March 21, 1994

Direct mail is about to become even more direct. Eight catalogue retailers are bypassing the post office and beaming their merchandise right into homes. Catalog 1, the new cable shopping channel developed by Time Warner and Spiegel that hits the airwaves in four test markets next Monday, features the wares of eight well-known retailers with sophisticated direct-mail operations.

At the Bloomingdale branch of the New York Public Library, a teen-ager asked for Richard Wright's "Black Boy," a toddler requested "The Little Engine That Could" and a businessman asked for any of several computer books. None of the books were available. The Bloomingdale branch, like others in the city's library system, is suffering from too many empty spaces. In field after field and collection after collection, the branch, at 150 West 100th Street, finds it has a dearth of the books people most want. It is a condition that Paul LeClerc, president of the Public Library, worries will result in "sclerosis of the collections" as critical books go unacquired, unrepaired or unreplaced.

Two of the nation's wealthiest entrepreneurs in communications and computers, Craig O. McCaw and William H. Gates, plan to disclose on Monday the formation of a company to develop a global satellite communications network far more ambitious than anything contemplated before. Indeed, the project is so big and so radically different from current satellite systems that it might be dismissed as an idle fantasy were it not for the two people behind it: Mr. McCaw, who built McCaw Cellular Communications into the largest cellular telephone company, and Mr. Gates, who turned the Microsoft Corporation into the biggest software company in the world.

As the Clinton Administration weighs whether to renew China's "most favored nation" status after the strained visit by Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Beijing, legions of American business leaders and Washington lobbyists for industry and trade associations are describing the consequences of withdrawing the designation in near-apocalyptic terms. But some economists and legislators, pointing to the United States' $22.7 billion trade deficit with China -- second only to its $59.32 billion deficit with Japan -- suggest that much of the oratory about damage to American exports and investment in China is overstated and that higher duties could go some distance toward trimming the trade deficit.

Isolated on a remote field of a vast Russian collective farm called Lenin's Legacy, lies a freakish sliver of the suburban American dream. Behind high steel gates, rows of semidetached, pearl gray wooden town houses are artfully arranged along flagstone paths. Each of the 67 prefabricated units is equipped with plush wall-to-wall carpeting, a working fireplace, two-car garage, air-conditioning, microwave oven, washing machine, dryer and cable television. A few yards away, 40 more units are under construction.