Comment by Adam Gopnik. Comment about Johnny Carson retiring. The truth is that in the last five or six or even ten years, writers wife and he hardly watched Johnny at all. The Carson show had become a bore... At some point it all came to seem terribly dated. (Dana Garvey, on "Saturday Night...

The Talk of the Town Congressman by Garrison Keillor. Talk story about Rep. Tom Coleman of Kansas City, Missouri who saw writer on a Tuesday morning last month in his office in Washington, along with delegations of beer wholesalers and petroleum distributors. It was a busy day for him, starting with a 9:30 meeting of the Wheat, Soybeans, and...

The Talk of the Town Maneuvers by John Seabrook. Talk story about Cops on Bikes, a program that will mount police officers on bicycles, at least until the end of the summer. The man who steered Cops on Biks through the NYPD bureaucracy is Inspector Mike Julian. He works on the top floor of headquarters, not far from Commissioner...

The Talk of the Town Flipping by Alec Wilkinson. A talk story about "flipping" on piles of mattresses and box-springs, which is done in the South Bronx, in a vacant lot that flippers call the Garden, at 163rd Street and Prospect Avenue. Writer interviews two flippers, Kevin Jones and Terrence Ford...

Fiction Millie's Gear Slips by Roz Chast. Color cartoon spread about a woman who takes four minutes and eleven seconds to retrieve a forgotten sweater, and then realizes she would always be that amount of time behind: in movieslines, inssupermarkets, in life...

Fiction Maundy by Christopher Hope. About a suburban housing estate, Badminton, in South Africa in 1952, during Easter, when an English woman raised Maundy money for the poor, then gave it to a legless black man, Salisbury, who had been working for a neighbor of the narrator, a young boy named Martin. Maggie's father found...

Profiles JUNGLE BOTANIST by E. J. Kahn. PROFILE of Richard Evans Schultes, a Harvard botanist specializing in ethnobotany and jugle plants. Tells about his life as well as the various applications of Amazon plants fot medicine...

The Current Cinema O PIONEERS! by Terrence Rafferty.

The Diplomatic Round EARTH SUMMIT by John Newhouse. THE DIPLOMATIC ROUND about next week's Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero; the formal name is UNCED, for United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Twenty to forty thousand people will gather at the summit, including the largest assemblage of world leaders ever. The basic document of its mandate is...

The Theatre GOING NOWHERE by Mimi Kramer.

Letter from Washington by Elizabeth Drew. The worst riots in modern American history, in Los Angeles, caused the probable candidates of the two major parties to proceed with care. The riots threw both George Bush and Bill Clinton off stride, raising subjects they had largely been avoiding. The probable independent candidate, Ross Perot, knowing very little...

Books by Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Poetry The Message by Mark Levine. Alone at last. With him...

Poetry Bubbles by Eamon Grennan. We are--not for ever but the moment--blowing bubbles in the kitchen. The...

Poetry Shirts by Marianne Burke. There was no poetry waiting for my mother...