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>."

In August, astronomers discovered an <A HREF="http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2007/coldspot/">one billion light-year hole</A> in the Universe. Now, Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton's team of theoretical physicists and cosmologists posits that it is "unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."

Have astronomers astronomers accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy?