The Talk of the Town Zip + 4 by E. J. Kahn. Talk story about the probable advent of a nine-digit Zip Code - Zip + 4, and interview with William F. Bolger, Postmaster General of the U.S. In 1976, while Deputy P.M.G., he was in charge of a task force assigned the job of getting mail sorting and delivering automated. As the...

That Was New York HARLEM I-THE JOURNEY UPTOWN by Jervis Anderson. THAT WAS NEW YORK about the movement, beginning around 1900, of Negroes to Harlem. They abandoned the West Side between the twenties and the low sixties, where they had lived for decades. Life on the congested and hostile middle West Side, with its overcrowded tenements and its increasing eruptions of...

The Talk of the Town Testy Playwright by Brendan Gill. Talk story about attending a Strindberg Festival in Stockholm, as an "observer." Gives biographical facts about the playwright, a Stockholm native, born in 1849, died in 1912...

Fiction The Tenant by Berry Morgan. A highly educated man -- probably a physician -- has taken his young child and abandoned city life to become a tenant farmer in northern Virginia. He is recovering from a nervous breakdown, and adapts readily to the quiet country, his log cabin. He talks to his child, and they take long...

Comment by Berton Roueche. A friend who lives in the country comments on gypsy moths. It looks as if his part of the world were in for the worst infestation this summer since the terrible defoliation of 1972. He is prompted to wonder why "Lymantria disper" is popularly known as a "moth" in reference...

The Current Cinema HEY, TORQUEMADA by Pauline Kael.

Musical Events Pictures from the Midwest by Nicholas Kenyon.

Dancing Tchaikovsky by Arlene Croce.

Letter from Israel by Robert Shaplen. Discussion of the attack by Israel, on June 7th, of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, which came only a short time before Israel's June 30th national elections. The attack, which has met with general approval in Israel, has elicited international shock and condemnation and has served to remind the...

Comment by Veronica Geng. Quotes Times headlines in the City Edition, June 19th, telling about the retirement of Justice Potter Stewart of the Supreme Court and two women who might succeed him. One was Carla Hills and the other was referred to as "Wife of Dole". Some dialogue making fun of this designation follows...

Fiction Healing Grace by Carola Dibbell. The narrator is in the hospital, recovering from an operation to remove some scar tissue that was keeping her from getting pregnant. Her heighbor in the hospital, Grace, is recovering from a hysterectomy, a much more serious operation. The narrator thinks of a time several years ago, when, at twenty...

The Talk of the Town Let's Hear Some Chatter by Susan Lardner. Talk story recording conversation at Little League baseball games, in southern Connecticut, during the season just ended. It was the players and fans speaking...

Books Happy on Nono Despite Odosha by John Updike.

Jazz The Red Norvo Trio: 1981 by Whitney Balliett.

Poetry The Suppliant by James Merrill. Tiny, half-blind life...

Poetry Like Boats by Brian Swann. Who is this who has come in...