The Current Cinema BOMBS by Pauline Kael.

Comment by William Finnegan. Comment about Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's decision to end the ceasefire between the Contras and the Sandinista Army. Ortega made this announcement at a summit meeting of sixteen hemisphere leaders in San Jose, Costa Rica. President Bush was at first stunned by the announcement. A day later, however, he seemed...

Comment Comment, Pt. II by Garrison Keillor. A comment about sleeping in city parks around the world. In Copenhagen, suddenly clubbed by jet lag, we found Orsteds Parken a fine place to nap in, with little dales and glens for privacy, a pond, ducks and swans, and gentle slopes, and with a few dozen Danes dozing there...

On Photography PHOTOGRAPHY WHITE AND BLACK by Ingrid Sischy. Review of Mapplethorpe's photography show "The Perfect Moment". Its sexually explicit images caused a political storm in Washington that led the Corcoran Gallery to cancel the show and resulted in changing the funding rules of the National Endowment for the Arts...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

The Talk of the Town Moonwalking by Mindy Aloff. Talk Story about John Cortese who owns a grocery store in Brooklyn's Park Slope. The writer visited him there to find out how he lost weight without dieting. It turned out that his weightless secret is walking. On five or six evenings a week, when he leaves work he strides...

The Theatre ANTI-NUCLEAR-FAMILY DRAMA by Mimi Kramer.

A Reporter at Large A GRAND EXPERIMENT by Lawrence Weschler. REPORTER AT LARGE about Poland and all the recent changes. In early 1989 the regime agreed to round-table discussions with the opposition. In the end the regime agreed to legalization of Solidarity and in exchange the union agreed to participate in a snap election, to be held on Sun...

Fiction The Jewish Hunter by Lorrie Moore. Odette is a New York poet who is visiting a small midwestern town on a library fellowship: 6 weeks and $4000 to live in town, write unpublishable poems & give a reading at the library. She meets Pinky Eliot, a Jewish farm lawyer. They have a love affair. He shows...

The Talk of the Town Hugh's Truck by Alec Wilkinson. Talk story about the restoration of Hugh Cosman's 1953 Ford F-100 truck, the special-de-luxe-edition pickup, with the high-rounded fenders, and the distinctive clamshell hood stamped from one sheet of steel, that Ford produced to celebrate its golden anniversary. Hugh works at Treitel-Gratz, an outfit...

Poetry Night Piece by J. D. McClatchy. Sylph of that cold ceiling, your papered sky...

Poetry Family Ground by Jane Flanders. Elsewhere they are enduring...