Reflections AFTER COMMUNISM by Robert Heilbroner. REFLECTIONS about the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, and the possible nature of the economic system that will ultimately replace it. The Soviet economic system deteriorated to a point far beyond the worst crisis ever experienced by capitalism; the villain in this deterioration was the central planning system...

The Talk of the Town Royalty by Susan Orlean. Talk story about papaya stands in New York. Writer notes the locations of Gray's Papaya, Papaya Kingdom, Papaya King, Papaya World and Papaya Princess. Before writer moved to NYC, 4 years ago, she hadn't much contact with papayas. She knew they existed...but they never figured greatly in her life...

Comment by Mark Danner. Comment about the Middle East crisis involving Iraq. With regard to Iraq, we have suddenly been told that Saddam Hussein has emerged as the Hitler of the Middle East, a ruthless bully who wants to take on the entire region and thus threaten America's "way of life." It is to...

The Current Cinema HIGH AND LOW by Terrence Rafferty.

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Books by George Steiner.

Fiction TV People by Haruki Murakami. Narrator says that he doesn't like Sunday evenings, when his head starts to ache and he hears things; all the more reason for the TV People to come around. "Like melancholy moods...they steal into the gloom of that appointed time." He describes their appearance, like "perspective demos," as if...

A Reporter at Large OUT THERE-I by William Finnegan. A REPORTER AT LARGE about the drug traffic in New Haven, CT, and especially about the black underclass. The illegal drug business enjoyed a spectacular boom in the late '80s in New Haven. The city's heroin trade had been large, but stable since the sixties, and the demand for marijuana...

The Talk of the Town Out of the Woods by Hal Espen. Talk story about visiting the area where the David Lynch TV series "Twin Peaks" was filmed. "The Real Twin Peaks," according to a T-shirt I bought at the Alpine Blossom & Gift Shoppe, in North Bend, Washington, is the Snoqualmie Valley, which stretches for thirty miles along the foothills...

Around City Hall AROUND CITY HALL PEACEKEEPERS by Andy Logan. Competing for attention in the last two weeks of Aug. were the crisis in the Persian Gulf and the civil war raging at the city's Rikers Island jail. Americans with a sense of history, remembering the Aug. of 1914, doubtless found it easier to understand Pres. Bush's manic expression at...

Poetry The Perch by Galway Kinnell. There is a fork in a branch...

Poetry The Influenzas by Alberto Rios. The last of the epidemics bore him...