David Gates

EXCLUSIVE Los Alamos Flunks a Security Test Just as the FBI seemed to be clearing up loose ends in its investigation of fired Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, NEWSWEEK has learned of other security worries at the atomic-research facility.

This year the New York Times created a separate best-seller list for children's books because adult authors and publishers kept whining that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books ate up too much space on the regular best-seller list.

Even when the beats hit the hardest, rap music really comes down to the voice: not just the boasts, yarns, protests and exhortations, but the tone, timbre, rhythm, pitch, articulation and attitude.

In keeping with that September back-to-school vibe, here's the fall season's first book report on a handful of novels (two by newcomers) and one very odd true-crime book. (Not odd because the guy used a razor blade--it's what he used it on.) We've got to say, some of these looked better before we actually started reading them.

Andre Agassi's second-round exit at the U.S. Open may have been tough for the defending champion, but it's not the battle that's haunting him. Just two days before his straight-set loss, tennis's No. 1--who's been in a slump since January--revealed that his mom and sister are both fighting cancer. "It's been a very difficult year in many respects," he told CBS, "with my sister having breast cancer, and my mom was diagnosed with it just a month ago." He's not the only player with family troubles.

Our Opinionated Guide From One to Five StarsMUSIC Doug Sahm, 'The Return of Wayne Douglas' (Tornado) The Texas blues-rock-country icon's posthumous CD: straight country, with a version of "They'll Never Take Her Love From Me" almost up there with Hank Sr.'s. (4 Stars) D.G.

Near the end of Denis Johnson's haunting novella, "The Name of the World," the narrator says an odd thing. Our century, he says, "has torn its way out of its chrysalis and become too beautiful to be examined, too alive to be debated and exploited by played-out intellectuals.

Joe Eszterhas’s “American Rhapsody” finally hits the stores this week, and one book reviewer should have been happy. All that stuff he read weeks ago—after he signed a confidentiality agreement and got escorted to a room at the publisher’s offices—now it can be told!

Deftones, 'White Pony' (Maverick) Yes, they're rap-rock, but not afraid of "unmanly" things like melody, singing and lyrical emotion. It pays to be wussy.

On a normal night at NEWSWEEK, Jack Kroll would be in his bear den of an office, jabbing away at his keyboard with a single index finger. You could walk in, show him what you were writing and ask if he thought it would get by the editors.

Readers tend to remember Joseph Heller for the funny names in the 1961 "Catch-22" (Milo Minderbinder, Major Major Major Major) and the novel's title, now a what-the-hey catchphrase.

I spoke rather well," Sir John Gielgud once said, recalling his early days in the theater, "but rather too well, and fell in love with my own voice." So did the rest of the world.

Early on in Bill Bryson's supposedly "rollicking" new travelogue, "In a Sunburned Country," he notes "the low but relentless piped music" on Australian trains.

If you're not used to sitting on the edge of your seat for 750 pages, saying "Well, I'll be damned!" every paragraph or so, you should go into training before taking on "From Dawn to Decadence," Jacques Barzun's intensely engaging history of Western culture since 1500. (Warm up with alternating chapters of Stanley Fish and Allan Bloom, to keep your left and right sides in balance; then cool down with Samuel Johnson.) Unhappily, Barzun's text goes on to page 802; some of the engagingness poops...

Picture Biggie Smalls--over- overweight, hypersmart, charismatic--as an East Harlem art-film buff instead of a Brooklyn rapper, and you've got a rough idea of Winston (Tuffy) Foshay, the rough-diamond hero of Paul Beatty's wickedly satirical yet touching second novel.

Late in Philip Roth's marvelous new novel "The Human Stain," his literary stunt double, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, chats up a murderer, though he knows he'd better get away. "This was not...

Everyone knew Edward Gorey's work: the hellishly busy pen-and-ink crosshatching, the interior views of vast, rotting mansions whose carpets and wallpaper threaten to overwhelm the inhabitants--and those spindly, Roman-nosed people in Edwardian clothes, wilting with melancholy or pop-eyed with the jitters.

Them again? It was only a year or so ago that Ted Hughes, dying of cancer, published "Birthday Letters," poems that broke his 35-year silence about his marriage to Sylvia Plath and her 1963 suicide.

There are two ways to deal with a 752-page novel that begins like this: "Then came Death hurtling along the Boulevard in waning sepia light. Then came Death flying..." You can decide life's too short--even if this is a fictionalized life of Marilyn Monroe and later you might hit a scene of her and Joe DiMaggio in bed.

To be a hip-hop DJ, keeping a rock-steady beat while cutting back and forth between records on two turntables, takes a jeweler's precision. (How do they hit just the right spot?) Also rub-your-stomach-pat-your-head dexterity.

Folks in publishing are still trying to figure out what happened last week. One thing they think they know is that they've just seen the fastest-selling book of all time, Stephen King's "Riding the Bullet"--if you can call it "sales" when many of the first day's 400,000 copies were distributed free, and if you can call a downloadable but not printable electronic text a "book." The title of King's e-book-only story refers to a scary amusement-park ride.

For anyone who thought the religious right had been losing its grip since the Swaggart and Bakker scandals of the 1980s, this year's presidential primaries must have been a head-snapper.

Even as tolerance seems to be on the increase, gays have learned they've got a new nemesis: the harsh-tongued talk-radio oracle Dr. Laura Schlessinger, 53, who's surpassed Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh as most-listened-to personality on the air.

For better or worse, nothing's been ordinary in Holocaust studies since 1996, when the young Harvard professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published "Hitler's Willing Executioners"--and even "ordinary" has become a fighting word.

TV & VIDEO Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (CBS; Feb. 27 and March 1) The biggest crime in this four-hour mini-series about the JonBenet Ramsey murder is that it's so boring.

In a couple of weeks, at this year's Grammy awards--where he's nominated in 10 categories--we'll all get to watch what's almost certain to be the uplifting conclusion of the Carlos Santana comeback story, but only two people witnessed the beginning.

Bob Dylan hasn't released a new song since his 1997 comeback CD, "Time Out of Mind." But last week Columbia Records sent out advance copies of the soundtrack to Curtis Hanson's forthcoming film "Wonder Boys," starring Michael Douglas as a pothead professor. The featured song, written for the film: Dylan's "Things Have Changed," a minor-key meditation on midlife crisis and, apparently, our weird new century: "People are crazy and times are strange... I used to care, but things have changed."

If you were one of John Harbison's music students at MIT, you'd want a resume like his when you were 60. Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur "genius" grant, gigs as visiting composer, 40-odd pieces recorded.

So when did it hit you that the 20th century might be maxed out on irony? Just this fall, when Fox TV put on a quiz show called "Greed"? This past spring, when Kurt Andersen's novel, "Turn of the Century," presented characters whose deviousness takes the form of "jolly candor about every mixed motive"?

The best of Joseph Heller's novels is probably his "Something Happened," the self-evisceration of a lost soul. But Heller, dead at 76, needed only his first, "Catch-22," to enter the U.S. canon.