This volume of the LLE Review covers the period January--March 1998. The first of eight articles documents the in-house development, scale-up, and manufacture of 60 continuous distributed phase plates with high laser-damage resistance. D.J. Smith et al. describe how inert ion beams were used to etch a continuously varying pattern into the surface of fused silica to form these devices. Other highlights of research presented in this issue are: (1) a soft x-ray microscope with high spatial resolution has been characterized and used for initial experiments on the OMEGA laser system, F.J. Marshall et al. give details of the testing, calibration, and initial use of this microscope for studying the hydrodynamic stability of directly driven planar foils; (2) D.K. Bradley et al. report on a series of experiments designed to investigate hydrodynamic instability growth in direct-drive capsule implosions; (3) C.J. McKinstrie et al. report on the use of systematic perturbation methods to derive formulas for the Landau damping rates of electron-plasma and ion-acoustic waves; (4) high efficiency and good beam quality are potential advantages of the end-pumped solid-state lasers over the side-pumped ones, A. Babushkin et al. describe their successful use of a transport fiber to end-pump a Nd:YLF laser, …