The Theatre IN SUNNY ITALY by Brendan Gill.

Fiction Rated by George W. S. Trow. The movie "Coming Near To You" is rated in a certain way because of some fairly routine violence. The violence is no problem, no obstacle to everyone's seeing and liking it. We want to know how the audience feels. They answer questions: Did the violence seem well motivated? Was there...

The Talk of the Town Letter by Thomas Whiteside. Talk story about the similarities between the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and a disaster that caused a dioxin-contaminated cloud to descend on Seveso, about 13 miles from Milan, Italy in 1976. It is in the form of a letter from a man who studied...

The Talk of the Town Identification Day by Victor Chen. Talk story about Identification Day at the Natural History Museum, which gave people an opportunity to have rocks, fossils, and artifacts they had been hoarding examined by experts. The experts were Sidney S. Horenstein, rocks, minerals, and invertebrate fossils; David A. Brody, insects; Harold S. Feinberg, shells and birds; Charlotte...

The Talk of the Town Solo by Anthony Hiss. Talk story about comedian Fred Willard who started doing a solo stand-up comedy act 5 months ago after 16 years in the business. He is 38 years old and from Shaker Heights, Ohio. Tells about the comedy groups he belonged to, Ace Trucking Co. and Second City, and about...

The Current Cinema Fuzz by Penelope Gilliatt. Review of Czech director Milos Forman's film "Hair". Discusses him - he is now an American citizen - and his past work. Mentions some of Czech movies: "Black Peter", "The Firemen's Ball" and "Competition...

Comment by Jonathan Schell. A recent headline in the Washington "Post" concerning the afflicted nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania, read, "Aides Wonder If Contamination May Close Plant Forever." Radioactive elements with half-lives of some 24,000 years are within the reactor. That length of time is, in human terms, "forever...

Profiles A CLOSE GATHERING by Suzannah Lessard.

Fiction The Safe Deposit by Isaac Bashevis Singer. During a heavy snowstorm, Prof. Uri Zalkind, a feeble Polish Jew, over 80, arrived by plane in N.Y. from Miami. He came to deliver a ms. on philosophy to his editor, personally, also to see a cousin of his late wife's and to see a doctor. He left N.Y. after...

The Air (On Television) by Michael J. Arlen.

The Sporting Scene FOUR-MINUTE MAN REVISITED by Herbert Warren Wind. THE SPORTING SCENE about Roger Bannister, who on May 6, 1954, became the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. He was 25 at the time, an English medical student at Oxford. He made his effort in a dual meet between Oxford and the Amateur Athletic...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

The Talk of the Town Pirates by Wallace White. Talk story about a meeting of the Music Publishers' Forum, an offshoot of the National Music Publishers' Association, at the Barbizon-Plaza to warn members of the recording industry against record piracy, the illegal marketing of records and tapes for which musicians, composers, etc., are not paid. Lawrence I. Kaplan...

Fiction Healing by Murray Bail. Narrator recounts an afternoon in the mid 1950's, in Adelaide, Australia, when he watched a neighbor boy, a show-off, wreck his souped-up bicycle as he was speeding along with his sister perched on the handle-bars. The brake of the bicycle gave out and just as it...

Poetry President Poem by Frederick Morgan. A President appeared to me in dreams...

Poetry In April by Richard Kenney. In April, in New England, the earth ball yields...