Comment by Philip Hamburger. A friend who is spending the summer in Wellfleet on Cape Cod flew to Boston for the day to visit the new I.M. Pei West Wing of the Museum of Fine Arts. He describes the new wing in detail. After leaving the museum he put away a dozen oysters at...

Books Routes by Jeremy Bernstein.

The Talk of the Town Kit by Jane Boutwell. Talk story about a chat with Dr. Thomas Dailey, a mountain-climbing surgeon who lives in Manhattan and is assembling a medical kit for a 2 1/2 week trek through the Tibetan plateau in China. Their group was organized by Mountain Travel Nepal, which has four trekking permits issued by...

Reflections THE SHAPE WE SEE IN OUR MINDS by William Pfaff. REFLECTIONS about U.S. Soviet policy. Since the death of Stalin, all Administrations have considered that the Soviet-American rivalry functioned within negotiable limits and need not lead to war. In the Reagan Administration, this view has been challenged for the first time since the mid-1950s. The view stated by...

Fiction Certain Questions in the History of the Party by Daniel Menaker. A parody on Communist China. Writer describes a dinner party given by Moo Vingvan for his friends, whose names sound like common American phrases, such as Bo Tai, No Go, Hai Enlo, and Ah Choo. Writer describes arrival of dinner guests and how a guest, Don Wenow, initiates a discussion...

Fiction The Girl Next Door by Julia Smith. Writer tells about a summer three years before when Annie, then a college student, fell in love with the boy next door, Matt Fowler. Matt is one of the few college-age men Annie feels comfortable being with in their suburban New York State community. She is self-conscious of...

Jazz New Bird by Whitney Balliett.

Musical Events Melodious Falls by Nicholas Kenyon.

A Reporter at Large IMAGING SATURN by Henry S. F. Cooper. REPORTER AT LARGE about the spacecraft Voyager 1's rendezvous with the planet Saturn, in November, 1980. Writer went to Pasadena, California and spent time with scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was running the mission for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as they analyzed the data arriving...

The Talk of the Town The Good Hello by James Stevenson. Talk story about Frank Julio who works in "The People's Garden," on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. The area west of Columbus Avenue at 90th St. is a hodgepodge of plots that creates a dense vegetable garden. Describes Julio's 20' X 30' plot, teeming with corn, tomatoes, cantaloupe, watermelon...

U. S. Journal AMUSEMENT-PARK THOUGHTS OF A PARENT ALONG FOR THE RIDES by Calvin Trillin. U.S. JOURNAL: LANGHORNE, PA., about "Sesame Place," a "family play park" that opened last summer in Langhorne, Pa., and about the writer's feelings on amusement parks in general. Sesame Place is designed to appeal to families with children from ages 3 to 13. Writer's older daughter is twelve. Writer is...

Poetry Milliner by Susan Prospere. It is only when the hour...

Poetry Elegy For a Dead Labrador by Lars Gustafsson. Here there be, in the midst of summer...