Comment by Mark Danner. A comment about abuses of power by the executive branch of government. During the nineteen-eighties, while Iraqis and Iranians killed one another by the hundreds of thousands, the US maintained a vigilant neutrality--or so Americans were assured by the governments they elected. But a half-dozen years ago...

The Talk of the Town Openings by William Finnegan. Talk story about Adolphe Frenche, a man from Trinidad who writer met at the Olympics. Tells how he lost his luggage containing his tickets and spent the Olympics at a seaside resort 100 miles north of the city, because that was where the travel agency had placed them. His personal...

The Talk of the Town Surplus by John Seabrook. Talk story about Stanley Imberman of Canal Surplus, and his store. After getting out of the Army, in 1947, Stanley Imberman decided not to go into the family business, which was wire. In the early seventies he started a surplus store on Canal Street. He specialized in surplus wire--marine...

Fiction Blown Away by Lisa Walker. Casual about Sharon Stone, an actress in the recent popular movie Basic Instinct about a bi-sexual murderer, who seduces her victims and murders them with an ice-pick. Casual begins with a series of quotations about Stone, from interviews, a director, a comedian, and Michael Douglas among others. The...

Fiction Disappeared by Enid Shomer. Leila Pinkerton, "a plump 68-year-old white woman," and a widow, lived in Waccasassa, Florida, next door to Fontane Whitley, a slim 29-year-old black woman, whose 12-year-old son Hiram had been missing for 3 days. Leila and Fontane were"as close to friendship as they...

A Reporter at Large INSECT LOVE by Diane Ackerman. A REPORTER AT LARGE about insect mating habits and entomologist Thomas Eisner, of Cornell. By worldwide proclamation he is "the father of chemical ecology"--the one who sees the relationships not only between insects but between insects and other living things, such as trees and plants. He discovered much about...

Concert Records / Popular Music by Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Letter from Panama by Alma Guillermoprieto. The teargassing of George Bush in the Plaza Porras last June 11 was a public relations fiasco for the White House, but it had the effect of an earthquake on his hosts. Panamanian politicians and groups have been trying to blame the event on one another. Tells what has happened...

Musical Events by Paul Griffiths.

The Sporting Scene DINOSAUR by Roger Angell. THE SPORTING SCENE about minor league baseball and about the Oneonta Yankees. Minor league baseball, which encompassed 59 leagues and perhaps 10,000 players at its peak in the late forties, is now reduced to less than a third of that size; most of the 26(soon to be 28)major...

Poetry Little Whaley, Pawling, N.Y. by Marianne Burke. In this book, the stars are well connected...

Poetry Present by W. S. Merwin. She informed me that she had a tree of mirabelles...

Poetry In the Woods by Leonard Nathan. Night, and a candle guttering on the table...