The target reader is a man over 35 who earns more than $100,000 a year, is already living the life he wants rather than merely chasing it, and presumably isn't too embarrassed to be seen reading a magazine that for more than a century has been associated with women.

"When people ask me, 'Who is this magazine for?' I say, 'Well, did you ever wonder who are the guys on the arms of the women who read Vogue?'

It's hard to think of a contemporary magazine that is analogous to Men's Vogue. In a way, it's a paean to the urbanity of The New Yorker, the glamour of Vogue and the cosmopolitan sparkle of Esquire of the late 60's and early 70's before, it seems, the world was divided into gay and straight.

Vogue Answers: What Do Men Want?

Seven months after Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, exhorted his colleagues to re-engineer the network's evening newscast, the drafting process has reached an apparent milestone: the news division has begun to record and edit prototypes of how that broadcast could soon look.

Katie Couric, perhaps the biggest star on network news, whose contract with NBC's "Today" expires next year, was quoted in The New Yorker this month as saying she had met twice with Mr. Moonves and would make a decision on her future this fall.

CBS Moving to Find a New Look for News

Aug. 16 - Last year a Chinese mathematician, Xiaoyun Wang, shook up the insular world of code breakers by exposing a new vulnerability in a crucial American standard for data encryption. On Monday, she was scheduled to explain her discovery in a keynote address to an international group of researchers meeting in California.

But a stand-in had to take her place, because she was not able to enter the country. Indeed, only one of nine Chinese researchers who sought to enter the country for the conference received a visa in time to attend.

"It's not a question of them stealing our jobs," said Stuart Haber, a Hewlett-Packard computer security expert who is program chairman for the meeting, Crypto 2005, being held this week in Santa Barbara. "We need to learn from them, but we are shooting ourselves in the foot."

Chinese Cryptologists Get Invitations to a US Conference, but No Visas

Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.

Many Going to College Aren't Ready, Report Finds

At a time when movie attendance is flagging, when home entertainment is offering increasing competition and when the largest theater chains are focused on shifting from film to digital projection, a handful of smaller companies with names like Muvico Theaters, Rave Motion Pictures and National Amusements are busy rethinking what it means to go to the movie theater.

Liked the Movie, Loved the Megaplex

Thirty summers after Jaws attacked intelligent filmmaking, the question remains: Why are the movies so bad? A search for answers with David Thomson.

Hollywood's Phantom Menace

"The Aristocrats" is -- how shall I put it? -- an essay film, a work of painstaking and penetrating scholarship, and, as such, one of the most original and rigorous pieces of criticism in any medium I have encountered in quite some time.

Perhaps I should add that "The Aristocrats" is also possibly the filthiest, vilest, most extravagantly obscene documentary ever made.

A Filthy Theme And Variations

An obscene, misanthropic go-for-broke satire, "Pretty Persuasion" is so gleefully nasty that the fact that it was even made and released is astonishing.

A High School Princess Who Treats the World Like a Frog

In the frazzled world of country and western music, the crap that passes with that tag today comes along the same lines as blues: people are trying hard to replicate the masters of the past, but only one or two can nail it with conviction. Even amongst his finest peers, there was only one Johnny Cash. He was the artist who melded several genres together without bastardizing a single one, and he didn't need any tricks to do so. His was a natural talent, and even up until a week before he died, he dedicated himself to his career. He will be missed. The Legend is a perfect time capsule of the legend that became Johnny Cash. The one word that best describes the late Cash and his music: masterpiece.

Johnny Cash: The Legend

He is an irrepressible man with full, close-cropped gray hair, blue eyes and a radiant smile, and as he told me about the early days, he recalled his disbelief at the men who were drawn to the company. "He wants to work for me?" he said he thought, over and over. But his modesty went only so far. "Rock stars like to work with rock stars," he said.

When it needed cash, to pay employees or buy equipment or build camps, it dispatched someone from Chicago with a rucksack filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. "All the people in Iraq had to say is, 'We need a backpack,' Or, 'We need two backpacks.'" Each pack held half a million dollars.

Suddenly, we were braking. Traffic crawled and doors were "cracked": doors are opened as little as possible, and rifles are pointed out -- the response when other vehicles get too near. The windows on armored vehicles are so heavy that they don't reliably roll up once they're rolled down, so they don't use the windows to point their guns. The door-cracking is rehearsed procedure; they can ride this way at top speed, leaning out to aim their guns in warning, or to put bullets into the engine of an oncoming car.

The Other Army