Bill Maxwell
Lieberman brings Sabbath into focus
Al Gore's selection of Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, as his running mate has many non-Jewish Americans seriously learning about Judaism for the first time. This is a healthy development for the nation.

Editorials
As court steps aside, Pinellas schools face new challenge
For the better part of a half-century, through social change that at times included riots, tear gas and the National Guard, America has been forced to come to grips with the point that 11-year-old Linda Brown made about her all-black school in Topeka, Kan. Few places have dealt with it more earnestly than Pinellas County.

Gore's day in the sun
The Democrats' convention is in Los Angeles, but Al Gore can't -- and probably shouldn't -- maintain President Clinton's love affair with Hollywood.

Matthew Dees
Racial interaction, not isolation, helps understanding on college campuses
In March of 1992, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill became a modern-day plantation. Then-Chancellor Paul Hardin's plantation, to be exact. At least that's how a throng of minority demonstrators described their picturesque old campus during a protest outside the school's main administrative building.

Letters
Inform the voters about other choices
Re: Little difference between parties is no real choice, Aug. 6.

Philip Gailey
Running mates find strength through differences
One of the first things a vice presidential candidate has to do is undergo a political make-over. He is required to put aside his own principles and come into harmony with the one who chose him. He is expected to backpedal, retract, deny, trim, soften and explain his differences with the man at the top of the ticket. It can be an awkward -- sometimes demeaning -- political exercise that diminishes a running mate's credibility, which may be one of the reasons voters ultimately cast their ballots for a president, not a vice president.

Martin Dyckman
Boeing amendment places burden on air passengers
TALLAHASSEE -- Writing in the aftermath of the Concorde crash, Ralph Nader recommended that passengers boycott aircraft that have considerably outlasted their design lives -- typically, 20 years -- and that the government require such planes to be retired.

Robyn E. Blumner
Gore surrounds himself by his favorite censors
What is it about Al Gore that makes him so partial to censors? Is it that he simply can't escape his home state's Scopes-Monkey Trial parochialism or does he think his rigid physicality is nicely set off by rigid thinkers? Whatever it is, Gore surrounds himself with censors the way Brigham Young surrounded himself with wives.

Books
An unforgettable trip
A good journalist knows a story when he hears it, and several years back, Michael Paterniti heard one that just seemed too good to be true. A friend told Paterniti that the pathologist who performed Albert Einstein's autopsy was alive; and, not only was he alive, he still had Einstein's brain.

Cyberia
ON THE CONSUMER FRONT: The rise of the Internet will empower consumers, says author Tom Murphy in Web Rules: How the Internet Is Changing the Way Consumers Make Choices (Dearborn, $25) because it gives them access to information to make more informed decisions, and businesses will have to be responsive to that new dynamic to survive. Murphy talks to a number of people, such as Barry Diller of USA Network, Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Andy Grove of Intel to look at this change. On the other hand, the sheer size of the Internet can make sorting through all the choices difficult. Internet cool guide: Shopping (teNeues Publishing, $9.95) edited by Rula Rezak features 600 shopping sites, chosen for security, customer service, content and, of course, "overall coolness."

Life by the numbers
"Mix up some numbers and you get an equation for the way the wind shifts or an axiom for the movement of water, or the height of someone, or for how skin feels. You can account for softness," Mona says, "You can explain everything."