By Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor

What a great piece posted in Slate by Daniel Gross on the meeting here in New York this week between the top management of Exxon/Mobil and some of the adult descendants of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, the forerunner of Exxon/Mobil. In Gross's hands, the story I first read as an item in the business sections of several dailies yesterday is a great set piece, full of detail and an appropriate reference to David Rockefeller's fascinating autobiography.

To the task at hand: by my count, we have no fewer than a dozen contenders for stories -- that's in just the FIRST block of the broadcast, before the first commercial. So we need to do some winnowing down.

This is the one day every few years when my hobby actually intersects with my job: I've listened to all of the raw tapes so far released by the LBJ Presidential Library (hundreds of hours) of his tape-recorded telephone conversations. Today's release deals with a critical period of his Presidency. I've got all of the CD's at home and have been sampling on the web all day.

We've also got an astounding piece of work by Jim Maceda from Afghanistan tonight, politics, food prices, physical pain and infrastructure. It's a full boat. We hope you can join us tonight.

By Robert Bazell, NBC News chief science correspondent

Tonight we report on some new numbers showing just how many Americans are in pain at any one time.  Two economists, Alan Krueger of Princeton and Arthur Stone of the State University of New York at Stony Brook designed a survey, similar to a political poll, and commissioned the Gallup Organization to interview almost 4000 people on the telephone to ask whether they are in pain. 

Krueger and Stone found that at any one time 28.8 per cent of men and 26.6 per cent of women report they are in pain.  People who are less educated, poorer and less satisfied with their lives tend to be in more pain.  But it clearly a problem that cuts across all classifications in the society.