May 18, 1992

It all ended today for the Knicks -- their championship dreams, their memorable seven-game series with the Chicago Bulls, and their season. The Knicks were unable to survive the wizardry of Michael Jordan and the determination of the Bulls, a championship team that responded with passion when its title was threatened. Scoring 42 points on 15-for-29 shooting from the field, Jordan willed the Bulls to a convincing 110-81 victory over New York in the decisive Game 7 of their Eastern Conference semifinal playoff series. The Bulls advance to the conference finals, where they will meet Cleveland in a four-of-seven-game series beginning at Chicago Stadium Tuesday night.

lTHE DEBATE OVER PRIVACY AND ABUSE After 16-year-old Tawana Scott was charged with murder last May for abandoning her baby to die next to the swirling waters of the Harlem River, her relatives were left with many questions -- among them, why had New York City's child-welfare authorities returned the baby to Tawana when she had abandoned the child once before? In this case, as in any case in which a child under its supervision dies, the city's Human Resources Administration had the same reply: no comment. The response springs from laws intended to protect the privacy of families, but increasingly these laws are being questioned as some advocates for children charge that the laws too often shield bureaucracies that function poorly and make dreadful mistakes. A1. NEW YORK CITY

It took Wenefrette Conner a week to gather the courage to visit her burned-out businesses, and even then, gripping the hands of her daughter and business partner, she said, "I didn't know it was going to hurt so much." Collapsed now into their own ashes, her chiropractic and skin-care clinics represented more than a decade of personal struggle and a climb into what Mrs. Conner thought was economic security. And, along with scores of other small black-owned businesses destroyed in the recent riots, the clinics symbolized the efforts of black residents to build an economic base in an area filled with poverty.

Publishers are crying austerity and recession, and yet they continue to pay millions and millions of dollars, sometimes record-breaking sums, to buy books from celebrities or famous authors. To an outsider, it seems as if the publishers are claiming to be on a strict diet but are gobbling down banana splits with cherries and whipped cream. There are more than a few examples. Kitty Kelley got around $4 million from Warner Books for an unauthorized peek at the British royal family. Magic Johnson is being paid about $5 million by Random House for three books, two about himself and his fight with H.I.V. and one a handbook about AIDS for teen-agers.

In the continuing debate over the distribution of wealth and income -- the richest 1 percent of American families control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent -- one school of thought says findings like this, however extreme, do not present a true picture. In this view, largely conservative, these data are flawed because they are mere snapshots of a single moment in time and fail to reflect the constant ebb and flow of fortunes.