Comment by Mark Hertsgaard. Comment about the famine in Somalia. With thousands of people dying of starvation every day in Somalia, the world is at last paying attention. It is estimated 100,000 have already died in the famine; relief officials predict the toll will be well over a million if food aid does not...

The Talk of the Town Consequences by Caroline Fraser. Talk story about "The Donner Party," a new documentary that Ric Burns and Lisa Ades produced for PBS. Ric and his brother Ken produced the PBS documentary "The Civil War" two years ago. From his office at Steeplechase Films, in New York, Ric talked about how he got the idea...

The Talk of the Town The Big Boys by Adam Gopnik. Talk story about an infestation of rats in the writer's SoHo loft building. Past experiences with cockroaches and mice had done nothing to prepare the writer and his wife for the rats. First they heard them--a sound of weight & certainty. Then they and their fellow tenants began seeing...

Fiction Those Little Papers (The Diary of a Man On and Over the Brink) by George W. S. Trow. Casual that begins with an excerpt from a recipe on the package of Buckeye Many-Bran Muffins, which says, in part, "...or line the cups with those little papers." A man's diary entries about his wife leaving him. He sends their kids to Camp Slew. Throughout the entries he records...

Fiction The Important Houses by Mary Gordon. About the narrator's girlhood, especially her grandmother's house, on Long Island, near Queens, which, even in its foreignness, was at the center of her life; and about her father's death. The house proclaimed that her grandmother had no interest in having a good time. 7 of her grandmother's 9 children...

A Reporter at Large ALWAYS REMEMBER by Raymond Bonner. A REPORTER AT LARGE about Kurds, and the Iraqi governments war against them. If a genocide case is ever filed against the Iraq of Saddam Hussein and his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, the supreme commander in Iraqi Kurdistan in the late eighties, Iraq could admit to having killed lots...

Our Far-Flung Correspondents CATALONIA by William Finnegan. OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about Catalonia and the Barcelona Olympics. In some ways, the worst possible place from which to watch this year's Olympic Games in Barcelona was Barcelona. Writer was there, and he usually seemed to know less about what was going on than friends half a world away...

Musical Events by Paul Griffiths.

Onward and Upward with the Arts SELLING DREAMS by Ingrid Sischy. ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about the Takarazuka Revue, an all-woman dance and theatrical troupe in Japan. They play both male and female roles-Takarazuka actresses are held to a high social standard: they are not allowed to have any public connection with anything that suggests a sexual...

Letter from Washington by Elizabeth Drew. As the falll political season began, George Bush was still struggling for coherence and a purpose--beyond his ferocious desire--for reelection. His speech last week before the Detroit Economic Club, which molded various things he had been proposing into some sort of form, was a start. But he still...

Concert Records / Popular Music by Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Books by John Updike.

Poetry The Garden of False Civility by John Ashbery. Where are you? Where you are is the one thing I love...

Poetry Wagon by Zbigniew Herbert. What is he doing...

Poetry Birthday by Eamon Grennan. Eighty-one he'd have been. Given the fine day...