Katharine Graham

When Tina Brown took over the New Yorker 2 1/2 years ago, she did something quite shrewd. Definitely, she was going to turn the place upside down -- but how do you turn upside down a place predicated on tradition without looking like some sort of Chanel-suited vulgarian? You beat the traditionalists at their own game, that's how. Ms. Brown's defense: She was returning the New Yorker to its true tradition, the bounce and flair the magazine knew under its founding editor, Harold Ross.Well, bounce and flair are subjective things, but that hasn't kept Ms. Brown from continuing to present herself as a Rossian revolutionary.

Regional business leaders, hoping to land the 2012 Summer Olympics, commenced last night the politically delicate task of melding the competing bids by Washington and Baltimore."

After 22 books and a career that has captured virtually every other major prize in literature, Philip Roth yesterday won his first Pulitzer for "American Pastoral," an ambitious tale about a family torn apart by the social upheavals of the '60s.Paula Vogel, a former Marylander who looks to hurtful situations to create works that "feel like it's a healing," won the drama prize for "How I Learned to Drive," which grapples with issues of betrayal, guilt and incest.And Charles Wright, an English professor who writes the better to understand life, won for his spiritual and personal poetry in "Black Zodiac."

COLLEGE PARK -- If the summit convened here yesterday by Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend had been strictly about the working poor, about day care solutions for blue-collar families, or about the plight of single mothers, the debate would have taken a more unified, less meandering path.But the daylong summit's topic -- "Solutions: Women's Juggle for Time" -- cast a wide net, attempting to examine the needs of all women, from the most affluent working moms to those most disenfranchised and with little sense of dignity and hope.

THE IDEA that H. Ross Perot should run for president is nothing new. It surfaced before the 1988 campaign in published reports that Katharine Graham, chairman of the board of the Washington Post, had urged him to seek the Democratic nomination. Perot's attitude at the time, was summed up in a speech he gave in 1986 after receiving the Winston Churchill Foundation's leadership award. He had once dreamed of being the beautiful pearl in an oyster, he said, but then decided instead that his destiny was to be the grain of sand that irritates the oyster into producing the pearl.

DO YOU believe in affirmative action? Most Americans would probably say, "That depends." If, by affirmative action, you mean a little extra effort to offer opportunities to the poor and disadvantaged in our society, most people would certainly support it.But affirmative action, as it has become institutionalized, usually means something quite different in practice. It has come to mean the distribution of goodies according to race, sex and ethnicity -- with no reference to disadvantage at all.It is obviously not the case that all blacks, women and Hispanics are in need of special advantages.

It was near the end of the 1950s in New York that I first met Meg Greenfield, who for the last 20 years of her life was editorial page editor of the Washington Post. She was a clerk on the mail desk of the Reporter, Max Ascoli's importantly intelligent weekly magazine -- or she may already have graduated to the library. She was very smart and funny and earnest. I liked her a lot, though we never became close friends. I remember then seeing her byline on serious political pieces in that magazine.

NEW YORK - Former President Bill Clinton agreed yesterday to sell the worldwide rights to publish his memoirs to Alfred A. Knopf Inc. for an advance of more than $10 million, an amount believed to be the largest ever for a nonfiction book. The advance exceeds both the $8.5 million paid for a book by Pope John Paul II in 1994 and the $8 million recently paid to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for her memoirs, scheduled for publication in 2003. Adjusted for inflation, the pope's advance would be $10.1 million, but people involved in Clinton's deal said his is substantially higher.

The idea that H. Ross Perot should run for president is nothing new.It surfaced before the 1988 campaign in published reports that Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, had urged him to seek the Democratic nomination. Mr. Perot's attitude at the time, was summed up in a speech he gave in 1986 after receiving the Winston Churchill Foundation's leadership award. He had once dreamed of being the beautiful pearl in an oyster, he said, but then decided instead that his destiny was to be the grain of sand that irritates the oyster into producing the pearl.

WOMEN SPENT MONEY long before they earned much of it.It took economists much too long to realize that women made the spending decisions in the American family whether they worked outside the home or not.Once they understood that women were the ones who decided which cereal, which car, and what men's underwear to buy -- and that they exercised some conscience when they did -- consumer science caught up with reality.Last week in Washington, there was an opportunity to see women making another kind of decision about money.