New York University

Few states have jumped on the prison bandwagon more than California. The state prison population soared by more than 500% from 1980 to 2000. Taxpayers spend almost $7 billion per year to maintain the largest inmate population in America. Since 1980, the Golden State has built more than 20 new prisons, but hasn't fully opened a new campus of the University of California. During this period a powerful union of prison guards has emerged as one of the major players in statewide politics.

A New York University sophomore who says he spent eight months sleeping in a library basement because he couldn't afford campus housing now has a free dorm room, school officials said Tuesday. Steve Stanzak, 20, said he began spending six hours a night in the sub-basement of Bobst Library at the start of the academic year after he was unable to pay a $1,000 housing deposit. He slept on four library chairs and carried vital belongings -- a laptop computer, books, clothes -- in his backpack.

Irving Howe was undoubtedly one of our country's most eminent intellectuals, a man of passion and intelligence whose very being epitomized the now-lost world of the 1930s and '40s "New York intellectuals," a term that Howe in fact coined in a famous 1968 essay.

Justice and the Holocaust are incompatible -- not every wrongdoer can be held to account and no victim can ever be made whole. Two fascinating new books describe human suffering, desperation, determination and accomplishment revolving around "unfinished business" in the Holocaust's wake.

Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at USC's film school and one of the writers of the lighthearted coming-of-age flick "The Wood," knows he doesn't have much competition in the academy when it comes to discoursing on hip-hop. Practically all of the scholarly literature on rap music is dry and woefully out of touch and, on the other end, most successful trade books on the subject do little beyond regurgitating popular history.

The two actors are awash in a stark light while everyone outside camera range is in shadows. Even amid the relative darkness, you can make out the young faces of eager students in Studio A in Hofstra University's Dempster Hall. But among students clad in jeans, sneakers and sweats, one figure casts a decidedly different aesthetic. He wears an orange turtleneck sweater and green sweatshirt under a tan wool suit--in deference to the chill in the cavernous studio.

A long, graceful curve rises skyward, dips suddenly and then resumes its ascent. The line isn't art but does tell you a lot about its value over the last century. This arc, on a graph, traces the direction of the prices for artworks at New York auctions, just as the Dow Jones industrial average tracks the stock market. Its designers hope their new index will make the fine-art market easier to understand--and invest in.

Most days, just before dawn, Bill Skidmore climbs into his white boat and motors out to his 1,600 lobster pots on the Long Island Sound. For a year, when the lobster die-off hit, Skidmore--a lobsterman for 24 years--has barely eked out enough to survive. This month the state took a step toward changing that. "No one seems to know what happened," Skidmore, 60, of East Setauket, said as he stood on the rugged shoreline of Port Jefferson harbor with state legislators and five other lobstermen.

Strip away tradition, ivy-covered walls, fancy laboratories, gray-muzzled scholars and what's left at the foundation of all great universities is the same thing: money. That's the stuff that made Harvard, Yale and Princeton great over the past couple of hundred years. It's what Stanford spent lavishly in the '60s to build a world-class faculty and its reputation.

Like gun control and abortion, the death penalty is one of those peculiar American institutions that make citizens of the other developed countries shake their heads with wonder. Capital punishment has been abolished throughout the developed world, and it is now inconceivable that it could ever be reinstated in the countries of the European Union.