Ralph Waldo Emerson

Friends and former classmates gathered Saturday at Johns Hopkins University to remember Anne Smedinghoff, a Foreign Service officer who was killed in a bombing in Afghanistan earlier this month, sharing stories of a too-short life marked by adventure. As photographs of Smedinghoff in front of monuments and ruins around the world flashed by on projector screens, friends recalled her various escapades, including a coast-to-coast cycling trip, which saw the young woman eat a live bug to fulfill an item on a scavenger hunt list.

William L. Hedges, retired chairman of Goucher College's American Studies and English department, died of complications from Alzheimer's disease Thursday at Copper Ridge in Sykesville. The former Roland Park resident was 82. Born in Arlington, Mass., he was raised in Providence, R.I., where his father taught history at Brown University. While serving in the Army during World War II, he was wounded while stringing communications line in Italy and received a Purple Heart. He then earned a bachelor's degree from Haverford College near Philadelphia, earning membership in Phi Beta Kappa, the national academic honors society.

THE GOOD people at Brown University have decided they're going to teach their students values.This does not mean, for example, instructing a freshman as to where he or she can go to get a really good buy, or value, on a textbook. This means teaching and discussing what kinds of principles we, as a nation, should tout. Brown will insert such instruction into next fall's course work.This is a most slippery of slopes, especially so when a faculty member is quoted as worrying about the "decline of personal virtue" among our leaders and "the collective horrors in our world."

JUST AS long as he doesn't say something like "But I didn't inhale through my nose" . . .The "he," of course, is George W. Bush -- W. standing for, it's beginning to seem, "wriggling." He appears to be doing that in his attempt not to give a direct answer to the question about cocaine use.It's also beginning to appear that the Texas governor has been reading his trusty Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially the comment that goes, "Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."That could explain why he'll answer some questions -- the marital fidelity query -- but says, "I refuse to play the game" in response to the substance-abuse one.At first, Mr. Bush said, "I could pass the federal test for not using drugs in the past seven years."

Baltimore County Superintendent Joe A. Hairston told principals and administrators yesterday that the school system is making progress - and should be able to continue doing so - despite the mounting challenges brought by changing demographics, new federal mandates and a new state assessment test. "We are able to manage the changes that are taking place all around us," Hairston told the 700 school officials who gathered at Loch Raven High School. "Our successes show we are making progress in the midst of change."

Baltimore County schools Superintendent Joe A. Hairston called on the district's administrators yesterday to "think big" as they work to raise student performance amid rapid demographic changes. In his annual back-to-school address before an audience of about 700 at Loch Raven High School, Hairston outlined priorities for the school year on such topics as test scores and technology. But the speech was largely a pep talk for the many principals and other administrators in the auditorium, as the superintendent praised their accomplishments and urged them to set their sights higher.

BOULDER, Colo. -- To most college students, instant messages, or IMs, are about as ephemeral as the topics they typically address. One flicker and gone. Ethan Cowan, a 20-year-old cinema studies major, saves his IMs on his computer to read again later. But in his family, that is no surprise. Cowan comes from a long line of savers - really, really dedicated savers. "It's in the genes," said his mother, Linda Cowan. Beginning more than 200 years ago, Cowan's family has kept the messages - people called them letters in those days - written to one another, as well as correspondence with eminent outsiders like Ralph Waldo Emerson, sermons given by preachers in the family and essays sent home while traveling.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.Ralph Waldo Emerson TUCKED BETWEEN a tangled woods on one side and an old stone farmhouse and outbuildings on the other, the field lay -- new green in the spring deepening to a cool evergreen in summer as it grew tall with corn. Behind the field stretched a wooded ridge; before it wound a narrow country road.

WHITE CHRISTMAS? "Bah, humbug," say 63 percent of Americans polled by ABC News and Money magazine this month.This takes note of a significant trend. Americans increasingly are turning away from the element -- snow -- that is most responsible for the creation of the United States and its bedrock values.The good old U. S. of A. was created by the Revolutionary War. Few Americans know much about the war. It has never been as popular with the public as the Civil War. But ask the average American to name some important moment in the Revolutionary War and you will probably get "Valley Forge" or "Washington Crossing the Delaware."

On the occasion of its 140th anniversary, Atlantic Monthly has put out a fat November issue.Quite a few name-brand writers fill these pages, among them Seamus Heaney, E. Annie Proulx and Garry Wills, and the editors proudly remind us who its heavyweight founders were: James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe (I guess you had to have three names to get into this club).With all this touting of quality, though, it's hard to understand how the cover story got to be a cover story.