The Scottish architect and designer, in vogue at the turn of the century, is hot again, and coming to America. With his wife, Margaret, he changed the face of Glasgow; now the city is celebrating them by sending a major exhibition across the pond. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the masterful Scottish architect and designer, created his small stock of exquisite work in a brief outburst of youthful exuberance around the turn of the century and then slipped into a desperate decline. After Mackintosh died in 1928, a critic described him as "the European counterpart of Frank Lloyd Wright" and a forerunner of Le Corbusier. In 1994, a Mackintosh writing desk was sold at auction in London for an astounding 793,500 pounds, setting a record for a piece of 20th-century furniture. But Mackintosh never felt the kind of acclaim during his lifetime that critics shower on great artists. After tasting early success in his native Glasgow, a depressed Mackintosh found himself falling out of fashion. Drinking too much, he muttered bitterly in his 40s about the world passing him by. Long before he died, he gave up architecture and design...

When Secretary of State Madeleine Albright showed up for a breakfast session with the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times recently (an event carried live on C-Span television), she began by chiding the reporters: "It is a sign of my undying affection for the Los Angeles Times that I'm here, but I don't know why I came, because you're the only paper in the United States that did not put my picture on the front page, my brilliant performance throwing out the ball..."

In the "good old days" of the late 1960s, when Zaire was known as the Congo and its leader did not yet call himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu waza Banga (the all-conquering warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake), the United States proudly had the huge, unwieldy, volatile country wrapped around its little finger...

Money is no object for the Getty Trust, as it builds its collections and does good works around the globe. Now it has a new home overlooking Los Angeles. "I've always said that Getty-watching is like going to the Indianapolis 500," says John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. "You're not there to see them go round and round. You're there to see them hit the wall." The Getty Trust, whose extraordinary wealth has made it a target of both envy and scorn, will open its flagship Getty Center on December 16. The billion-dollar museum and research campus, designed by Richard Meier and perched on a ridge in the foothills of California's Santa Monica Mountains, is the home of an art institution whose focus has expanded exponentially since the death of J. Paul Getty, its oil baron founder, in 1976...