June 12, 2000

After six weeks of marching up stairs and knocking on doors, an army of census takers has surpassed the Census Bureau's efforts in 1990 and nearly completed the agency's task of accounting for New Yorkers who did not complete their mail-in forms this spring, the Census Bureau said yesterday. The census takers, called enumerators, still have to pound on tens of thousands of doors and prod people into providing detailed and personal questionnaires for the bureau to account accurately for New York City's residents. And census officials said many of those who remained unaccounted for -- residents who declined to mail back census questionnaires, refused to answer their doors or otherwise have been inaccessible -- will be among the toughest to reach.

Take a great company like American Ballet Theater, give it a piece of fluff like ''The Taming of the Shrew'' in John Cranko's ingenious dance treatment, and you have a terrific piece of escape entertainment. Among ballets for the tired businessman, this ''Shrew,'' first seen in New York in 1969 with the Stuttgart Ballet, has held pride of place. There were lots of laughs as Cranko's Petruchio and his Kate tripped each other up in pratfalls and were entangled in hammerlocks. Except for its bravura duets, the choreography got by on a great deal of sleight of hand, or foot.

Web journalism is usually cast as savior or savage. For some people, online journalism is a path to interactive enlightenment and economic liberty. But to the puritans of the old media world, Web journalists are apostates who have confused liberty with license and whose delusional disregard for profit can end only in self-immolation. It was hard for the puritans not to act smug last week.

Microsoft is mobilizing a pervasive lobbying and public relations campaign in an effort to temper the impact of a potentially devastating federal court ruling and generate positive public and political opinion. The company is spending millions of dollars to retain former lawmakers and top political figures, fill the coffers of both major political parties and mold public opinion in its favor through sympathetic research organizations and ostensibly independent trade associations.

There was plenty of room to dance at the Sixth Element festival, which presented more than nine hours of electronic dance music on Saturday. The dance floor was 10 blocks long and covered with grass: the soccer fields on Randalls Island. To hear more than two dozen disc jockeys and six electronic bands, thousands of club kids faced daylight. From about 2:30 p.m. to midnight they shook, jumped and made angular martial-arts gestures; a few break-dancers spun on their heads. Sixth Element presented simultaneous music on four stages (and in a fifth disc-jockey showcase backstage). It had one tent dedicated to house music, another for drum and bass, a main stage dominated by trance and a ''chill out'' area for less categorized music. It included the pioneering hip-hop disc jockeys Afrika Bambaataa and Kool DJ Herc, along with proponents of newer styles. During the set by the disc jockey Sandra Collins a hip-hop graffiti artist, Seen, and some helpers spray-painted a large panel with a ''Seen'' tag (stylized signature) emerging from ghostly shapes.