The Talk of the Town Prodigy by Jeremy Bernstein. Talk story about Willem Klein, probably the world's greatest calculating prodigy (not really a mathematician, he's just interested in numbers and has a fantastic memory for them). His feats are in the 1978 Guinness Book of Records. Tells about a demonstration at Brown Univ. where he calculated the perfect 13th...

Comment by Jonathan Schell. When the Justice Dept. dropped its request for a court order barring the Wisconsin magazine "The Progressive" from publishing an article about the making of an H-bomb, it abandoned a battle lost 34 years ago when the first atomic bomb was exploded near Alamogordo, N.M. Since then it has...

The Talk of the Town Beginning by Mark Singer. Talk story about tap-dancing. Writer accompanies Tom Whalen to Le Studio, a dance academy run by Bob Audy, and watches him take a lesson. Audy, known as the tap-dancer's tap-dancer, has taught people like Joel Grey and Shirley MacLaine to tap. Tom Whalen has just turned 50...

Dept. of Amplification by Joseph Rauh. DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION of Ken Auletta's recent Profile of Mayor Koch which contained a conversation that purportedly took place between Mr. Koch and Joseph Rauh during the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party credential fight at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, in Atlantic City. Mayor Koch asserted that he informed Rauh of...

Fiction So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. Writer recalls his boyhood in Lincoln, III. in the early 1920's. On a winter morning a tenant farmer living nearby, Lloyd Wilson, was found shot dead. The murderer could only have been Clarence Smith, the father of the author's friend Cletus. Writer recalls disasters in his own family, his...

Comment by Daniel Lang. We are well aware that in recent years the Federal Bureau of Investigation has fallen into disrepute, but sometimes to go on hitting someone whether he is up or down may be perfectly in order. We were dismayed to read the other day that 9 years ago the law-enforcement...

The Talk of the Town The Ottendorfer by Anthony Hiss. Talk story about the Ottendorfer Library, on 2nd Ave. near St. Marks Place, where the city's fiscal crisis, the nation's energy crisis, and the historic preservation movement have converged. The Ottendorfer, opened by Oswald Ottendorfer of the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung in 1884, was the first free reading room and...

The Current Cinema DEAD MEN COMIN' THROUGH by Donald Barthelme.

The Sporting Scene THE SLAM THAT FAILED by Herbert Warren Wind. THE SPORING SCENE about the U.S. Open tennis matches and the 23-year-old Swedish star, Bjorn Borg. Some observers feel he is the greatest athlete in the world today. Unfortunately, in the U.S. Open he lost in the quarter finals to Roscoe Tanner. In July he won the men's...

Poetry Impressions: Monet by Edward Hirsch. Smoke blooms like breath from the chimneys...

Poetry Samos by James Merrill. And still, at sea all night, we had a sense...