Peter de Jonge

Midway through the second quarter of an early-season game against the Memphis Grizzlies, the rookie power forward for the Phoenix Suns, Amare Stoudemire, flying diagonally across the paint, made an unlikely but life-affirming attempt to convert a low-altitude rebound into a reverse put-back dunk. Only that he's 20 and what the N.B.A. auditors of flesh and bone call ''a freak'' enabled him to even imagine that he could make this play. 

Exactly two weeks after terrorists ambushed New York and Washington, killed more than 5,000 of us and changed everything, and nothing, Aaron Sorkin, creator of ''The West Wing,'' leans anxiously against a long table filled with actors and production assistants. This is the high-tech briefing area where the show's main character, President Josiah Bartlet, huddles with the military brass when make-believe blips on the radar grow alarming.

Overlooking Thimphu, Bhutan's capital and the closest thing it has to a city, is a 9,000-foot hill called Sangyegang. At the top of it, where the long, thin, spear-tipped prayer flags never stop rippling -- and you can serenely take in the full valley, if not the whole epic impermanent cosmicness of it all -- a red carpet adorned with loose elaborate patterns of dyed rice has been rolled to the door of a modest one-story structure.

You think it's easy navigating a $20 billion company that has never made a dime?

Hal Hartley’s films, miniature landscapes of tainted love, revel in their depression. Just like their creator.

Early on the morning of March 27, Pete Sampras, then the no. 1 ranked tennis player in the world, and Andre Agassi, No. 2 with a bullet, boarded a Concorde jet in New York City to fly to London and then on to Sicily to represent the United States in a Davis Cup match against Italy.

On a mild morning in late fall, Tiger Woods, a tall, thin, impossibly elegant Stanford freshman, is standing at the edge of the seventeenth green of the notorious Shoal Creek golf club near Birmingham, Alabama, awaiting his turn to putt. For Woods, who is almost invariably the longest off the tee, and very often the closest to the flag

As the third game in the first round of the Eastern Division playoffs wore on, Starks's teammate on the New York Knicks, Charles Oakley, began referring to Miller as "Cheryl," the name of his older and, until recently, more celebrated Olympic-basketball-playing sister. For his part, Miller, a guard with the Indiana Pacers, was punctuating his long-range jumpers with obscene references to a report that the Knicks, confident of ending the series that night, had checked out of their hotel before the game.

Cecil Fielder leans over his kitchen sink and squirts out a light brown sluice of saliva and tobacco juice, then washes it down the drain with a pull on a thin white tap. It's about 8 in the evening, but the darkness inside his huge new home, in an enclave of huge new homes just outside Dallas, feels more like 3 in the morning.

The characters Nick Nolte plays are bewilderingly screwed up. Where do you think it comes from?

It's 2 in the morning in the Hollywood Hills and Monte Kuklenski, Chuck Louis, Kenny Ralph Harper and John Goodman are at the bar in Goodman's den, nursing the last beers in the house and their memories of the true glory days when all were drama students at Southwest Missouri State University.

Sarunas Marciulionis, the first Soviet ever signed to a National Basketball Association contract, is lying face down across a trainer's table in the basement of the New England College gym in Henniker, N.H. It's late summer, the beginning of preseason rookie camp for Marciulionis's new team, the Golden State Warriors, and, after a workout, he is being treated for a strained lower back.

Andre Agassi's workout is more like batting practice than a long rally. Augusto Solano, a young Colombian player employed by the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Fla., hits the ball to the 18-year-old tennis player, and Agassi whales on it.

To Watson, it's a pattern that has gotten wearisome: first, a beautifully struck approach shot that zeroes in on the flag as if pulled by a magnet.