Comment by Allan Nairn. With the completion of the elections in Nicaragua, there is reason to hope that the war and the economic agony in that country may finally be coming to an end. As soon as President Bush heard the news of Violeta Chamorro's victory, he announced that "there is no reason at...

Profiles THE CONSTITUTIONALIST by Nat Hentoff. PROFILE of William Brennan who has been a Justice of the Supreme Court since 1957. He was born in Newark, N.J., in 1906 of Irish immigrant parents. He graduated in 1928 from the Wharton School of the Univ. of Penn. That same year he married Marjorie Leonard. He entered Harvard...

Around City Hall Starting Out by Andy Logan. It was David Dinkins' good fortune that any rocky moments he encountered during his first months--& there have been some--happened in a season when so much astonishing news was pouring in from other parts of the world that even the most ernestly civic-minded of his constituents had...

The Talk of the Town Clubhouse by Mike Cannell. Talk story about Tom Sena & the Rockaway Beach Surf Shop, as well as surfing activity in the Rockaway area. When the Hawaiians invented surfing, they did not have New York City in mind. Schlepping a seven-foot surfboard through the subway--a maneuver guaranteed to draw verbal abuse from...

Fiction The Custodian by Deborah Eisenberg. The story begins with a chance meeting of two childhood friends, Lynnie and Isobel. Lynnie now owns a gourmet shop in their old home town; Isobel has a husband and children in San Francisco. Her father is dying of cancer. The story flashes back to Lynnie and Isobel's childhood, their...

Letter from Europe by Jane Kramer. Russians, like everybody else, are a little bewildered by Mikhail Gorbachev. They argue about what Gorbachev wants, and whether Gorbachev can last, and how "sincere"Gorbachev is--about who Gorbachev is. They cannot really decide if Gorbachev is a Communist in a democrat's suit or a democrat in Party clothing...

The Talk of the Town Chicken Dinner by Patricia Marx. Talk story about a pet rooster belonging to the writer's friends, here referred to as Betty and Hal Madison. The writer is dining at their home in Oyster Bay. Betty says that getting to know Nancie has given her greater respect for all animals. Being a lawyer, she now does...

The Talk of the Town Seduction by Adam Gopnik. A talk story about an exhibit of Jana Sterbak's work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Ferguson, an art critic, is quoted extensively by the writer. According to Ferguson, Sterbak's "Seduction Couch" demonstrates "the contradictory nature of desire--its conflict of irreconcilable tensions within the ever renewable cycle of...

The Current Cinema EXPEDITIONS by Terrence Rafferty.

Books by Judith Thurman.

Poetry In Aphrodisias by Stephen Stepanchev. Here Homer's wine-dark sea is a deep...

Poetry What Work Is by Philip Levine. We stand in the rain in a long line...

Poetry The Afterlife by Debora Greger. The schoolmaster's forgotten the present...