Comment by Mark Hertsgaard. The world has every reason to want to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of Saddam Hussein, a man who has used chemical weapons against his own countrymen and who in the last ten years has started two wars, which left hundreds of thousands dead. Even a so-called...

The Talk of the Town Family Business by Adam Gopnik. Talk story about the Argosy Bookstore, which has been on E. 59th for 60 years. It is run by the 3 Cohen sisters, Judith, Naomi and Adina, who are stately and elegant. They were offered money to sell the building. "All around us, tall, alarming buildings were going up, and...

The Talk of the Town Exhibition by Lawrence Weschler. Talk story about Tomislave Gotovac, 53, a Yugoslav artist whose work often requires him to get naked. He doesn't particularly enjoy it--"I'm just as shy as anyone else," he told writer the other day--but he has found nudity to be an essential element of many of his performances...

The Talk of the Town Lego by David Owen. Talk story about Francie Berger, 30. Her job is building things out of Lego bricks. Her works include the six-foot-tall red-bearded pirate that stands in the Lego department of FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue, and the six-foot-tall roller coaster, part of an animal amusement park...

Fiction Jun-Hee by Marshall N. Klimasewiski. Jun-Hee and her husband, Tanner, never planned to have children, but they are excited when Jun-Hee becomes pregnant. She dreams that her late mother comes in the night and takes the baby from her. Jun-Hee has a miscarriage, and blames her dead mother for it. She telephones...

A Reporter at Large THE EIGHTH BRIDGE by Tom Buckley. REPORTER AT LARGE about Hell Gate Bridge which opened in 1917. It was the work of an engineer named Gustav Lindenthal who had built up a thriving practice in Pittsburgh. He was born in 1850 in what is now Brno, Czechoslovakia. Accounts he gave & entries on him in reference...

Letter from Europe by Jane Kramer. Tells about the Muslims in Britain and the Salman Rushdie affair. His novel "The Satanic Verses" was published in 1988. A group of Qum mullahs in Iran read a selection of 20 pages to the Ayatollah & the Ayatollah issued his "fatwa", a kind of Koranic edict, sentencing Rushdie to...

The Current Cinema VANITY, VANITIES by Pauline Kael.

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Report from Moscow by Robert Cullen. At the Communist Party Central Committee's autumn plenum, speech after shril speech from provincial representitives demanded that the central authorities do something to repress the separatists. President Gorbachev dismissed the man in charge of the nation's police, and replaced him with an apparatchik whose previous career had involved keeping the...

Books by John Updike.

Poetry This Pen Clinging to My Hand by Simon Perchik. This pen clinging to my hand...

Poetry Covenant by Adam Zagajewski. For an instant there was a silent...

Poetry Invitation to the Past by Debora Greger. Closer, a little closer. There...