Best of 1991

Wars rage around the the globe. A vast, tragic empire collapses. The economy constricts painfully. But ordinary life -- and extraordinary life -- goes on. People still write novels and environmental treaties, design solar cells and stage sets, orchestrate symphonies and ad campaigns. They still care about tossing a salad or a baseball superbly. From science to show biz, they exert all the passion, wit, ingenuity, game playing -- and, yes, the ego, venality and damn-fool silliness -- that keep the human enterprise steaming along so entertainingly.

And at the end of the year we feel compelled to sort it all out. Why? To impose order on the culture jumble, perhaps to restore a reassuringly human scale: when Warren Beatty represents a peak and Geraldo Rivera the pits, the concepts of triumph and disaster have been safely domesticated. And, of course, to play the parlor game. (The Simpsons better than thirtysomething? Come on!)

Some of the personalities and achievements singled out in the following pages will prove to be stars who shine only to be eclipsed, records that stand only to be broken. Many others will soon be swept into history's Dumpsters, as used up as New Year's confetti. A few -- we can't know which -- will turn out to matter, and to last. Whether by typifying 1991 or by transcending it, whether by embodying some great theme of the day or by quietly capturing the everyday, they will reverberate as long as, maybe longer than, the dramatic headlines now shouting at us. They will be, in Ezra Pound's phrase, news that stays news.