Popular Music by Susan Orlean. Mark Moses, The New Yorker's popular music critic, died this summer at the age of 32. He wrote his first piece for the magazine in early 1988...

Books by Lis Harris.

Fiction Bread, Butter, and Florrie Ford by Muriel Spark. The writer was born in Edinburgh in 1918 & she reminisces about her preschool life up to the age of five. Sometimes she compares her early infancy with that of her friends whose very early lives were in the hands of nannies, who were surrounded by servants & privilege. Those...

Reflections THE END OF NATURE by William McKibben. REFLECTIONS about the greenhouse effect. Scientists already knew that carbon dioxide, a by-product of fossil-fuel combustion combustion, trapped solar infrared radiation that would otherwise have been reflected back into space. It was Svante Arrhenius, employing measurements of infrared radiation from the full moon, who did the first calculations...

Obituary by Whitney Balliett. Obituary of Roy Eldridge, trumpeter, singer, and drummer, who died last winter at the age of 78...

The Talk of the Town The Wedding by Peter Sikowitz. Talk Story about a couple who decided to get married after being together for 12 years. They felt that a formal or traditional wedding ceremony wouldn't be appropriate, so they planned to get married in a civil ceremony in the Municipal Building. When they told their families, friends, & acquaintances...

The Talk of the Town Gems by Mike Cannell. Talk Story about Rick Prelinger, a 36 year old former Berkeley film student, who maintains the nation's largest private collection of educational, safety, & promotional movie movies that were shown decades ago at school assemblies & civic clubs, & long since discarded. He operates out of 3 cramped rooms that...

Around City Hall AROUND CITY HALL FIGHTING THE POWER by Andy Logan. Currently borough president of Manhattan and running as a Democratic candidate for mayor, Dinkins would, if elected, by the first black mayor of New York. He has said that while he does not hold Mayor Ed Koch responsible for the killing on Aug. 23rd of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst, he...

The Talk of the Town Muttontown'sKing by Thomas Vinciguerra. Talk Story about Ahmed Bey Zogu(Zog I), Albania's first & only king, who, in 1951, bought Knollwood, a mansion on Long Island's North Shore, to establish his kingdom in exile. Born in 1895, he gained control of his country after WWI, became President in 1925, & declared himself King...

Comment by Ronnie Dugger. Texas Congressman Mickey Leland, chairman of the House Select Committee on Hunger, was killed when the plane taking him to Fugnido, a refugee camp near Ethiopia's border with the Sudan, crashed into Tamsi Mountain in Ethiopia...

Poetry Yellow Flowers by James Schuyler. Pie-wedge petals...

Poetry To a Box Turtle by John Updike. Size of a small skull, and like a skull segmented...