Context

Now you hear it, now you hear it again. That used to be the rule for restaurants' background music. Through the late 1990s and into this millennium, you could go from trattoria to pizza parlor across the nation and hear Rosemary Clooney belting "Mambo Italiano." Fancy steakhouses have forever offered Frank Sinatra on a continuous loop, while at Rosa's Rosticeria in Santa Cruz, Calif., even some margarita drinkers got a little tired of Bob Marley's lilting reggae Legend album. No connection, but Rosa's has since closed.

Context can't soften the deaths in Iraq Thomas Sowell makes a comparative historical argument that suggests that the casualties in the Iraq conflict are minimal in the context of past wars ("Hyping losses while glossing over victories," Opinion Commentary, Dec. 15). This argument is specious. Today, we have a neoconservative brain trust that has assumed for the rest of us the responsibility for deciding, in secret and with arrogance and deceit, how and when the United States should use its military force to achieve its objectives.

From silk-screens by Andy Warhol at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art to color-drenched canvases by Monet at the Baltimore Museum of Art - the 2005-2006 season is packed with offerings for all types of art lovers. Among this year's most exciting events surely will be the Walters Art Museum's spectacular Palace of Wonders and its cornucopia of fabulous bling-bling, which goes on view Oct. 22. Paintings, sculpture, porcelains, gemstones, clocks, carpets, watches, swords and knickknacks by the cartload were the means by which aristocrats and mercantile princes of 17th-century Netherlands and Flanders trumpeted their good fortune and virtue.

A cartoon appeared in The New Yorker a few years ago depicting a typical New York street scene: hot dog vendor, street sweeper, bookseller, typist in an office window, bus driver. Each had the same thought balloon: "My story is really interesting -- I ought to write a memoir." Which raises the question: To whom, exactly, is a life interesting? There's a certain hubris, an unrestrained ego, in thinking one's memoirs are worthy. I saw Tatum O'Neal touting her memoir on Oprah with the same earnest zeal displayed by women telling husbands they've slept with his whole family on Jerry Springer.

JERUSALEM - The building is a tunnel carved through Mount Herzl, opening onto a breathtaking vista that will bring visitors from darkness into light. That will be the path of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial and museum, when its new, largely underground headquarters opens early next year, part of a larger makeover of Holocaust museums. Their curators are seeking to make the events of two generations ago relevant to people for whom the murder of 6 million Jews is more distant history than a felt part of life.

STUDYING. Listening. Staring. Moving. Looking. Constructing. Watching. These simple human activities can have unintended consequences. When seen in a particular context -- an art museum, for instance -- they can create a kind of visual harmony, a brief interaction that, for an instant, is a form of art itself. It might be the moment in which a viewer is framed by the circular forms of a sculpture. Or when a visitor is embraced by the beauty of an impressionist painting. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, which this month marks the 90th anniversary of its incorporation, these moments happen constantly.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED for John O'Neill and the other Swift boat veterans. They did what they set out to do - accuse John Kerry of being a phony and a liar - and then some. In the process of beating on Kerry, they reminded us, time and time again throughout the 2004 presidential campaign, of Vietnam, nearly 30 years gone but burning again like a jungle fire in the memory of anyone over 40. Kerry and the millions of Americans who viewed yesterday's election as a referendum on the war in Iraq owe the Swift boat vets some thanks for keeping Vietnam in the American consciousness through summer and into fall.

CINCINNATI, Ohio - Vice President Dick Cheney cast doubt yesterday on whether Sen. John Kerry was strong enough to fight terrorism and asserted that the nation might one day face terrorists "in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us," including a nuclear weapon. As he toured southern Ohio by bus seeking to energize Republican supporters, Cheney hit hard on a central theme of the Bush campaign: that President Bush had a better grasp of the threats facing the nation and the will to stymie terrorists.

MANY OF US who have drifted from faith often return to organized religion as parents, if only in search of moral instruction for our children. But there is a more pervasive communicator of values closer to home: the animated features produced by Walt Disney. The time children spend watching these movies, developing a sense of values, dwarfs that spent in church, synagogue, mosque or temple. From Pinocchio, Dumbo and Peter Pan, they learn that with faith, all things are possible. From Aladdin, they learn that you shouldn't pretend you are something you are not, just to be popular.

Can a democracy ever condone torture? In the months since Abu Ghraib, the controversy over what constitutes torture and when, if ever, it can be used has been rife. The pictures from the prison expose a sinister reality: Torture remains a dark weapon human beings continue to wield against each other. The first military hearings of those accused in the torture have begun. Early this month, Pfc. Lynndie England, the 21-year-old whose impish grin smiled out from many of those brutal pictures, proffered a defense reminiscent of other torturers: England says she was just following orders.