Wes Phillips

This is one of the best profiles ever run in <I>The New Yorker</I>&mdash;and one of the longest. It's worth it.

David Mehegan remembers his grandfather's devotion to the <I>Harvard Classics: The Five-Foot Shelf of Books</I>. Mehegan contends that the "Five-Foot Shelf" was the lodestone for "the life of a totally successful human being."

Father Athanasius Kircher explains just about everything&mdash;and the pictures are gorgeous.

Because nothing says Christmas like marimbas and wild bass! BTW, if the marimbas look backwards, it's because the clip was designed to be projected in one of those film jukeboxes, where they were in fact viewed from the other side.
<P ALIGN=CENTER
<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DANkec2NY4w"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DANkec2NY4w&quot; type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

Christmas without Pops? Unthinkable!

A cabal of record labels&mdash;including Arista Records, Warner Bros., Capitol, and BMG&mdash;have taken legal action against the Russian music site <A HREF=http://www.allofmp3.com/>allofmp3.com</A&gt;, charging that the site offers their music without having received permission. The suit, filed in federal court in New York, is only the latest step in the war against the Russian digital download site.

Two days after reaching $1.5 million settlements with the states of Texas and California over its knuckleheaded attempt to prevent "unauthorized" use of its CDs, Sony BMG agreed to pay another $4.25 million to an additional 39 states and the District of Columbia in what has become known as "the rootkit debacle."