arts section

Jeremy Eichler's lovely article about Matt Haimovitz begins with this sentence: "Acclaimed cello soloists rarely come through Jackson, and when they do, they almost never perform at Soulshine Pizza."

The MATA Festival this year will include a program by Counter)induction, one of whose members is my college friend Doug Boyce. It was at Doug's... parents'?... house one... Thanksgiving?... that I first heard Assassins--I still haven't seen it, but Sondheim's songs for it are among my favorites in musical theater. Former theater critic Frank Rich's column this week is about that play and, as usual, the national mood.

Noémie Lafrance's new work, Noir, is a movie-inspired, site-specific dance in a parking garage. For a fee, you can bring your own car.

A. O. Scott on revenge dramas (among them, three of the top five movies last weekend). And Terrence Rafferty on Godzilla, soon to be released in a restored, uncut edition.

Same-night concert CDs of the Pixies, and other bands.

travel section

Andy Newman, in an appreciation of Brooklyn, writes: "I am a sucker for Brooklyn's inexhaustibility."

The main travel feature this week is on Eastern Europe: Parties in Krakow, restaurants in Budapest, Modernism in Prague, frugality in Riga, and driving in Albania. There's also a general article about tourism in the European Union's new members, but it's mysteriously missing from the web site.

Finally, an essay by Roxana Robinson on packing and reading books (not necessarily the same ones) on a trip to Russia rings a lot of bells with me, although not the Russian ones.

news section

Let's get the international news out of the way: Killings in Israel. Killings in Saudi Arabia. Prisoner abuse in Iraq. All the troops killed in Iraq. The return of the Republican Guard.

The politics of catastrophe..

Antonin Scalia:

"When I worked for him, he had a set of principles, and those principles led to principled results, which were sometimes conservative and sometimes liberal," said Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford who was also a law clerk to Justice Scalia. "I don't understand anymore how his jurisprudence follows from his principles."

It might be worth noting that Lessig recently argued Eldred v. Ashcroft before the Supreme Court, and Scalia was among the seven justices who decided against him.

Five years of drought in the American West may be not an aberration but a return to normal.

The Long Island Power Authority plans to put a few dozen 425-foot windmills off Jones Beach. The paper edition of this article is accompanied by a lovely photo of windmills off the coast of Ireland. Never mind the clean energy, I just think offshore windmills are gorgeous.

artname section

Google's all over the Times today. Amy Harmon, in Week in Review, asks if Google will "be able to adhere to its famous corporate ethos, 'don't do evil.'" Apparently not famous enough to quote correctly. In the business section, Alex Berenson says the SEC filing is "long on platitudes (one section begins 'Don't Be Evil') and short on specifics." And the newspaper's editors agree with Berenson that the IPO feels like a flashback. Where was all this skepticism when we needed it?

On a lighter note, the style section covers a new generation of New Yorker cartoonists, under the supervision of cartoon editor Robert Mankoff.

Mr. Diffee crossed paths with an older cartoonist emerging from Mr. Mankoff's office, looking as though he'd seen a ghost. Mr. Mankoff, the cartoonist confessed, had given him an ultimatum: no more fedoras in his cartoons.

"The look on his face was as though it hadn't occurred to him not to draw people with hats," Mr. Diffee said. "I don't own a hat. I've never drawn a hat, and if I ever had to draw a fedora I'd have to Google it. So I thought, 'Maybe I'll be O.K.'"