David Gates

As a teaching assistant back during the Ford administration, I assigned a paper on "A Christmas Carol," and one hulking, inarticulate kid turned in a crudely handwritten but magisterially argued essay.

At last week's Grammy Awards in L.A., they shut down the bars and Budweiser stands during the televised part of the ceremony to try to keep bodies in the seats.

As something to tell the hypothetical grandchildren, attending the Feb. 14 premiere of the Metropolitan Opera production of Prokofiev's "War and Peace" isn't quite up there with being in the stands when Roseanne sang at the Super Bowl.

We are shocked--shocked. After the Olympic torch got borne through America's high-desert canyonlands and strip-mall badlands by a relay of well-vetted everyday heroes.

A Beautiful BindhastwoRetiring?! He's Barely Written 60 Books!Yep, I'm Rosie

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT If you don't think Randall Kennedy's "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word" is ultimately a hopeful book, just watch for the next few weeks as nice white people writhe while saying the title aloud.

Everything about opera seems to conspire against what Coleridge called "the willing suspension of disbelief": from its most basic premise (that humans speak and soliloquize in song) to its cultural context (what are we doing in $190 seats while half the world is starving?).

A couple of weeks ago the poet Edward Hirsch was talking on public radio--pretty much the only media outlet where you'll hear a poet talk these days--about how since 9-11 people have had a new appetite for serious fiber in their artistic diet. (His exhibit A: the rediscovery of W.

Despite Shelley's old wheeze about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, writers don't have a great track record when it comes to politics.

If a nation really did have a collective psyche, right about now America's friends might suggest that it could possibly be time to, you know, maybe see somebody about this?

What do you get when you mix high-culture erudition (Homer to Hemingway) with pop-culture savvy (Ellen to Elian)? A prophet's vision of both civilization and souls in crisis with a watchmaker's obsessive sense of formal interconnectedness?

Like many people around his age--48--Ernie Isley remembers watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan: how old he was (12), who else was there (his older brothers' guitarist, Jimi Hendrix).

At a time when people like Cynthia Ozick and John Updike are still going strong--as well as such younger critics as Albert Mobilio and Francine Prose--you won't catch me getting all elegiac over the decline of vigorous writing about books for intelligent general readers.

Back in 1992, when she was still about the hottest item in Nashville, Patty Loveless made the country-music equivalent of a pilgrimage to kiss the Pope's ring.

I'd hate for this to get back to my bosses at NEWSWEEK, but here in the anarchic, free-spirited world of the Internet I have no problem with letting it out: this may be the last piece of journalistic content-providing I'll ever have to do.

Peter D. Kramer's first novel, "Spectacular Happiness," sounds like a stinkeroo. Fiction isn't his metier: he's the psychiatrist whose "Listening to Prozac" and "Should You Leave?" showed a profound, agile intellect and a clear prose style, but no gift for daydreaming.

Since he'll soon have an office in Manhattan's Lincoln Center, this is an oddly inauspicious fantasy for Lorin Maazel to be spinning out. "Manhattan is an island," Maazel is saying, in that voice that makes him sound like a less ingratiating Vincent Price, "and the powers that be can, for whatever reason--a threatened terrorist attack?--close it down in five minutes.

Robert Burton began his 1621 "Anatomy of Melancholy," that choke-a-horse compendium of lore about what we now call depression, with an address to the reader: "I presume thou wilt be very inquisitive to know what antic or personate actor this is, that so insolently intrudes upon this common theatre to the world's view..." In "The Noonday Demon," a 21st-century analogue to Burton, New Yorker writer Andrew Solomon makes the same assumption, and if he's holding anything back, it's hard to imagine...

;It's a great show-and-tell. David McCullough, who won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling biography of Harry Truman, is taking you through the house in Quincy, Mass., where John Adams, the second president of the United States and subject of McCullough's forthcoming biography, spent his last years.

Maybe it's possible to distinguish between cultural cross-pollination and cultural pollution, but no American-since we're products of the ultimate hybrid culture-should have the chutzpah to try it.

Like any great biographer, Newton Arvin (1900-1963), the influential scholar of American literature, made such subjects as Hawthorne and Melville into "surrogates...

When a thumb injury side-lined the master pianist Murray Perahia in 1991, he immersed himself in Bach. He's since recorded three all-Bach CDs, including the Grammy-winning "English Suites" and his passionately precise new recording, "Keyboard Concertos Nos. 1, 2 and 4." Last week he riffed with NEWSWEEK's David Gates.

On the one hand, I was happy for Bruce Feiler. After traveling 10,000 miles around the Middle East, this journalist and NPR contributor found what he was after: a connection with the divine and with his own religious upbringing, and a sense of the Bible as "a living, breathing entity." But after finishing "Walking the Bible," a 451-page slog from one Biblical said-to-be-the-place-where to the next--with epiphanies lurking behind every crumbling stone and earnest conversations at every pit...

In 1999, North Carolina folklorist and collector Marshall Wyatt released "Violin, Play the Blues for Me," a revelatory and well-chosen anthology of African-American fiddlers from the '20s through the '40s, on his own label, Old Hat Records.

MOVIESThe Widow of St. Pierre A proud French officer (Daniel Auteuil) and his idealistic wife (Juliette Binoche) take in a prisoner condemned to death in Patrice Leconte's gripping, romantic 19th-century epic about--what else?--love and death.

One summer afternoon in the late 1950s, the then aspiring novelist Alison Lurie and the then aspiring poet James Merrill were discussing love affairs with famous people--Lurie theoretically, Merrill not. (If he named names, they're lost now.) She told him, half-jokingly, that he was going to be famous himself. "I expected him to laugh and protest," Lurie recalls in a new memoir, "but I was wrong. 'Yes,' he said, slicing a ripe red tomato with his little serrated knife. 'I know it'." The knife...

Our Opinionated Guide From One to Five Stars MOVIES 'Down to Earth' In this bland "Heaven Can Wait" remake, comedian Chris Rock is reincarnated as a rich white guy.

In this Manhattan movie house, at 10:30 a.m., you can tell who isn't here to watch Kevin Costner handle the Cuban missile crisis in "Thirteen Days." You, sir, with the tattoos and the FRODO LIVES!

To call John Adams's "El Nino" exactly what it is--an oratorio on Christ's nativity, supplementing the New Testament account with Spanish poems by women poets--may give you the wrong idea.

Ken Burns peers at the screen and says to his editor, "What's he hiding?" He's at work on a modest--i.e., four-hour--documentary on Mark Twain, to air next fall or winter, and a cinematographer has supplied footage of Twain's house in Hartford, Conn.