December 28, 1986

The death of a black man in Howard Beach, Queens, in what is widely perceived as the worst racial incident in New York City in years has, after more than a week of intense scrutiny, left a host of unanswered questions. Some facts are not in dispute: a group of white youths at a party, hearing that three blacks were walking through their community, chased and beat them with a baseball bat, a tree limb and fists. One victim, Michael Griffith, a 23-year-old construction worker, was killed by a car as he fled across a busy highway. But as the investigation of the case has unfolded, gaps and contraditions have emerged, leaving elements of mystery and doubt over many of the things that happened on the night of Dec. 19-20 and in the tense aftermath of the episode. Some questions involve the roles of the assailants, including three white teen-agers charged with second-degree murder, and of the motorist whose car killed Mr. Griffith. Others pertain to the victims. Still others arise from apparent contradictions in accounts by the police and by witnesses.

Piece by painstaking piece, NASA is revamping the space shuttle system that disintegrated, along with a good measure of the nation's technological self-confidence, 11 months ago today. The next shuttle orbiter that astronauts clamber into on the Kennedy Space Center launching pad will probably include a crude but effective escape system for them to use in case disaster strikes again. Its landing brakes will be improved. Its main liquid fuel engines will be upgraded, and for the first time astronauts may fly without harboring the seldom-spoken fear that a malfunction in a simple 17-inch valve could choke off the craft's liquid fuel supply and send it crashing into the sea. Much Safer Craft Is Seen The safety changes being made by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration thus go far beyond the redesigning of the solid-fuel booster rocket whose failure killed seven astronauts 73 seconds into the flight of the Challenger last Jan. 28. While the debate over how to redesign those boosters has drawn much attention, both agency officials and outside experts are concerned that other critical elements of the shuttle may have been neglected amid the pressures to keep flying that contributed to the Challenger's destruction.

There were no last-second heroics needed, and the opposition was not a team with dubious credentials. Rather, this was a rout of a legitimate contender, and it was truly the Knicks' finest moment in a long while. In a victory that may have signified the end of their arduous transition from one coaching philosophy to another, the Knicks pummeled the Milwaukee Bucks last night at Madison Square Garden, 114-100, to extend their winning streak to three games, their longest in more than a year. In winning for just the eighth time in 30 games this season, the Knicks dominated a team that had a 15-game winning streak against them, and one considered by many observers to be the league's hottest. The Bucks had won five straight games and 9 of their last 11. But they Knicks broke from a 50-50 tie at intermission and led by as many 20 points in what became their most convincing victory of the season.

''LESS is more,'' said Walter Gropius, or Alberto Giacometti, or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, or Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, or Constantin Brancusi, or Le Corbusier or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; the remark (first made in fact by Robert Browning) has been severally attributed to all of those more or less celebrated more or less minimalists. Like the bauhaus motto, ''Form follows function,'' it is itself a memorable specimen of the minimalist esthetic, of which a cardinal principle is that artistic effect may be enhanced by a radical economy of artistic means, even where such parsimony compromises other values: completeness, for example, or richness or precision of statement. The power of that esthetic principle is easy to demonstrate: contrast my eminently forgettable formulation of it above - ''artistic effect may be enhanced,'' etc. - with the unforgettable assertion ''Less is more.'' Or consider the following proposition, first with, and then without, its parenthetical elements: Minimalism (of one sort or another) is the principle (one of the principles, anyhow) underlying (what I and many another interested observer consider to be perhaps) the most impressive phenomenon on the current (North American, especially the United States) literary scene (the gringo equivalent to el boom int he latin American novel): I mean the new flowering of the (North) American short story (in particular the kind of terse, oblique, realistic or hyperrealistic, slightly polotted, extrospective, cool-surfaced fiction associated int he last 5 to 10 years with such excellent writers as Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, James robison, Mary Robison and Tobias Wolff, and both praised and damned under such labels as ''K-Mart realism,'' ''hick chic,'' ''Diet-Pepsi minimalism'' and ''post-Vietnam, post-literary, postmodernist blue-collar neo-early-Hemingwayism'').

Of Business and Boxes In preparing predictions for the new year, some economists count boxes. Not the gift-wrapped goodies under the tree (though they can help measure the economy's current strength), but another sort of box: containers ordered by manufacturers. So far, the count is encouraging for 1987.