Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote his column this weekend about the Times Bestseller List. What does it do and how does it work, he wanted to know; also, why was Elie Wiesel's Night retired from the list last month despite the fact that it was still selling well enough to chart at number nine on the paperbacks list the week before?

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It’s hard to imagine two people whose combined influence could get more important people off their couches and over to the Waldorf-Astoria on a Sunday night (May 20) than Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel and talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey, who was being honored by Mr. Wiesel’s foundation.  read more »

In her fine book on gypsy life, Bury Me Standing, Isabel Fonseca describes the resistance by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council to the inclusion of Roma, or gypsy, victims of the Nazis in the museum that the council supervises in Washington.

It was only after the 1986 resignation of President Elie Wiesel, the survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who had opposed Gypsy representation, that one Gypsy was invited onto the council...

I tended to judge Wiesel for this opposition, till a few days ago, when I read his book on his father's murder in a concentration camp, Night (1958). In it, he describes his first night in Auschwitz, after saying goodbye to his mother and one of his sisters for the last time. He and his father are moved to a barracks where Gypsy inmates assisted the German guards, or kapos. His father is suffering from colic and approaches a Gypsy to find out where the bathroom is.

The gypsy looked him up and down slowly, from head to foot. As if he wanted to convince himself that this man addressing him was really a creature of flesh and bone, a living being with a body and a belly. Then, as if he had suddenly woken up from a heavy doze, he dealt my father such a clout that he fell to the ground, crawling back to his place on all fours... I did not move... Yesterday, I should have sunk my nails into the criminal's flesh... I thought only: I shall never forgive [him] for that...

Former Czech President Vaclav Havel, former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevick, and Elie Wiesel discuss a report urging UN action on North Korean human rights violations at the UN.

Andrea Stewart-Cousins, along with David Paterson, Malcolm Smith and Liz Krueger, announces the Senator-elect's victory in the 35th state senate district at the Westchester County Courthouse.

Also the City Council will release a report on "how to strengthen the State's ailing hospitals and ensure that all New Yorkers have access to affordable health care." [added].