The Talk of the Town Open Road by Berton Roueche. Talk story about a trip by automobile from eastern Long Island to the Deepest South, Mobile, Alabama. There is very little open road--very little countryside--in the eyesore megalopolis that stretches almost unbroken from Boston to Washington. Passing through South Carolina writer was favored with an endless garden of...

Comment by Suzannah Lessard. Comment about the decline of U.S. power. Hardly a day goes by without a news story that in one way or another confirms that the U.S. is in the process of becoming a leading member of a community of nations rather than a giant looming over all. We also pick...

The Theatre AT BALLYBEG HALL by Edith Oliver.

The Talk of the Town Winky King by Adam Gopnik. Talk Story about Ronald Globus, an inventor, who cornered the Vari-Vue Company's inventory. Ronald Globus invented the GlobuScope, the world's smallest panoramic camera. It's a stainless-steel oval camera with a single vertical slit on its face & is used for military reconnaissance work, landscape photography, & surveying...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

The World of Business THE OLD BOY AND THE NEW BOYS by Connie Bruck. THE WORLD OF BUSINESS about increased LBO (leveraged buyout activity on Wall St., financed by junk bonds & also about the new Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, who seems to be emphasizing regulatory fine-tuning. This is a change from the Reagan years which were sympathetic to a free market. Brady...

A Critic at Large THE FALLEN HERO by William Pfaff. In A CRITIC AT LARGE writer examines the lasting attraction of T.E. LAwrence & how it has contributed to 50 biographical accounts of his life & to the resurgence in "Lawrence Studies" in academia. Lawrence's celebrity followed from having played a brave & romantic role in W.W.I. The military affair...

Fiction Driving Gloves by Sergei Dovlatov. Dovlatov meets Filimonov at a conference of industry newspaper editors in Leningrad. Filimonov wants him to play the lead in his underground film about Czar Peter the Great returning to modern Leningrad. Filimonov describes the film as "politically touchy." They go to Lenfilm studios to get Dovlatov his czar costume...

The Talk of the Town Small Town by Bill Barol. Talk STory about the Panorama of the City of New York, the giant scale model that Robert Moses created for the 1964 World's Fair, which is located at the Queens Museum, in Flushing Meadows. Visitors to the World's Fair viewed the Panorama from pod-shaped fibre-glass cars that travelled...

Letter from Beijing by Fred C. Shapiro. Writer compares the cities of Beijing & Shanghai with Washington and New York. He lives in Beijing & recently visited Shanghai, which he prefers as a city. Like N.Y. Shanghai developed as a port (beginning in about 960 A.D.) & now with more than 12 1/2 million residents it is...

Fiction A Model World by Michael Chabon. While in a bookstore in Long Beach, California, Levine, a graduate student, discovers a slim book by a Dr. Kemp called "Antarctic Models..." & he decides almost immediately to plagerize it & submit it as his dissertation. His friend, Smith, meanwhile, is looking for a book by Mehet Monsour, the...

The Sporting Scene STATE OF THE ART by Roger Angell. THE SPORTING SCENE about spring training & about the quality of play now, as opposed to 20 or 30 years ago. Writer talks to Whitey Ford about baseball. He was the centerstage pitcher at Yankee Stadium for 16 years during the Yanks' Late Augustan era--the 750s & early '60s...

Poetry Alchemy by Alan Michael Parker. On the first good day of yard work...

Poetry A Castle in the Olives by Derek Walcott. I crossed my meridian. Rust terraces, olive trees...

Poetry Thrasher by W. S. Di Piero. Dirt grenades blown around...