VOLTAIRE once remarked: "If --you wish to converse with me, define your terms." Last week the great debate around the U.S. was over the health of the nation's economy--not only among financial experts, but among factory hands, taxicab drivers, secretaries and housewives (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Everyone worried that the U.S. might be on the verge of or actually in a "recession"; yet there was no clear idea of just what a recession involves, or what it means in terms of the postwar economy. For a reading on where the U.S. stood last week, and what the Federal Reserve Board is doing about it, see BUSINESS, The 1957 Recession and Using the Credit Tools.

. . . And after this fling Who could blame Mr. Bing If he shipped Madam Callas to Dallas?

WITH these lines, TIME'S Music section last year concluded a story about the famed-and-furious soprano's latest fracas at the Met. Last week Diva Callas was indeed in Dallas, helping to launch the city's top-notch new opera company and give a concert. On hand to witness the historic meeting between the Lone Star State and the stately star of opera was TIME Music Researcher Dorothea Bourne. For a report on how the limerick came true, see Music, Callas in Dallas.

A poet who goes in for grimmer kicks than limericks is the hero of another Music story--The Cool, Cool Bards. Kenneth Rexroth has started an unshaven love affair between verse and jazz, and it is proliferating like a weird crop of mushrooms throughout San Francisco jazz joints. Mushiest of the mushrooms is a poem entitled Thou Shalt Not Kill, a lengthy dirge for hordes of long-lost poets who somehow strayed from their vocation. In it, among other things, Rexroth asks dolefully: "How many stopped writing at 30? How many went to work for TIME?" By latest count there are 46 writers on TIME, most of them over 30, and most of them are poets, at least part of the time.

OVER the last six weeks. Massachusetts' Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy has traveled more than 10,000 miles in his preliminary prospecting for the 1960 Democratic nomination for President of the U.S. TIME Washington Bureau Correspondent Marshall Berger accompanied Kennedy on key trips to the South and Midwest, which made some of the year's most remarkable political news. Almost everywhere else that Kennedy went, there was a TIME correspondent at his elbow. Says Kennedy: "It got so that whenever I got off a plane and didn't immediately see a TIME man near by, I'd wonder what had happened." For what happened, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Man Out Front.

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