Madison, Wis.–Put yourself in the situation:

You are having lunch with a friend when suddenly she asks you if you would lend her $30 until she gets paid next week. You have the money but you were planning to spend it for something else. She says, "Please lend me the money. I'll pay you back next week."

Reston, Va. — A delicately assembled and highly unusual summit conference adjourned recently at this woodland conference center outside Washington. It was a conference made up of adversaries whose detente was so fragile and whose trust was so slight that their last common act was to vote to suppress any official version of what went on during the three days they met together.

"There is a tendency to criticize people doing ethical analyses for being absolutists, and then to demand from them hard and fast answers, sure-fire formulations, which can be mechanically applied in every situation," says Dr. Peter Steinfels. "on the one hand, they are criticized for trying to impinge their views on the practitioners; on the other hand, they are dismissed for not supplying ready resolutions for the daily dilemmas met in applying and regulating our newly-discovered technologies."

Madison, Wis. — Dr. Victor Wayland is a cheerful man, the kind of children's dentist who makes you wish you could repeal your dental history and start over with a new set of baby teeth.

Chicago — "What happens if tomatoes do have feelings?" a young woman was heard to ask as she and her companion left the Conrad Hilton Hotel. The question was inevitable; just as setting a thousand monkeys to work at typewriters would eventually produce Shakespeare, setting several thousand psychologists together in the Loop was bound to produce silliness.

Ann Arbor, Mich. — David Lebowitz has a problem. One of his supervisors at the large hospital he manages in New York state is supposed to be interviewing new interns after their first six weeks on the job to tell them how they're doing. The problem is, the man is not doing the interviews; he is submitting the post-interview checklists without ever seeing the interns. Lebowitz knows this; the supervisor doesn't know he knows it.

Mexico City — The psychology of operant conditioning pioneered by the controversial American experimenter B.F. Skinner is spreading through Latin America with the force of a crusade.

San Francisco — The holidays were a busy time in Gay San Francisco. The city's 80-some gay bars were preparing for a massive New Year's Eve celebration to mark not only the advent of the Bicentennial Year but also the enactment of California's new sex reform law. All private sex relations between consenting adults would become lawful at midnight.

The "brainwashing" defense of Patricia Hearst has sent newspaper writers scurrying for explanations of the apparently exotic process that transformed a happy heiress into a gun-toting bank robber with the improbable nom-de-moll of Tanya.