November 5, 2005

The opening image of the Larry Brown era at Madison Square Garden was understated but poignant. As a short video tribute to Brown, the Knicks' new coach, played on the scoreboard last evening, he shifted awkwardly from side to side near the home team's bench. Brown, the Brooklyn native who came home to try to save the team he idolized as a youth, was nervous, unsure of what the evening would hold for his embryonic team. In a moment of extreme candor before tipoff, Brown admitted he was ''worried to death.''

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. has reliably favored big-business litigants as he has pushed the federal appeals court in Philadelphia in a conservative direction. His extensive paper trail of 15 years of opinions reveals a jurist deeply skeptical of claims against large corporations. A review of dozens of business cases in which Judge Alito has written majority or dissenting opinions or cast the decisive vote shows that, with few exceptions, he has sided with employers over employees in discrimination lawsuits and in favor of corporations over investors in securities fraud cases.

An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended yesterday that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary. The work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly. The board did not, however, give examples of poor work.

AT the turn of the last century, a new phenomenon arose in America: the chain store. The most dominant chain was the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company -- A.& P. -- which by 1930 had become the country's fifth-largest corporation, with $1 billion in sales, and was ''opening stores at a rate unprecedented in the history of American retailing,'' according to Richard S. Tedlow, the author of ''New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America.'' The New York Times described A.& P. that year as ''the world's greatest retailing machine.'' Its president, John A. Hartford, attributed the company's success to its policy ''of immediately passing on reductions in wholesale commodity prices to the consumer,'' as The Times put it. Under Hartford, writes Mr. Tedlow, ''A.& P. had one dominant mission: to sell quality food at low prices.''

Harpriya Sidhu, 26, a recent dental school graduate from Weehawken, N.J., is a faithful luxury consumer. Ms. Sidhu buys only Gucci or Burberry purses, Tiffany jewelry and cosmetics from Chanel or Kiehl's. Estée Lauder was never a name that got her attention, because it is one of those brands ''that are so mainstream,'' she said. But on Wednesday, Ms. Sidhu's opinion of the 59-year-old label changed when she was at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and discovered a line of gold-cased bronzers and lipsticks called the Tom Ford Estée Lauder Collection. Ms. Sidhu bought four products. ''Tom Ford is a world-renowned designer,'' she said. ''These are collectors' items.''