Letter from Cairo by Joseph Kraft. Discusses the Oct. 6, Egyptian military action, Operation Spark, against Israel--the crossing of the Suez Canal & the attack against the Bar-Lev Line, designed to break diplomatic stalemate & set in motion forces that would lead the Great Powers to press Israel to yield up territory seized during...

The Art World (The Art Galleries) Futurism et Seq. by Harold Rosenberg.

The Talk of the Town New in the Berg by Geoffrey T. Hellman. Talk story about the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Among the recent acquistions of the Berg is a section, on display, called "The James Joyce Circle in France." It contains a 1929 "out-of-series" first edition of "Ulysses" (one of ten copies printed on Holland paper...

Fiction Old Friends by Henry Bromell. Sam, a member of the U.S. Diplomatic Corp, & his wife Laura, wait with their youngest son, Quentin, in Venice, for the arrival of their sons Scobie & Matthew, & their girlfriends. They will be celebrating Christmas together for the first time in 8 years. The family has always been...

The Race Track Repeater by G. F. T. Ryall. Mrs. William Farris and her daughter Mrs. Edward H. Gerry are owners of the Lazy F Ranch, one of whose horses is Forego who won the Roamer Handicap and then the Discovery Handicap at Aqueduct...

Fiction The Inquiring Demographer (This Week's Question: How Do You Think Watergate Will Affect The Energy Crisis?) by Calvin Trillin. Illustrated story. The following six Americans answer the pollster's question: Wendell R...

Profiles III-THE CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY by John McPhee. PROFILE of nuclear physicist Theodore B. Taylor. In 1956 he went to work in San Diego for General Atomic, a subsidiary of Gen. Dynamics, a civilian laboratory set up to make creative use of nuclear energy. In 1958 he & others began to work on a design for a nuclear...

The Talk of the Town Elsewhere by Lillian Ross. Talk story about Lola Finkelstein, the New Yorker's Great Neck friend, & how she does her Christmas shopping. She feels that the most exciting way to shop is to shop elsewhere & to get what other people don't. Accordingly, she buys (for herself) wallpaper in Paris, panty hose in London...

Musical Events Words, Words, Words by Desmond Shawe-Taylor.

The Talk of the Town Testimonial by Victor Chen. Talk story about Ada Louis Huxtable, the architectural writer for the New York Times, who was recently appointed to the Times' editorial board. She is the second woman to be appointed to it. She studied architectural history at Hunter College, went to Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship, was a curator...

The Theatre Off Broadway by Edith Oliver.

Comment by Jonathan Schell. Comment about candor, credibility, and confidence. The White House, in its Watergate maneuverings, has adopted as its strategy the Big Snarl--numberless, clashing mutually cancelling stories put forward, so that before long the integrity of all the fact & the logic of all the justifications are destroyed beyond reconstruction. The...

The Current Cinema The Hero as Freak by Pauline Kael. Lengthy review of the film "Serpico", adapted from the Peter Maas book by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler, directed by Sidney Lumet. The rowdy spirit & dry wacked-out humor come from Wexler, a former advertising man and political speech-writer, best known for "Joe" (and for his arrest for...

Poetry The Search by W. S. Merwin. When I look for you everything falls silent...

Poetry Approaches by Douglas Morea. From their bedroom window in the night...