Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

In Singapore, Author-Philosopher Lin (The Importance of Living) Yutang, first chancellor of the city's abuilding $7,000,000 Nanyang University (TIME, Aug. 16), rose before some 300 women to make a speech titled "Dress Is Civilization." Cried Dr. Lin, who thinks like a Confucius but dresses like a Coolidge: "Men should dress neatly, sensibly and efficiently, but let us do away with this age-old Nordic fashion--the tie. Give us a few inches around our necks. You ladies can take off your jackets when it is too hot, and appear in your blouses. Why not men?" A curious woman in his audience then asked Dr. Lin why, contrary to his sartorial convictions, he was wearing a coat and tie. Shrugging philosophically, he replied: "I was asked by Mrs. Lin to do so."

Shortly before he gathered most of his clan (5 children, 15 grandchildren) at his Long Island home for his 70th birthday party, the unblinking beacon of U.S. Socialism, Norman Thomas, loosed a flood of thoughts and recollections for veteran New York Timesman A. H. Raskin. No longer a perennial also-ran (six defeats) for the U.S. presidency, roving Lecturer-Writer-Committeeman Thomas had lost none of his tongue's facile sharpness. Eying the rigors of a world toying with the idea of "peaceful coexistence" (he calls it "competitive coexistence"), Thomas placed his bet on the West: "Our democracy is like a reluctant knight going out to engage the dragon. His armor is on awry and he drives out his horse with no flash of enthusiasm, but somehow in the end the dragon poops out and our knight wins." He glibly switched metaphors to tick off one of democracy's own current ailments: to him, Senator Joseph McCarthy may be viewed without hysterical wailing, as "a bad skin disease, rather than a cancer." Inevitably, onetime Presbyterian Parson Thomas reflected on the day-dreamy luxury of turning back the clock: "I am not such an idiot as to say that if I had my life to live over again I would not change it some, but I would not change the main lines. I might have gone further as a Republican or a Democrat, but I am not disappointed that I did not do so."

Charles A. Lindbergh, winner of a Pulitzer Prize (for last year's The Spirit of St. Louis, his brilliant, present-tense narrative of his 1927 transatlantic flight), put on his Air Force uniform (his first time out of mufti since before World War II) to become an active brigadier general. Long an exponent of a harder, faster U.S. military punch, Lindbergh will make a secret survey of the Air Force's super-secret guided-missile program.

Leaving her two children, Yasmin, 4 (daughter of Prince Ali Khan), and Rebecca, 9 (daughter of Orson Welles), frolicking at Lake Tahoe, Cinemactress Rita Hayworth, with her fourth husband, Crooner Dick Haymes, in tow, journeyed to nearby Reno for the climax of a Versailles among divorce settlements. Yasmin was the prize. For her, Prince Aly signed away a princess's ransom of the estimated $500 million fortune of his aging (77) father, Ago Khan, who dotes on Yasmin and will treasure her as one of his four heirs.* To Rita will come more than $1,500 a month for Yasmin's support until she comes into her inheritance. In return for his largesse, Aly will get Yasmin for six weeks a year at first, longer later, and have the right to see that she grows up a good Moslem. As Rita put her name to the custody agreement, reported a lawyer later, "a smile of satisfaction crossed her face."

Elder Statesman Herbert Hoover, 80, took off by air for West Germany, where he will be the guest of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, get an honorary degree from Tubingen's university.

In Naples, a six-man commission of solid citizens and cops grilled onetime U.S. Vice Czar Charles ("Lucky") Luciano, 57, deported from the U.S. in 1946. After keeping him squirming on the hot seat for half an hour, the six unanimously decided that Lucky is "socially dangerous because of well-founded suspicions that he lives on crime and by crime." Just to help him be a good boy, the commission prescribed a virtuous regimen for Luciano, ruled that for the next two years he must 1) stay home between dusk and dawn, 2) roam no farther than Naples' near suburbs, 3) check in with the cops every Sunday, 4) avoid saloons, cafes, race tracks and all shady characters except himself.

Novelist Louis Bromfield, a deft-penned agrarian reformer who has made a fair amount of money by writing about saving the soil and such to make farming pay, auctioned off his 60-head herd of purebred Holstein dairy cattle, which had browsed at his famed Malabar Farm in northern Ohio. Reason for the sale, at which bids were alarmingly low: dairying didn't pay.

Oil Heir Laurance Spelman Rockefeller, 44, owner of a 650-acre plantation on St. John, small (12,200 acres), unspoiled (only one hotel) gem of the Virgin Islands, offered his land as a site for the first U.S. National Park in the Caribbean. Holder of options on about half the island, Conservationist Rockefeller hoped to pick them up, eventually hand over about two-thirds of St. John to the U.S.

Before his slated release from the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary this week, Model Prisoner Alger Hiss, 50, had a "customary talk" with the warden. Hiss, who has served three years, eight months and five days of a five-year sentence for perjury (for denying that he had turned secret documents over to the Communists while in the State Department), could scarcely find much consolation in the warden's parting words. When, as ex-Convict 19137, he walks out of Lewisburg's gate two days after Thanksgiving Day, Lawyer Hiss will greet the world as a convicted felon, practically broke, disbarred in all courts, stripped of nearly all ordinary civil rights.

The Atomic Energy Commission announced that the first award of its special $25,000 prize for "especially meritorious contributions" in nuclear physics will go to the University of Chicago's ailing Dr. Enrico Fermi, 54, Italian-born Nobel Prizewinner (1938), who presided over the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942, thereby ushering in the Atomic Age.

*The other three: Aly and his two sons by an earlier marriage, Kharim, 16, and Amyon, 15.

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