Carla Power

The Vietnam War was fought partly on the basis of "the domino theory"--the idea that if South Vietnam fell, so would the rest of Southeast Asia. Just because the theory proved wrong in Asia doesn't mean it's wrong in the Balkans. "Imagine," Macedonian Interior Minister Pavle Trajanov said last week, "that 35 to 40 million Mexicans entered the United States, increasing your population by close to 15 percent." The United States could handle that; Macedonia, barely coping with a flood tide of...

Like the Taj Mahal and most celebrities, Salman Rushdie seems smaller in real life. Sitting in a wood-paneled suite in a Knightsbridge hotel in London, he looks more like a prosperous banker or corporate lawyer, say, than the creator of wild-ride fictions like "Midnight's Children" and "The Moor's Last Sigh." And he looks nothing like the sloe-eyed, hook-nose effigies that blazed on four continents after Ayatollah Khomeini issued his 1989 fatwa against "The Satanic Verses." This may be due in...

For Albanians ousted from Kosovo, getting wired seems as essential as finding a meal and a bed. Aid workers say the refugees are for the most part healthy, but they're hungry for news of their families.

There are few things more exciting than watching famous people do dull things. When Garbo talked, audiences thrilled. When Clinton walks Buddy, the world watches.

The jungle's quiet. Too quiet. The young woman in the tight aqua tank top and combat shorts skids down the slope to the sound of her own breathing, the odd bird call and the rustle of palms.

London's borough market doesn't seem to be the sort of place you'd go in search of unbridled sensuality. On a gray winter day, the wind from the Thames wafts the smell of rotting cabbage through the arcades.

On a midwinter night at an 18th-century Roman palazzo, the marble-floored and chandeliered room is abuzz with anticipation for the performance ahead. Editors from French women's magazines mingle with bearded musicologists, and suited executives chat with Japanese television crews.

THE HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD IS FULL of writers made bitter by watching their work mangled onscreen. Michael Ondaatje is not one of them. He is so enamored of the screen version of his 1999, novel, "The English Patient," that he's been on a multicontinent promotion tour.

IN THE RECENT HIT ""THE First Wives Club,'' Goldie Hawn, as a collagen-pumped actress, rattles off the three ages of Hollywood women: ""babe, district attorney and "Driving Miss Daisy'.'' But the current vogue for the classics has blurred the lines between these cruel categories.

NOVELIST A. M. HOMES, WHO monitors the Zeitgeist from her Manhattan apartment, traces the beginning of "The End of Alice" not just to "Lolita" but to the 1993 case of Katie Beers (the Long Island girl locked up underground), the hysteria over Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs, Madonna's "Sex" book and to novelist Angela Carter's notion of "moral pornography" --that is, porn used to critique the relations between the sexes. ""The End of Alice' is a book with a moral core," says Homes,...