Comment Comment, Pt. I by Lincoln Caplan. Comment about the death of Paul Freund, a legal scholar of the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court. He was a law clerk of Justice Louis Brandeis, an assistant to the Solicitor General of the U.S., and, for five decades, a professor at Harvard Law School, where he had been...

Comment Comment Pt. II by Garrison Keillor. A friend writes from a resort on an island off Antigua: It's raining on the island this morning, the last day of an impulsive vacation, and when I woke up and heard the rain I felt instantly cheerful. What a luxury: instead of playing tennis, I'm sitting in bed... Nature...

The Talk of the Town Possibilities by James Albrecht. Talk story about the Raging Rooks, a chess team at Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Junior High School (known as J.H.S. 43M) at 129th St. and Amsterdam Ave. Richard Gudonsky, a science teacher, has been in charge of the team for 20 years. The team began to take off in 1989...

The Talk of the Town Homemade by Susan Orlean. Talk story about attending a meeting of Roundtable for Women In Food Service, Inc. The purpose of the meeting was to tell people how to package the new food products they have invented and sell them to people like Victoria Verdiglione, the executive director of nutritional services for the N.Y.C...

Fiction Have You Ever by Ian Frazier. Humorous piece in the form of a questionnaire for insurance applicants. First Mutual Protagonist Life & Health is providing basic health and liability coverage to single, married, and dependent characters in daytime television dramas. Applicants are questioned about their susceptibility to various far-fetched plot twists: "Did you ever emerge...

Fiction Lost Ground by William Trevor. On the afternoon of Sept. 14, 1989, Milton Leeson, 15, sees a withered woman with lustrous black hair in his father's orchard, in Ireland's County Armagh. She kisses him and walks away. She appears to him again on the evening of the following day. She tells him that she is...

Reflections WAITING FOR COLUMBUS by Alastair Reid. REFLECTIONS about the Dominican Republic and Columbus landing there. On Oct. 12 500 years will have passsed since he first stepped ashore on a new world. The country that has dressed the anniversary in the most official pomp and gravity has been the Dominican Republic, which with Haiti, occupies the...

The Art World (The Art Galleries) The Close-Up by Adam Gopnik.

The Current Cinema SHOCKS TO THE SYSTEM by Terrence Rafferty.

The Theatre DUBLINERS by Edith Oliver.

Personal History EARLY INNINGS by Roger Angell. PERSONAL HISTORY about boyhood memories of baseball. Writer was born in 1920, and became an addicted reader at a precocious age. Baseball, which was in its late first golden age, meant a lot to writer, but it didn't come first, because writer seems to have been a fan of everything...

In Fashion by Holly Brubach.

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Books Laughter from the Yokels by John Updike.

The Film File Grand Canyon by Michael Sragow. Or, the self-importance of being earnest. Kevin Kline plays an L.A. immigration lawyer who lives as comfortably as a hot entertainment lawyer; Danny Glover plays the tow-truck driver who rescues Kline when his car conks out in a rough black section of the city. Kline plots to repay his savior...

The Film File The Inner Circle by Michael Sragow. Hoping to pin the blame for Stalinism on the unthinking masses, the director, Andrei Konchalovsky, and his co-writer, Anatoli Usov, mistakenly rest an epic-scale movie on a straw man: Ivan Sanshin (Tom Hulce), the dictator’s personal projectionist. Both sheepish and sheeplike, Ivan the Fallible buys every official explanation for Stalin’s...

Poetry Self-Portrait in Tyvek TM Windbreaker by James Merrill. The windbreaker is white with a world map...

Poetry Field Flowers by Louise Gluck. What are you saying? That you want...

Poetry The Prodigal by Charles Simic. Dark morning rain...