Hiroshima

God, how we hated the "Japs." No one born after World War II can really understand the wave of hatred and revulsion that swept over the nation after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They had seemed like such an innocuous people on the pages of National Geographic. Kimonos and cherry blossoms. Who knew? Few Americans had even seen a real Japanese person. Thousands of young men went off to fight and die against an enemy of whose culture they knew next to nothing.

Hedda Bolgar, a psychologist old enough to have attended Sigmund Freud's lectures in Vienna but youthful enough to have treated patients until just a few weeks ago, has died. She was 103. Her mind was sharp, her zest for work keen, and her social calendar full until shortly before her death on Monday, said Allen Yasser, her longtime friend and colleague. "It took me a month to get a dinner date with her, and we were virtually family," said Yasser, a psychologist and psychoanalyst.

SEOUL - Perhaps it is merely basic human desire to keep up with the neighbors, but an increasing number of South Koreans are saying that they want nuclear weapons too. Even in Japan, a country still traumatized by the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is a debate about the once-taboo topic of nuclear weapons. The mere fact that the bomb is being discussed as a policy option shows how North Korea's nuclear program could trigger a new arms race in East Asia, unraveling decades of nonproliferation efforts.

Yuja Wang is a wonder. Having proved a sensation as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at both Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, the 26-year-old Chinese pianist finally made her recital debut at Disney on Sunday night. Again a sensation, she displayed degrees of speed, agility and strength that may have been in violation of gravity's laws. Nor did Wang shy from her notable high style. She wore nearly identical tube-tight dresses - black for Scriabin, bright red for Rachmaninoff - as though a Bond girl who was also Houdini and Horowitz rolled into one, in her demonstration of startling dexterity despite physical restraints.

Artists and writers have been weighing in on political matters for a long time now. But when a filmmaker as controversial as Oliver Stone announces a 10-part television series about American history, it makes you wonder: Do we really want a history lesson from a guy who thinks LBJ had a hand in killing Kennedy? Stone laughs a little when asked how his new "The Untold History of the United States" fits into a feature film career that includes projects like "JFK," which suggested that the Mafia, the CIA and Lyndon Johnson had roles in assassinating the president.

Like most people, I've long regarded the Abstract Expressionist painting done in San Francisco in the decade after World War II to have been a quick, sometimes deft response to extraordinary artistic developments principally being generated in New York.

SIXTY YEARS ago tomorrow, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants. At least half of the victims died of radiation poisoning over the next few months. Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate. The magnitude of death was enormous, but on Aug.