The Talk of the Town In Progress by Bryan Di Salvatore. Talk Story about Edward Robb Ellis, a columnist for "Diarist's Journal." "Diarist's Journal" is a monthly tabloid that comes out of Lansford, Pennsylvania. They publish excerpts from diaries...

The Current Cinema KILLERS AND COUSINS by Pauline Kael.

Fiction Tickets by Donald Barthelme. The narrator's decision to form a new group was prompted by by a situation vis-a-vis the symphony. His wife asked him to attend the symphony knowing full well his views on the symphony--that only those socially malformed would choose to get dressed up, sit between 2 people...

Books by Brad Leithauser.

A Reporter at Large III-GREAT PLAINS by Ian Frazier. REPORTER AT LARGE about the Great Plains. Writer visits Nicodemus, Kansas, a town founded in the 1870s by black homesteaders. The founders were part of a movement of tens of thousands of blacks who left the South in the late 1870s for new homes in the West. The movement reached...

Annals of Transport LIGHT RAIL by Anthony Hiss. ANNALS OF TRANSPORTATION about trolley cars & light rail transportation, specifically about the Electric Railway President's Conference Committee or PCC car. The term "light rail transit" refers, technically, to what is called a medium-capacity rail system--one that can carry between 2,000 & 20,000 people an hour at a...

The Talk of the Town The Game by Adam Gopnik. Talk story about the New York City table-hockey championships at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn...

The Theatre BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS by Edith Oliver.

Fiction by Louise Erdrich. The narrator returns home to her mother's house in Argus, North Dakota. Inside the shades are drawn because it's over 100 deg. & the fans are broken. She's afraid to tell her mother, a French Chippewa, that she married Gerry, a man in his 30s who is a notorious political...

The Talk of the Town Temples of Thrift by Richard Brookhiser. Talk STory about visiting the Apple Bank For Savings on 73rd St. between Broadway & Amsterdam & the Bowery Savings Bank just north of Grand St. in Chinatown. With Texas S & Ls going out of business every week the writer decides to visit these banks because they're built as...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Comment by Suzannah Lessard. Writer tells of the new kind of terror we feel when we put ourselves in Salman Rushdie's shoes. Never before has an international mob of millions called for the murder of someone like him--someone who's not a world leader or an official, someone who until now was probably unknown...

The Sky Line by Brendan Gill.

Poetry Ideal City by George Bradley. Sometimes the weather was nice and time was ample...

Poetry Orpheus Alone by Mark Strand. It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk...