2,000-plus pages each -- a few days before. Now, like college kids crashing a term paper, the other five -- A.I.G., Bank of America, Chrysler, Citigroup and General Motors Acceptance Corporation -- were frantically trying to get their pitches into Treasury's digital in-box by the Aug. 14 deadline. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Remember the concept of ''sisterhood''? That quaint relic of an idea that women owed it to other women to crash through ceilings and navigate a male world? It just might be taking new root in a most unexpected place -- among women with money. There are more women controlling more wealth in the U.S. than ever before. (Of those in the wealthiest tier of the country -- defined by the I.R.S. as individuals with assets of at least $1.5 million -- 43 percent are women.) And unlike the women who preceded them -- old-school patrons who gave to the museum and the symphony and their dead husbands' alma maters -- these givers are more likely to use their wealth deliberately and systematically to aid women in need. To appreciate the magnitude of this change, go back 150 years or so to the women's suffrage movement. Back to when one of its leaders, Matilda Joslyn Gage, lamented: ''We have yet to hear of a woman of wealth who has left anything for the enfranchisement of her sex. Almost every daily paper heralds the fact of some large bequest to colleges, churches and charities by rich women, but it is proverbial that they never remember the woman suffrage movement that underlies in importance all others.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For its first fiscal quarter of 2009, the chain Lululemon Athletica reported that consumers spent $81.7 million in its stores, which represented a slight increase over the same period in 2008. What were shoppers buying? ''Yoga-inspired athletic apparel'' is how the company describes its wares. This includes specifically yoga-related gear like mats. But it also includes items whose connection to the practice of yoga is harder to parse: bags, jackets, dresses, even hats. Anybody who is honest about consumer behavior knows that often what we buy is not simply some thing but some idea that is embodied by that thing. ''Conceptual consumption'' is the name given to this practice in a recent paper with that title by Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University (and author of the book ''Predictably Irrational''), and Michael Norton, an assistant professor of marketing at the Harvard Business School, in The Annual Review of Psychology. Their notion has various subsets, one of which is the consumption of goals. And that may be relevant to the purchase of, say, a $128 jacket or a $48 T-shirt that is ''yoga-inspired.'' With connotations of healthful living, mindfulness and self-improvement, yoga is a pretty appealing concept. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The sun is hot and yellow, gas is cheap again, the fun's gone out of flying, and America, proud and resilient, beckons anew. Citizens, it's time for a road trip. Pick your road, any road: the ''holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road,'' to quote from Jack Kerouac's guidebook, though good luck plugging those into MapQuest. It might be better to try, say, I-95, that nice fat highway that loosely hugs the Atlantic coastline. The highlights of any road trip, of course, are the pit stops for food, and -- on paper at least -- I-95 should offer a cornucopia: Maryland crabs, North Carolina barbecue, Virginia ham, Georgia boiled peanuts. Yet as we're all sourly aware, Interstate exits rarely, if ever, yield memorable culinary pit stops. Without strenuous preplanning, road food is almost always bad food, sad food, chain food, clown food. So what's a spontaneous road tripper, equipped with a functioning palate, to do? Here's one line of advice -- pertaining to Virginia travelers seeking native fare like Brunswick stew or chess pie -- worth considering: ''If the tourist does not find the Virginian foods along the highway, he should knock at some farmhouse door, register his complaint against American standardization, and be served after a manner that conforms to the ancient rules of hospitality.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My favorite way to look at photographs is by leafing through homemade albums. The captions are fanciful, the order is significant, the material is diverse. Good albums communicate a private urgency, and occasionally you even hit on something sinister, as when an ex-wife is conspicuously missing or a blacklisted face has been cropped out. For decades, a growing network of scrappers in America has refined and updated English commonplace books and turned scrapbooking into folk art. My second favorite way of looking at photos is in online slide shows. Slide shows began appearing on news sites like Slate.com a few years ago, before most sites could handle video. Many early slide shows featured runway fashion; you could see dozens of outfits instead of the select handful that might make it into the paper. Now all kinds of subjects get slide-show treatment, with substantial captions. Recently, on the Times site, lucid daylight portraits of people attending the Obama inauguration chronicled the event even better than live footage did. Seen in sequence, each face seemed to reflect a discrete facet of the day's ecstasy, catharsis and anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An employee accidentally carried bird mites from her home to our office. We are certain of it. The office became moderately infested, and some employees brought the mites home and were bitten and infested too. We hired an exterminator for the office. Need we do so for employees' homes? N. WEIDBERG, NEW YORK Unless you can get the mite-ridden bird itself to provide an exterminator, the company should step up. Employees face certain reasonable dangers at work -- co-workers with colds, paper cuts -- but bird vermin is not one of them. While the company was not negligent -- I assume it didn't sponsor a Bring Your Parrot to Work Day -- it should help its staff solve a problem that was contracted on the job. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last 20-plus years, overall economic growth in the United States has come at a cost: rising income inequality, which in the past few years has hit levels not seen since the late 1920s. A more progressive income tax, introduced during the New Deal, helped mitigate the problem, and it remains a likely prescription today. Yet a team of economists that includes Robert Shiller of Yale University and Leonard Burman of the Tax Policy Center recently released a paper in which they propose another way of ''spreading the wealth'' -- one that, while less controversial in political terms, would still prevent income inequality from worsening in the coming years. Under the proposal, the tax code would automatically be rewritten at the end of each year to reflect any changes in the relative share of national income earned by each income bracket. For example, if one year the nation's top earners saw their share of national income rise while people at the bottom saw their share grow at a slower rate (or decline), the following year's tax rates would be automatically rewritten to compensate for the new inequality. This would keep everyone's share of after-tax income at the earlier level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When bags of spinach contaminated with E. coli began poisoning diners in 26 states two years ago, it was more than a month before the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were able to trace the outbreak back to its source: Natural Selection Foods in San Juan Bautista, Calif. Frustrated with the faltering federal response and the spiraling hysteria that accompanied it, two social scientists at Michigan State University proposed a second resource for consumers: a ''mass collaboration'' Web site where sick diners could post their symptoms and food intake anonymously. Modeled after open-source information systems like Wikipedia and the illness map whoissick.org, the academics suggested in a paper last November that an anonymous symptom aggregator ''would provide more information, more quickly, and at finer geographic scales than is possible from government agencies.'' While Laura DeLind and Philip Howard, the authors, acknowledge that accuracy in such a system would be dependent on its participants, they say it could lessen the public's dependence on federal oversight and protect smaller farms not responsible for industrial-scale outbreaks. At least that's the idea -- the map has yet to be developed by the professors or anyone else. JILLIAN DUNHAM (MM75) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

''The moment I read that paper,'' the wind entrepreneur Peter Mandelstam recalled, ''I knew in my gut where my next wind project would be.'' I was having lunch with Mandelstam last fall to discuss offshore wind in general and how he and his tiny company, Bluewater Wind, came to focus on Delaware as a likely place for a nascent and beleaguered offshore wind industry to establish itself. Mandelstam had been running late all morning. I knew this because I received a half-dozen messages on my cellphone from members of his staff, who relayed his oncoming approach like air-traffic controllers guiding a wayward trans-Atlantic flight into Kennedy. This was the Bluewater touch -- crisp, informative, ever-helpful, a supercharged, Eagle Scout attentiveness that was part corporate style, part calculated public-relations approach. It would pay off tremendously in his company's barnstorming campaign of Delaware town meetings and radio appearances to capture what he had reason to believe would be the first offshore-wind project in the country's history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE FACTS Olympic diving is like high-stakes aerial gymnastics: who can pack the most intricate and flawless combination of twists, flips and pikes into mere seconds of free fall? Whether divers are handstanding off the 10-meter platform or launching from the 3-meter springboard, success is in the splash -- the smaller, the better. ''As the last thing the judges see, it can put an exclamation mark on a great dive, and it can also earn a mediocre dive solid scores,'' says the University of Texas diving coach and former Olympian Matt Scoggin. Just as they hit the water, divers pull their hands apart, creating a hole in the surface of the water for their body to slide through; this is called ''ripping the entry.'' Unlike the flabby smack of a belly-flop, the sound of a body hitting the water perfectly at 35 miles per hour is akin to ''paper being torn apart,'' says the United States' Laura Wilkinson, who won gold in the platform at the 2000 Games. ''It's pretty breathtaking.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To the Editor: Virginia Heffernan's humorous essay ''Advice Squad'' (July 20) reinforced my long-held suspicion that self-help authors are helping themselves to a far greater extent than they help their devotees. At a time when my local paper is providing daily columns to help consumers navigate the economic hard times -- how to barter, how to use coupons and so forth -- Heffernan provided me with a clear-cut formula for how to make money, as well as 10 surefire ways to save it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

HOW GREEN IS MY CAMPUS?: At the University of Washington, the custodians follow a detailed green-cleaning policy. Spills are wiped up with Green Seal-certified disinfectants. Paper-towel dispensers are stocked with postconsumer recycled content. The commitment to the environment is evident all across campus. Dining Services buys local, organically grown food. The school's fleet of cars and trucks contains more than 300 hybrid and alternative-fuel vehicles. The president, Mark Emmert, who adopted a policy on environmental stewardship when he took office in 2004, says: ''For us it's certainly a component of the image of who we are and what we want to be. Our students like it, our faculty likes it and our community here in the Pacific Northwest likes it.'' Washington is one of only six schools to receive an A-, the highest grade attained on the 2008 College Sustainability Report Card, published annually by the Sustainable Endowments Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Grades were determined from public data and surveys of school administrators, then broken down into eight categories, from ''Green Building'' to ''Shareholder Engagement.'' The other schools with top marks are Carleton College in Minnesota, Harvard, Dartmouth, Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. The 200 schools with the largest endowments in the U.S. and Canada were graded. Four schools received F's: Samford University in Birmingham, Ala.; Regent University in Virginia Beach; Howard University in Washington; and the Juilliard School in New York. ROBERT ANDREW POWELL -------------------- [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

''Maelstrom/Before'' The disorienting details in Francesca Gabbiani's paper and acrylic collages -- labyrinthine passages, mirrors within mirrors, wallpaper patterns that jump off the canvas -- can leave the viewer with a touch of vertigo. ''It's like being trapped inside,'' says the Canadian-born Gabbiani, based in Los Angeles. Her inspirations are as eclectic as they are horrific -- say, Edgar Allan Poe's ''Fall of the House of Usher'' or the '70s Belgian vampire film ''Daughters of Darkness.'' But in her work, blood and gore are replaced with a cool detachment, ''as if something bad just happened or is about to happen,'' she says. ''Koenig House'' ''I am interested in American faux appropriation,'' explains the painter Rosson Crow, who recently moved to Los Angeles after a year in France. ''I like the idea of the Paris Las Vegas hotel rather than actual Paris.'' For her current show at Honor Fraser gallery near Culver City, Calif., the Texas native created electric visions of a Hollywood Western set, the Ambassador Hotel (where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated) and a Pierre Koenig house, to which she added a rococo-style chandelier. Crow's colorful, almost frenetic style has roots that extend well beyond Tinseltown. In the 1970s, her mother designed the interiors of private jets for clients like the Sultan of Brunei. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Present a list of best selling fiction, non-fiction and how-to paper back books in the U.S. as of June 28, 1992. 'The Firm,' by John Grisham; 'Cruel Doubt,' by Joe McGinniss; 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,' by Stephen R. Covey.

Discusses people who have a passion for vintage fashion magazines. Patrons of Gallagher Paper Collectibles in New York City; Friend of the author who is obsessed with such magazines.

Probes cheating by college students in the United States. College students admitting in 1997 that they have cheated at least once; Figures for cheating in 1941; Methods of cheating; Comments from Kenneth Sahr, who runs a World Wide Web site that features free downloadable term papers.

Focuses on William Vickrey a professor of economics at Columbia University for 50 years. Reputation for devising complex theories to solve everyday problems; Excerpt from letter which he sent to the editors of `The New York Times Magazine,' part of a lengthy paper debunking widely held demand-side beliefs.