Manifesto

NEW YORK -- At the request of Attorney General Janet Reno and the FBI, and with the concurrence of the New York Times, the Washington Post today is publishing the unaltered 35,000-word manifesto of the serial killer known as the Unabomber in the hope of ending his 17-year campaign of murder through the mails.The bomber offered last June to stop the killing, though not necessarily the property damage, if the text of the manifesto, calling for a revolution against the industrial-technological underpinnings of society, was published by one of the two newspapers within three months, and if three annual follow-up messages were printed.

In case you hadn't heard, it is Screen-Free Week . No computers. No televisions. No hand-held devices. (All of this comes with one caveat: your kids can use "screens" to do homework. It isn't like you have to break out the old encyclopedias or go to the public library or anything drastic like that.) To all of you are participating this week, I say: "Go for it!" I won't invite your kids over and show them a cool new video on YouTube or ask if they want to see Orioles' games highlights.

WASHINGTON -- For any editor, the choices are terrible: Cave in to a terrorist, publish a lengthy diatribe and set a dangerous precedent. Refuse, and run the risk that the terrorist will kill more people.That is exactly what editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post face as they consider whether to run a 62-page, single-spaced manifesto from a terrorist dubbed the Unabomber, whose 17 years of random bomb attacks have killed three people and wounded 23."I can well understand an editor or publisher wanting to head off the possibility of a calamity by bending journalistic rules a bit," said Marvin Kalb, a former CBS News correspondent and now a media analyst.

Dear fellow Baltimore driver: Now that spring is in the air, I've begun riding my bike a couple of times a week. Nothing too ambitious. It's great for short trips — the gym is 3.7 miles from home and Saturday yoga class is 1.6. I'll be getting sweaty anyway, so why not? I also drive in my car, plenty, and I've noticed something. When we are driving, we tend only to pay attention to other cars. When we do see a bike, we can be surprised or even resentful. Why is that recreation-seeker getting in my way?

The former Greyhound service terminal at Park Avenue and Centre Street is a good site for the exhibit of contemporary Soviet photography that opened there yesterday. It's a hulk of a building, sprawling and unused, but with potential for new life if approached with creativity."Photo Manifesto: Contemporary Photography in the USSR" is a sprawling show of more than 200 photos by 45 artists whose work is done over a vast area from Leningrad to Siberia. The styles represented are a melange from the traditional to the avant garde.

HELENA, Mont. -- Federal agents are investigating whether Unabomber suspect Theodore J. Kaczynski ever sought or received psychiatric treatment for depression, a source familiar with the investigation said yesterday.Based on the discovery of a bottle of an anti-depressant medication in his cabin, the FBI is attempting to locate any doctors who might have prescribed drugs or provided therapy to the former math professor, the source said.The Unabomber, in the rambling 35,000-word manifesto that was published last year, frequently cited depression as a symptom of society's illness in the technological age. "Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them anti-depressant drugs," the serial bomber complained.

WASHINGTON -- Seven weeks after a manuscript by the serial bomber known as the Unabomber was published, investigators say they have been deluged with thousands of leads from the public, but are no closer to solving the baffling 17-year-long string of bombings.But the authorities are revising important assumptions about the background and motives of the criminal whose 16 bombs have killed three people and injured 22 others.Interviews with investigators and academics who are closely following the case suggest that the 35,000-word manuscript is the work of a man whose profile more closely fits that of a serial killer than a domestic terrorist with a political agenda.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Patrick Webb cautiously entered Theodore J. Kaczynski's Montana shack, leading a team of bomb experts. In the gloom, he examined shelves crammed with baby food jars and baking soda cans that were carefully marked with the chemical names of explosives.Then, in a Quaker Oats box, agents found what they had hoped for: 23 bomb igniters, each made from a piece of appliance cord pulled through a wooden plug. A Unabomber signature.For Webb, who saw his first Unabomber crime scene in 1982, fresh out of bomb school, and his last in 1995, when he examined the shredded body of Gilbert B. Murray in a Sacramento office, it was the instant of realization that, after 17 years, the FBI's quest for the serial terrorist had ended.

NEW ORLEANS -- One of the cruelest assignments I ever gave my students was to read the entire Unabomber Manifesto from the Washington Post. In addition, they were to write an essay on it.It is a testimony to their toughness that they got through the whole text without dropping the class.To tell you the truth, and this confession will get me in big trouble, I couldn't get past the middle of it. My eyes glazed over, the pencil fell from my hand and I fell into an agitated sleep wherein I stood before my class, which had somehow grown to millions of people, and they were all shouting at me: ''You Are Trying to Bore Us To Death!

NEW YORK - Laren Stover sweeps into Le Gigot, a Greenwich Village bistro, wearing a vintage plaid swing coat and mismatched retro skirt with frothy red blooms that resemble poppies. Dipping into a checkerboard bag, Stover, the author of Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge (Bulfinch, $19.95), produces a small vessel with a blurry gold and scarlet Florentine design. It is a long-ago find from the Carry-on Shop, a Baltimore thrift store frequented by Stover's grandmother.

Thousands of Americans fret over the appearance of their lawns - spraying, aerating, grooming - but here Grace Bauer finds good reasons to resist the impulse to tame what's wild: the white of clover blossoms under a streetlight, the possibility of finding the hidden, lucky, four-leafed rarity. "Against Lawn" The midnight streetlight illuminating the white of clover assures me I am right not to manicure my patch of grass into a dull carpet of uniform green, but to allow whatever will to take over.

NEW YORK - Laren Stover sweeps into Le Gigot, a Greenwich Village bistro, wearing a vintage plaid swing coat and mismatched retro skirt with frothy red blooms that resemble poppies. Dipping into a checkerboard bag, Stover, the author of Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge (Bulfinch, $19.95), produces a small vessel with a blurry gold and scarlet Florentine design. It is a long-ago find from the Carry-on Shop, a Baltimore thrift store frequented by Stover's grandmother.

Celebrities have always been somewhat mysterious creatures. They're beautiful people we see on magazine covers and TV screens holding hands, pushing baby strollers, ducking into stores with lattes in hand. We feel like we know them, but what's really on their minds? Well, these days, it's easy to find out -- just check out their chests. In recent months, we've seen musician Sheryl Crow on the red carpet, and The Lord of the Rings' Viggo Mortensen at a book signing, with "War is not the answer" scrawled on their shirts.

BOSTON, Mass. - They were five physicians who were convinced that the health care system had veered dangerously off course, that profits, instead of patients, were at its core. Every one had stories of patients floundering in the bureaucratic sea of managed care. All believed the marketplace had seriously compromised their ethics. Together, they issued a "call to action" with nonnegotiable terms - a patient's right to choose his physician, a moratorium on takeovers of health-care institutions by for-profit companies and health care for all. To dramatize their cause, they commandeered the replica of the Boston Tea Party ship and tossed from its decks crates stamped with their message, "For Patients, Not For Profits."

Biographers have massaged it as compulsively as a phrenologist fingering the skull of an ax-murderer. Dubya made it a key point Friday in Saginaw. The vice president says he stands by every word, even as he nonchalantly amends the shrillest ones without hesitation or apparent regret. What it is, of course, is "Earth in the Balance," a book with perhaps the longest shelf life of any written by a politician in the last 30 years. Though often puzzled over for its apocalyptic tone and fuzzy New Age philosophizing, the book remains the central artifact of Al Gore's political career.

Four years ago, a man known only as the Unabomber demanded that two major newspapers print his 35,000-word manifesto -- or he'd strike again. After much agonizing over ethics and journalistic responsibility, both papers acquiesced.Today, Ted Kaczynski is locked away for life. But he hasn't stopped writing.Next month, another publication -- an obscure student-run magazine at the State University of New York at Binghamton -- will serve up Kaczynski's latest creative ramblings, penned in his Colorado prison cell.

Perhaps no nation has as passionate a grass-roots movement to preserve endangered species of cheese and protect vegetable rights as does Italy.Slow Food is a food and wine organization created 13 years ago by an Italian journalist, Carlo Petrini, as an antidote to fast food. More than 100,000 people were expected to attend Slow Food's Salone del Gusto, a five-day food fair that ends tonight.Now with 40,000 members in 35 countries, Slow Food's manifesto warns against "obsessive worrying about hygienic matters" and pledges to preserve such endangered foods as Firiki apples from Greece and Sicilian lattume di tonno, sperm of male tuna.

The work of 45 artists from the Soviet Union will be displayed in "Photo Manifesto: Contemporary Photography in the U.S.S.R," the first international exhibition mounted by the Museum for Contemporary Arts. The exhibit will run Sunday through June 21 in the former Greyhound Service Terminal, a vacated art moderne bus garage at Park and Centre streets.All of the pieces in "Photo Manifesto" -- only a few of which have been shown outside the Soviet Union -- were created during the past two years, a period of great change in the U.S.S.

HANOI, Vietnam -- The spirit of a new nation comes to life in the offices of FPT, one of Vietnam's handful of Internet service providers.All the employees are under 30 and speak English. Not one believes in communism. The "American War" -- as it is known here -- is something they read about in history class."We had better forget the past," says Le Hien, a 26-year-old marketing executive, with a pragmatism typical of the times. "I hope American people can help Vietnam to improve our economy and technology."

Perhaps no nation has as passionate a grass-roots movement to preserve endangered species of cheese and protect vegetable rights as does Italy.Slow Food is a food and wine organization created 13 years ago by an Italian journalist, Carlo Petrini, as an antidote to fast food. More than 100,000 people were expected to attend Slow Food's Salone del Gusto, a five-day food fair that ends tonight.Now with 40,000 members in 35 countries, Slow Food's manifesto warns against "obsessive worrying about hygienic matters" and pledges to preserve such endangered foods as Firiki apples from Greece and Sicilian lattume di tonno, sperm of male tuna.