NEW YORK -- Because Kathy Morgan believes in the Christian doctrine of free will, she offers her students at All Hallows Catholic High School a choice about their future. "So, you want to get out of the South Bronx?" she asks 17-year-old Brian Seymour, who just slumped into a chair in her pin-neat office. No response. She waits. "Yo, Brian. It's a simple yes or no."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In a dormitory lobby, under harsh fluorescent lights, there is a glimpse of the future: A throng of promising minority high schoolers, chatting and laughing, happy and confident. It is a late June day, and the 51 teenagers have just converged here at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for its prestigious minority summer program -- a program that bootstraps most of its participants into M.I.T.'s freshman class. Already, an easy familiarity prevails. A doctor's son from Puerto Rico invites a chemical engineer's son from south Texas to explore nearby Harvard Square. Over near the soda machines, the Hispanic son of two schoolteachers meets a black girl who has the same T-shirt, from an annual minority-leadership convention.

BOSTON -- Later this month, in ancient Boston Garden, No. 35 will be retired -- raised high to the crossbeams alongside banners of long-ago champions. But as the crowd pays homage to Reggie Lewis , the dead Celtics captain, certain people will feel a special ache. The event will be particularly poignant for the doctors and team officials who crowded into a conference room at New England Baptist Hospital two years ago. They had gathered, that early May afternoon, to discuss medical tests taken in the crucial days after Mr. Lewis collapsed during a playoff game.

WASHINGTON -- Recently, a student was shot dead by a classmate during lunch period outside Frank W. Ballou Senior High. It didn't come as much of a surprise to anyone at the school, in this city's most crime-infested ward. Just during the current school year, one boy was hacked by a student with an ax, a girl was badly wounded in a knife fight with another female student, five fires were set by arsonists, and an unidentified body was dumped next to the parking lot. But all is quiet in the echoing hallways at 7:15 a.m., long before classes start on a spring morning. The only sound comes from the computer lab, where 16-year-old Cedric Jennings is already at work on an extra-credit project, a program to bill patients at a hospital. Later, he will work on his science-fair project, a chemical analysis of acid rain.

PELHAM MANOR, N.Y. -- Timothy Fisher, a 44-year-old tax attorney, is sitting in his English Tudor home on a quiet street in this pristine suburb, talking to himself. Actually, the conversation is with his earlier self -- a fondly remembered 20-year-old who worked for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, worried about the poor and thought he would change the world.

What do Citicorp's John Reed, CBS's Laurence Tisch and American Express's James D. Robinson III have in common with heiress Ann Getty, philanthropist Walter Annenberg and Ron Reagan Jr.? They are all part of Warren Buffett's growing network, a formidable collection of corporate heads, financiers, money managers and celebrities. The relationships in many cases have been built over decades, deftly combining friendship with business. Members of the far-flung group, who often look to the Omaha investor as something of a mentor, exchange investment ideas, insights into corporate affairs and profitable connections that have been one key to Mr. Buffett's success.