Nicholas Johnson

As Gov. Jerry Brown mulls whether to sign into law another round of subsidies for Hollywood production companies, the question that confronts him is how much each job on a movie set is worth to taxpayers. In Massachusetts, lawmakers recently discovered a similar program was much more expensive than they thought. After years of subsidizing film productions without looking too closely at how that was helping the economy, state officials put it under a lens and found that taxpayers were spending as much as $300,000 to bankroll each position.

The moribund economy is drying up tax revenues more dramatically than expected, forcing 22 states, including California, to confront growing budget gaps. Some states have already eliminated jobs and services -- and more cuts are likely. The new shortfalls -- totaling at least $11.2 billion -- come just months after numerous states enacted belt-tightening measures while writing their yearly budgets. Officials also adjusted their revenue projections downward to account for the slowing economy.

Sometime in the next few weeks, a disabled Soviet spy satellite carrying a highly charged nuclear reactor will drop out of its shallow orbit. If it burns up in the upper atmosphere--as Moscow predicts--it will go largely unnoticed by the general public, just another of the hundreds of pieces of space junk that fall from the sky every year. But if the satellite follows the predictions of some American space experts, it will plunge to Earth, scattering radioactive debris wherever it lands. The 4.

So you think the Angels cleaned up at the Metrodome the last three days? Well, let's see . . . They swept the Minnesota Twins, Wednesday's 9-1 victory their third in as many nights under the Teflon sky. They also outscored the Twins, 22-7. Outhit them, too, 37-22. So why did the Angels leave the Twin Cities in worse shape than when they arrived last Sunday night? Time.

The television networks' decisions to sharply cut back their news budgets--heralded with wide publicity and noisy internal dissent--marked more than one important change for the broadcasters. The decisions represented the networks' acknowledgment that after years of bounding growth, growing competition and slowing inflation had brought new financial pressures.

Aging Los Angeles International Airport would be transformed by a $9.6-billion modernization effort that would dramatically alter the airfield, ban traffic in the central terminal area and rely on an elevated train to link LAX with new facilities to the east, according to a plan to be unveiled today. Although it would add little capacity, the sweeping plan seeks to curb long lines and traffic congestion at LAX by building more terminal space and encouraging passengers to use mass transit.

While Americans have spent the last month transfixed by the spectacle of one financial giant after another crashing to the ground, the rest of the U.S. economy has been sinking in the muck. By now, the process is so far advanced that, even after passage of the Bush administration's $700-billion financial rescue plan Friday, the nation's economic options span the unappealing gamut from bad to worse. "The wheels seem to be coming off the economy right now," said Brian P.

President Bush, charting a course for an American return to space exploration, Thursday challenged the nation to commit itself to a permanent manned presence in space and, in the next century, to send a manned spaceship to Mars. Speaking on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Bush said the Apollo astronauts "left more than flags and footprints on the moon. They also left some unfinished business."

Rolling Stone once ran ads promoting the magazine's value to advertisers using the slogan "Perception. Reality." "Perception," in terms of who reads Rolling Stone, was a picture of a drugged-out hippie. "Reality" was presented as a well-groomed yuppie with all of that disposable income media buyers love. Separating perception and reality in prime-time television is an equally daunting task, especially when the hot-button issue of sex and violence arises.

The Boeing engineers giving space shuttle Atlantis its regular post-mission maintenance check have myriad routine tasks to perform, including, this time around, the unlikely job of replacing the windshield. The reason? Think of it as interstellar road debris. Outer space isn't as rubble-strewn as Southern California's freeways, but there's enough trash out there that the shuttle windshields periodically need to be thrown out because of damage from multiple collisions with orbital debris.