The Talk of the Town Aquarium News by Jane Boutwell. Talk story about visit to New York Aquarium, which raises blue lobsters, and has two thousand-pound beluga whales, Winston and Natasha. They're working on plans for Sea Cliffs --a big new outdoor habitat for seals, walruses, black-footed penguins, and sea otters--and Discovery Cove, an educational display that...

The Talk of the Town Sections by William McKibben. Talk story about Sid Bronsky, who sells sections of the Sunday Times in front of Zabars every Sunday. He relies on other people giving him their paper, or discarded ones. For 25 years, he served for brief spells as the director of softball at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills...

The Talk of the Town Cushioned by William McKibben. Talk story about Matthew Lass, who built a Hovercraft in the basement of his Greenwich Village apartment. Writer talks to Jack Kramer, who runs a small boatyard at the Hudson end of Dyckman Street in uppermost Manhattan. Kramer told writer his boatyard never had a Hovercraft until something over a...

Comment by Jonathan Schell. For some months now, the national scandal at whose center the silent Lt. Col. North sits has mocked assiduous attempts of journalists & others to give it a name. Part of the reason, certainly, is that one earmark of the scandal is its prolific & at times themeless extension...it...

Books by Veronica Geng.

The Current Cinema AT FIFTEEN by Pauline Kael.

Jazz by Whitney Balliett.

Fiction World After Dark by John Rolfe Gardiner. Abe and Roma live on a farm in Worton, Va., with their 3 children: Charlotte, 14, and the boys, James and Clayton. They were poor. Roma worried their next door neighbor, Mr. Ray, was hostile. Abe tried a variety of ways to make a living, from opening a horse stable...

Personal History I-THE LIFE IT BRINGS by Jeremy Bernstein. PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer's life in physics. He was born on Dec. 21, 1929 in Rochester, N.Y. His father Philip, also born in Rochester, in 1901, was the rabbi of a large old Reform congregation. Writer has no early scientific or mathematical memories. Tells about growing up in Rochester...

The Theatre TAP-HAPPY by Brendan Gill.

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Poetry Kelomyakki by Joseph Brodsky. Dumped in the dunes snatched from the witless Finns...

Poetry Man Feeding Pigeons by Amy Clampitt. It was the form of the thing, the unmanaged...