October 9, 1994

M. L. Carr, who once waved sweaty towels at the end of the bench, was airing dirty laundry as the most well-leveraged member of the Boston Celtics' brass. Friday was the first day of training camp at Brandeis University, and already Xavier McDaniel was volunteering to break the logjam at small forward, if Carr could be so kind as to find another place for him to go. Dino Radja was saying he wanted a long-term extension of his contract, and soon. Reporters were demanding from Carr definitive news on the condition of Pervis Ellison's knees and Dominique Wilkins's back.

THERE is something in the human psyche that simply wants to know about the end. When will it come? What will it be like? And, paradoxically, what comes afterwards? These questions -- of a particularly cosmic significance -- figured in the news last week, in the strange deaths more than 50 people in Switzerland and Canada who were members of religious sects that engaged in apocalyptic prophecy.

THE "outs" call their opponents "career politicians." The "ins" say their experience has made them effective. The outs in this case are Andrew C. Hartzell Jr., a Scarsdale Republican who is challenging Nita M. Lowey, the three-term Democratic incumbent from Harrison, for the Congressional seat in the 18th District; and Gregory Julian of Rockland, a Democrat trying to unseat Benjamin Gilman, the 11-term incumbent Republican, also from Rockland, in the 20th Congressional District.

In the end, the full truth about Luc Jouret may become known only after Swiss pathologists determine whether he chose to die alongside members of his esoteric sect here this week or whether he slipped away after arranging a mass murder disguised as collective suicide. What is already known, though, is that well before 48 bodies were found dead in two Swiss villages this week, things had started to go wrong for Mr. Jouret and his secretive Order of the Solar Temple.

NEIL KLAR of Armonk, N.Y., had never gambled on interest rates before; he had always taken out fixed-rate 30-year mortgages, the safe, conservative, plain-vanilla loans that have been the financial foundation of the American housing industry for most of the last 50 years. After studying some numbers crunched by a mortgage broker, however, Mr. Klar recently decided to switch to a mortgage with a rate that adjusts every year --also known as an A.R.M. -- for the new home he is having built in nearby Katonah.