Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

When a questioner at the Moscow World Youth Festival inquired about the "degenerate American comic-strip and rock-'n'-roll culture," top-ranking Red novelist and Propagandist llya Ehrenburg spoke mildly, once again showed himself to be an indicator of the changeable Soviet climate: "Whoever asked that question doesn't understand American culture, which has nothing to do with rock 'n' roll or comic strips. American culture is represented by Whitman, Dreiser, Hemingway^ and other men of genius." Continued the many-faced Ehrenburg, who toured the U.S. in 1946, roasted it for its slums and racial tensions: "In my voyages abroad I have learned that authentic culture is common to the whole world." Asked if he were planning a sequel to his novel The Thaw, which condemned--after Stalin's death--the shackles Stalinism clamped on art, he showed the same instinct for survival necessary for a Soviet writer: "Yes, I will write it--when I see clearly how the present situation develops."

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In Copenhagen, Danish-descended Val Peterson, new U.S. Ambassador to Denmark and onetime federal Civil Defense administrator, collected a plaque sent to him by citizens of Dannebrog, Neb., pleased bike-loving Danes by pedaling jauntily about on a two-wheeler.

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Bagged in Manhattan by a London Sunday Dispatch interviewer, sad-eyed old Satirist Aldous Huxley, 63, rhapsodized about his Hollywood hermitage, where "foxes, possum, raccoons, even coyotes, are always trotting across my terrace," lamented the pointless counterpoint of the brave new world. On Manhattan: "The psychological cost of living is rather high in New York. I find the streets horrifying and spend most of my time in my hotel room in a sort of fool's paradise." On television: "Who needs that little screen with disgusting little grey figures hopping around?" On writing: "It's getting to the point where no young man can live on straight writing. He has to go into another job, like doing television scripts--a fearful profession. In a democracy you now have financial censorship." On creeping concrete: "Architects are looking to cities 400 miles long. Extraordinarily repulsive." The cure for it all: "I've started work on a sort of reverse Brave New World, about a society which makes use of both East and West." Would it work? "Who knows?"

A year after he pleaded guilty to lightfingering $637,000 from the state and drew a 12-to-15-year sentence, onetime Illinois State Auditor Orville Hodge, now a $7.50-a-month disk jockey at the Menard branch of the Illinois State Penitentiary, had a word for the taxpaying public: "I still don't know what happened. This year has seemed like ten years. It's been awful, and sometimes I get so lonesome. I've been punished enough."

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Back at his summer home in Westbury, N.Y. after a horseplaying vacation at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Wall Street Sachem Bernard Baruch celebrated his 87th birthday and the publication of the first volume of his memoirs, Baruch: My Own Story (TIME, Aug. 19), earlier told Hearstman Bill Corum "that he would travel to Russia if he thought the visit would help promote peace. Reflecting on trips to the Soviet Union he might have made but did not, he reminisced: "Ever since Lenin, every regime in Russia has invited me to come there. Lenin asked me to come and spend six months as an adviser, and he told his emissary: 'I know Mr. Baruch will not be interested in money, but if he could think up a goodly number of millions that would interest him, let him name them.'

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While an unamused Ingrid Bergman snapped "ridiculous," the press rubbed its hands happily at the prospect of another newsmaking Rossellini in the family. From the principals--blonde, pretty Jennie Ann Lindstrom, 18, Ingrid's daughter, and good-looking Franco Rossellini, 22, nephew of Strolling Player Roberto Rossellini --reporters got no facts, but freely spun their fancies. Said Jennie, who held hands and exchanged fond looks with Franco on Capri: "What business would it be of anyone?" Sighed Chip-Off-the-Old-Charmer Franco: "Jennie is young, charming, beautiful and Swedish."

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Reporters checked up on Convicted Perjurer Alger Hiss, learned that despite small sales of his book, In the Court of Public Opinion (TIME, May 13), he has no deep reason to worry about income. Hired at $6,000 a year last May by Feathercombs, Inc., a Manhattan hair-accessory firm, he shortly got twice the salary and the title of administrative assistant to President R. Andrew Smith, who said he had no convictions about Hiss's guilt or innocence, found his book "dry." But, said Hiss's satisfied boss: "He is a terrifically nice person, gentle, helpful, objective, and has amazing ability to see right through a problem."

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