A history of the Martini. A fine old drink—and I'll bet you didn't know how old—although I still prefer a rye Manhattan (with Orange bitters, of course).

As the stagehands' strike enters its third week, <I>The Boston Globe</I> discovers what it is a Broadway electrician <I>does</I>. Anybody besides me find it strange that no NY paper did this?

<I>Wired</I>'s Seth Mnookin interviewed UMG's CEO Doug Morris, who proves that record labels were even more clueless than anyone could have even imagined when it came to the changing landscape of the Internet.

Peter Williams ponders a recent spate of books on Johannes Brahms' "late" <I>ouvre</I>. What does "late" mean? What does music mean, for that matter?

Ricky Rosas is teaching the USC Trojans how to be something better than football heroes&mdash;he's teaching them to be adults.

It was terribly difficult to get out of bed this morning. Wasn't it? For me, the soft sound of car tires over wet city street was a warm whisper: <i>Stay in bed, don't go.</i>

It's funny, but hard-boiled pulp fiction seems to appeal to the literary mouth-breathers and the most extremely intellectual literati (and I make no claim as to which group I fall into). Even so, I did a double take when I saw that the review of Otto Penzler's new <I>The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps</I> was by John freaking Banville, author of <I>The Sea</I>, <I>Doctor Copernicus</I>, <I>The Newton Letter</I>, and <I>Kepler, a novel</I>."