Radical

Everybody knows that Microsoft rarely innovates. You know the knock. While companies such as Apple Computer roll out bold and original hardware and software products, Microsoft relies on tweaks to its world-dominant Windows software. Of course, there's something to be said for this approach. Rather than launch some radical product, why not add a heap of features to a product that already has a loyal user base tens of millions deep? That's the philosophy that guided Microsoft in the development of its upcoming Tablet PC technology.

In arguing the First Amendment right of employers to choose what coverage they should be exempt from providing based on conscience, the Republicans who supported the Blunt amendment (and the three Democrats who sided with them) are guilty of short-sightedness and an absence of humility. The essence of the First Amendment is the right of all to their own interpretation of religion, not just the right to their own convictions. To maintain that order of tolerance, the First Amendment mandates that the government must not establish religion, but rather allow the practices of all people.

THREE YEARS ago, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a relative political unknown in Iran. But now, the 49-year-old hard-liner - a former commander in Iran's universally feared clerical army, the Pasdaran, and more recently the mayor of Tehran - has become one of the Islamic Republic's most recognizable faces. In Friday's presidential election, the gruff, unpolished Mr. Ahmadinejad leapfrogged ahead of five more prominent candidates - including former Science and Education Minister Mostafa Moin, the favorite of Iran's reformist camp - to secure a spot in the presidential runoff set for tomorrow.

HOW would you like to go to lunch with Irving Howe?" ((TC Stanford University dean asked me when I was an 18-year-old anti-war activist during the late 1960s. "Irving who?" I asked without embarrassment.The startled dean described Howe as a visiting Faulkner scholar and editor of Dissent, which even I knew to be a leading socialist journal. As I soon found out, that's like describing Willie Mays as a jock who hangs around center field chasing fly balls.I agreed to lunch -- but only as a kindness to the dean because I anticipated another dreary lecture on political manners by an academic who cared more about university decorum than human life in Vietnam.

CHICAGO -- Has Ayn Rand gone mainstream? The radical champion of individualism and capitalism, who died in 1982, is no longer an exotic taste. Her image has adorned a U.S. postage stamp. Her ideas have been detected in a new mass-market animated comedy film, The Incredibles. And tomorrow, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, there will be a Rand commemoration at the Library of Congress -- an odd site for a ceremony honoring a fierce anti-statist. In her day, Ms. Rand was at odds with almost every prevailing attitude in American society.

"Dr. Spock: An American Life," by Thomas Maier. Harcourt Brace. Illustrated. 488 pages. $30.When Dr. Benjamin Spock died in March at age 94, his obituaries were as overstuffed and unlikely as a John Irving novel. The two main acts of Spock's epochal career - as author of the Baby Boom child care bible and then, in the Sixties, as goofy aging antiwar protester - were familiar enough.But who remembered that Spock, as a gangling Yalie, rowed on the U.S. gold-medal crew team in the "Chariots of Fire" Olympics?

TC Washington -- When John Paul II creates 30 new cardinals tomorrow, including Baltimore's William H. Keeler, reams of commentary about a ''conservative'' pope securing his ''restorationist'' legacy are sure to follow.It is true that the pope hasn't changed his mind about the central doctrines of Catholic Christianity -- the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the sacramental forgiveness of sins, the primacy of the bishop of Rome in the college of bishops.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- In many ways, the Levinsons are the very profile of a traditional couple. They share a last name, a mortgage, two small children and two nondescript dogs. One of them is a stockbroker and the other ''an at-home mom.''On a typical sun-filled Sunday afternoon, they come back from church, put the children in for a nap, and contemplate trying again to put together the doll house that came with the manufacturer's infamous promise that it was ''easy to assemble.''But the Levinsons are both women, both lesbians.

THE smart scholarship girl from a sheltered environment whose self-image goes south in the polyglot and high-pressure world of college is a staple, of modern fiction and of life. I know her. I was her.And that is why I recognized Katherine Ann Power when she turned herself in and was sent to jail, understood how it was possible in four years to go from the valedictorian of a Catholic girls school to a campus radical who drove the getaway car in a 1970 bank robbery.Some of us in our 40s have to strain to remember the self we were 23 years ago -- the convictions, the ideals, the sex, the drugs, even some of the rock 'n' roll.

Over the past few years, the influence of a very well-organized but radical political movement has been growing in Carroll County. The movement I am referring to is often described as "the radical right" and is led by groups such as Pat Robertson's "Christian Coalition." Members of these groups claim they are not political. When you disagree with their narrow political agenda, they often call you Godless and accuse you of Christian-bashing.In fact, these groups are avidly political and they are aimed at reducing religious freedom in the United States.