No one will ever accuse Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the former Stanford students who founded the Internet search company Google, of a lack of ambition. Brin once said that he hoped Google could be "like the mind of God, everywhere and knowing everything." When the company went public earlier this year, the pair promised to organize all information.

Common Ground: Art in New Mexico at the Albuquerque Museum

Pity the permanent collection. Locked away for most of its sad life in a dark, lonely temperature- and humidity-controlled vault, it only rarely gets to feel the warmth of artificial light on its fragile skin.

Mr. K's Chinese Restaurant

Longtime Albuquerque comedy producer Ronn Perea inaugurates his Duke City Comedy Cabaret on New Year's Eve, Friday, Dec. 31, at Mr. K.'s Chinese Restaurant, formerly New Chinatown. The Red-Headed Divas will be singing jazz and blues numbers. Local comic Goldie Garcia will tell a few jokes. Brenda Hollingsworth Picket will be doing her Lena Horne impression. And comic Bobby Bedard headlines the evening. "After the show," says Perea, "we'll be partying until the midnight hour." A steal at $15. www.rt66cabaret.com, 265-8859.

An interview with Tom Wolfe

Sitting cross-legged on a couch in the library of his Upper East Side apartment, wearing the trademark white suite, navy tie and spotless two-tone spats, Tom Wolfe is about as far from a college keg party as one can be in the United States of America. He should know, since this 74-year-old chronicler of the zeitgeist spent the past four years listening to wasted 20-year-olds recite lines from Old School and spin their game at co-eds. The result of this anthropological masochism is I am Charlotte Simmons, a hulking, hilarious, exclamation point filled tale that is probably every suburban dad's worst nightmare. The novel follows college frosh Charlotte Simmons from her small hometown in the Blue Ridge Mountains to the sex-obsessed campus of fictional DuPont University, where a college basketball player, a frat boy and a nerdy editor of the campus newspaper vie for her hand. Wolfe explained why young co-eds fascinated him so.

No one does literary horror like Straub. His latest novel is a sequel to last year's Lost Boy Lost Girl. This time out Straub's protagonist, an author named Tim Underhill, meets up with a character he's creating in his journals. The results, as usual, are stranger than fiction.