Ann Reinking (““Dancin’ ‘’) and Bebe Neuwirth (““Cheers’’) play Roxie and Velma, two vixens who meet in a ’20s Chicago jail. Some convicts sing like canaries; Reinking and Neuwirth dance–irresistibly. But it’s Reinking’s choreography that steals the show. She’s taken Fosse’s (she was his girlfriend) vocabulary of angled limbs, pulsating pelvises and writhing bodies and refashioned them into a string of hormonal showstoppers. The rest of the show is spare: one set, black costumes (what there is of them)....

Jerry Howard, the CEO of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), discussed some issues and predictions for the housing market during an interview on Fox Business on Monday. He said that things are currently going “very well” for high-end housing since “people who have money have money, whether it costs more to get a mortgage or not.” However, things are not going quite so well in regard to housing for first-time homebuyers, Howard said....

Some people have too much free time. Using the same ASCII characters that you type on your keyboard, New Zealander Simon Jansen is re-creating most of the original 1977 “Star Wars” as frame-by-frame animation (www.asciimation.co.nz). He began in 1997, but he’s gotten only as far as the destruction of Alderaan. At that rate, he’ll never get to Jar Jar. The average web user can easily access less than 20 percent of U....

Taken by themselves, these contradictions in the conduct of a war NATO could never afford to lose are acute. But Kosovo has raised deeper dilemmas. One question, above all, remains unanswered: in the future, will the West be willing to make the same sorts of sacrifices in defense of its values as it has in the past made in defense of its interests? In public, Bill Clinton and his West European colleagues will close ranks and trumpet the epochal nature of their decision to wage a war in defense of human rights and humanitarian imperatives....

“The Good Soldier” by Ford Madox Ford. The combination of complexities and emotionally intense timbre is an inspiration. “Dubliners” by James Joyce. A granting of lyricism to lives which, to the outside, would not suggest that they are worthy of it. “Howards End” by E. M. Forster. It manages to speak about immensely serious issues with a delightful lightness of tone. “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust. It forces one to ponder again and again: what is it to be alive?...

Last week’s suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon laid bare the complex love-hate relationship felt by many in the Arab world toward the United States. Even as Palestinians celebrated America’s “comeuppance” in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, there were outpourings of grief and expressions of condolence across the Middle East, from Libya to Lebanon. In Iraq-as I discovered during a week-long visit just before the massacres-attitudes toward the United States are steeped in similar ambivalence....

Scientific reaction was fast, and at times, furious. The evidence for life, said critics, was only circumstantial. As long as alternate explanations existed, a claim to have found the first indication of life anywhere but on Earth should require more definitive proof. After three years and dozens of scientific papers, researchers have been unable to resolve the issue. There is still no overwhelming evidence that the meteorite carries remnants of ancient Martian life....

This term, the Supreme Court decided three important religious liberty cases. Each case firmly defended the right of people of faith to be free from anti-religious discrimination at the hands of government officials. In each case, the government tried to defend its religious discrimination by relying on a mistaken understanding of the Establishment Clause. In each case, the Court rejected any interpretation of the First Amendment that treats people of faith as second-class citizens, or religious expression as a second-class right....

Genetic evidence has the potential to solve the 37-year-old mystery. But many families of the Strangler’s victims–and even some of DeSalvo’s own relatives–want to keep the past behind them. As with many grisly cases across the country that are being pulled from the cold file and given new life by DNA evidence, opening the Boston Strangler case raises uncomfortable questions: what if the victims of violent crimes or their families don’t want to dredge up painful memories–even if the truth is at stake?...

Six years ago, when Matthiessen started work on “a big Florida novel,” he thought that the story of Watson’s murder in 1910 would be no more than a small thread in the narrative. But no sooner had he started to write than the Watson story began to grow. “This thing just took over like a strangler fig,” he says. Killing Mr. Watson (384 pages. Random House. $21.95), Matthiessen’s first novel since “Far Tortuga” in 1975, is a magnificent yarn fueled by a theme that has preoccupied this country’s best authors: the corruption of paradise....

As similar scenes in neighborhoods across the nation attest, soccer is no more foreign to America than immigration is. Soccer fanaticism and Cup mania crackle through scores of ethnic enclaves, both long-resident Irish and Italian neighborhoods and new ones touched by the great wave of immigration from the Caribbean and Latin America that has changed the face of America. The World Cup highlights just how profound those demographic changes have been....

Not to everyone, it turns out. Gen. Peter Pace, another Marine who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff, caused a storm last week when he called homosexual acts “immoral” in response to a question from the Chicago Tribune. He explained later he was expressing a personal view, but NEWSWEEK has learned it wasn’t the first time he’d done so. At a 2005 Wharton School leadership seminar, Pace told grad students, also in response to a question: “The U....

But the battle of personification will assume a different and more sympathetic visage in the years to come. Perhaps the change in the weather was best illustrated when conservative Sen. Strom Thurmond invoked his own daughter to explain a position opposed by the anti-abortion forces. The senator’s daughter has diabetes. The actor Michael J. Fox has Parkinson’s disease. Christopher Reeve is in a wheelchair because of a spinal-cord injury, Ronald Reagan locked in his own devolving mind by Alzheimer’s....

Elephant shrews, which evolved in Africa some 100 million years ago and have never left the continent, are so named because of their long, flexible snouts. (Ironically, genetic analysis has recently found that they are actually more closely related to elephants than to shrews; other kinfolk include sea cows and aardvarks.) Scientists knew of 15 species, but now Galen Rathbun of the California Academy of Sciences and collaborators have found a 16th, as they report in The Journal of Zoology....

The Meridian tragedy raises some troubling questions not just for Lockheed, but for any company with a disturbed and angry employee in its ranks (there have been other such shootings, like the one at a millwork factory in Goshen, Ind., in 2001 that left two dead and six wounded). In Williams’s case, his supervisors at Lockheed ordered him to attend a two-week anger-management course after he threatened a co-worker in 2001 and, more recently, sent him home when he donned a bootee on his head that looked like a Ku Klux Klan hood....

““Interesting theater,’’ Clinton observed to an aide as the meeting broke up. But his staffers, gathered around TV sets in their offices, rendered a less restrained verdict with whoops of delight and high-fives. Their take: that Clinton’s performance masterfully undercut those who argue that his China policy is ““all carrots’’ and papers over Beijing’s human-rights abuses. With the clamor of anti-Jiang demonstrations audible even on the South Lawn, his aides say that Clinton demonstrated perfect political pitch....

On Oct. 9, I arrived in Bali and met up with a college friend who had flown in before me. We spent one night at Paddy’s Irish Club on the southern part of the island before heading for northern Bali–known for its calm waters and great diving–the next morning. Those first few days were idyllic; we explored rain forests, bargained with merchants and walked along the beach. Mostly, we spent our days taking in the beauty of the scenery....