The Current Cinema by Pauline Kael. THE CURRENT CINEMA review of “Hairspray...

Comment by Daniel Ford. Comment about an accident involving one of the Strategic Air Command's new B-1B bombers. The plane crashed because it hit a bird. A few days after the accident, the Air Force BASH unit, the Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard team, surveyed the area and reported seeing hundreds of turkey-size...

Dancing by Arlene Croce.

Our Far-Flung Correspondents LOOK AT THAT by Alex Shoumatoff. OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about Madagascar, a huge island in the Indian Ocean. The natives are dark-skinned tropical people; they are Afro-Indonesian. Most of them are Merina, the largest & most urban of the country's 18 ethnic groups. In the 19th century the Merina conquered the island &...

The Talk of the Town Avtograph by Elizabeth Morgan. Talk story about Avtograf, the first Russian rock-and-roll band to play in the U.S. The writer is friendly with a young couple, Brad & Katya, both of whom teach Russian. Katya, who is from Leningrad, emigrated to the U.S. after marrying Brad, and is now being educated by...

Fiction Child in the Leaves by Charles Dickinson. On the first day of the leaf pickup a car went into a skid striking a boy before coming to a stop in the leaves where the boy was hiding. The driver continued on unaware of what had happened. The boy was Randy Brennan, 8 1/2. His mother, Francie, taught...

The Talk of the Town Deliveries by Sue Hubbell. Talk story about an older woman who is a beekeeper in Missouri, who occasionally drives to New York to deliver honey. Tells about a day spent delivering honey to a Bloomingdale's warehouse in Long Island City...

A Reporter at Large EXPLORERS by Henry S. F. Cooper. REPORTER AT LARGE about a visit to Moscow to learn about the Soviet space program. The real space center, Starry Town just outside Moscow, where the cosmonauts live & work, and Tyruatum, in Central Asia, where most Soviet rockets are launched-are off limits to foreign journalists. Moscow, however, is...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Letter from Washington by Elizabeth Drew. Dukakis has thus far been lucky. His coming in third in Iowa-a great disappointment to his staff-was treated by the press largely as a victory of sorts. His luck held in New Hampshire where he came in first. His bankroll is the largest among the Democrats. It was...

Poetry The Fly by Joseph Brodsky. While you were singing, fall arrived...

Poetry Seeking to Account to A Fisherman Thief by Elizabeth Macklin. See this fish flipping around, hand-sized, silver to...