Professor Labov argues that black Americans have become more monolingual since the 60's - that fewer of them have a mastery of standard English. That's the result of residential segregation, the fact that poor blacks tend to live with poor blacks. But it's also compounded by desegregation, which ended up separating the black poor and the black middle class.

Because of these two factors, there's now a large group of poor black people whose face-to-face conversations are almost entirely with people like themselves. As the cultural critic Greg Tate told me, black people are "segregated, landlocked and institutionalized between prison, the project and public institutions." He added that "there's a certain tribal caste to segregated African-American communities for that reason," and that's reflected in their increased monolingualism.

Writing in The Times 25 years ago, James Baldwin ventured that the black vernacular was one of self-defense. "There was a moment, in time, in this place," he recalled, "when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today."

Is that still true? The black vernacular seems to be everywhere these days, from Dave Chappelle's show to Boost Mobile's "Where you at?" ad campaign.

"It becomes part of the mainstream in a minute," the poet Amiri Baraka told me, referring to the black vernacular. "We hear the rappers say, 'I'm outta here' - the next thing you know, Clinton's saying. 'I'm outta here.' " And both Senator John Kerry and President Bush are calling out, "Bring it on," like dueling mike-masters at a hip-hop slam.

The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on.

"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," he said yesterday in a speech at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. "We never had enough troops on the ground."

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A federal judge has ordered the FBI to turn over files on John Lennon to a California professor who said the documents show Britain's domestic spy agency shadowed the late Beatle's political activities.

Rejecting the U.S. government's national security claims, U.S. District Judge Robert Takasugi on Tuesday brought to a close a 23-year battle waged by Jonathan Wiener, a University of California professor who requested the information for a book he was writing shortly after Lennon was murdered in 1980.

"The issue has become government secrecy and the absurdity that, today, when the FBI should have better things to do they are still trying to keep secret 34-year-old documents about the anti-war activities of a dead rock star," Wiener said.

The documents revealed efforts by President Richard Nixon to deport Lennon to silence his anti-war activities in 1971 and 1972, Wiener said.

The justices' most pressing task is to resolve the fate of the federal criminal sentencing system, which the court itself threw into limbo in June by declaring unconstitutional a similar, although not identical, system used by the state of Washington.

In both the state and federal systems, sentencing guidelines provide a starting point for calculating a criminal sentence, and judges then make findings about a variety of factors to determine how much time a defendant will actually serve. The Supreme Court held in Blakely v. Washington that the state system violated the constitutional right to trial by jury by permitting judges to make these essential findings.

Federal judges around the country quickly started ruling that they could no longer treat the federal sentencing guidelines as binding. Whether that judgment is correct and, if so, what should happen next will be the subject of an unusual afternoon argument on Monday in two cases that the justices granted in August at the Justice Department's request and agreed to expedite for an argument that would not ordinarily have been scheduled until January.

Sept. 29, 2004 - Lightning has struck twice for Vann Gibson. He woke up overnight to find his bed on fire, with him in it, "The edge of my mattress was burning. I jumped up immediately, ran into the kitchen to try to put it out and it didn't go out."