Comment by Guy Trebay. Comment about the Needle Exchange Program of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. The needles distributed are tinted yellow with enamel in the Bronx, blue for the Lower East Side, and red in Brooklyn. About 3,000 of them are distributed in these neighborhoods once a week by volunteers...

The Talk of the Town Night and Day by Peter Stark. Talk story about the writer and his wife's recent trip to Qaanaaq, a village in the north of Greenland. In the high Arctic, the summer sun circles the horizon without dipping beneath it and there is no discernible difference between night and day. The writer and his wife were extremely...

The Talk of the Town Reconstruction by Richard Woodward. Talk story about monthly Saturday meetings at 34th St. Y of Record Research Associates, an organization of about 50 mostly middle-aged men who gather to advance the cause of discographic scholarship. R.R.A.'s interests lie chiefly in the technical history of the record business: copyrights, patents, pressings, release dates...

The Talk of the Town Here's A Story by Richard Cohen. Talk story about"The Real Live Brady Bunch", an absurd theatrical version of the TV show "The Brady Bunch", which uses adult actors, and canned laughter, set to an accurate reconstruction of the show from 20 transcribed scripts. Writer interviews three members of the cast. The show opens soon in...

Fiction Off-Ramp by Polly Frost. Doreen works at a Carl's Jr. cafe run by her mother and stepfather near Flagstaff, Arizona. She meets a customer named Lyle who tells her that he could be an artist if she would be his muse, but adds that Doreen is not a muse's name. "Henceforth," he says, "you...

Fiction Emergency by Denis Johnson. In early September of 1973, the narrator is working as a night clerk in a hospital emergency room in the Midwest. He shares drugs that are stolen by his friend Georgie, an orderly. Georgie hallucinates that there is a pool of blood on the floor of O.R., which he mops...

A Reporter at Large THE BEES FROM RIO CLARO by Wallace White. REPORTER AT LARGE about Africanized honeybees in Brazil. The first bees originated outside the city of Rio Claro. In the fall of 1956 a Brazilian geneticist named Warwick Estevam Kerr, on the faculty of the Univ. of Sao Paulo at Piracicaba, brought some queen bees from Africa to Brazil for...

The Sporting Scene THE GAME OF KINGS by Stephen G. Smith. THE SPORTING SCENE about court tennis. Tells about a match between world champion Wayne Davis and Lachlan Deuchar. The real name of tennis, as most people think of it, is lawn tennis. Tennis is a game played in a court, with all four walls in play. Tells the history of...

Jazz by Whitney Balliett.

Books by Louis Menand.

The Film File Hot Shots! by Michael Sragow. “Good for a few laughs” may be the motto for the “Airplane!” college of filmmaking, but it applies literally to this sputtering spoof of military movies and commercials. The lampoons go all over the globe, in more ways than one. The director, Jim Abrahams, and his co-writer, Pat Proft (who...

Poetry Spring Glen Grammar School by Donald Hall. THAT...

Poetry Fibre Optics by David Woo. Again a call from an old friend I thought I'd lost...

Poetry On the Peninsula by Nicholas Christopher. Lit from below, the blue water...