The Talk of the Town The Lady Bobcats by William McKibben. Talk story about Tom McKibben and the Lady Bobcats. McKibben is in his first season as coach of this girl's junior-high basketball team in a small town in rural Maine, where he teaches. It's his first season as coach of the team. This game was the season's biggest contest...

The Theatre THE EMPEROR'S CLONES by Brendan Gill.

Books by John Updike.

Fiction From a Free-Lancer's Notebook by Polly Frost. Excerpts from the writer's notebook about trends: how difficult it is to spot them and how quickly they become out of date. In order to compete with other journalists she has to hurl herself further and further into the future. She begins by saying: "People think that writing about trends...

Our Far-Flung Correspondents A FRIEND ON THEIR SIDE by E. J. Kahn. OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about mail fraud stemming fro classified advertisements, and the Postal Inspection Service's attempts to curtail it by placing bogus ads in newspapers, then answering them with pamphlets explaining how mail frauds work... Inspector Kacy R. McClelland mailed off his 2 ads--in a letter over the...

Fiction Women and Children First by Francine Prose. Janet rents a farmhouse in Monterey and trucks in antiques which Gordie, her gay friend, sells at American Beauty, his Georgetown shop. Janet's divorced from Will, a surgeon, and lives with their son Kevin who is soon to be a teenager. Gordie and Janet browse through an old children's book...

A Reporter at Large THE BIG SINGING by Wallace White. A REPORTER AT LARGE about the Big Singing, in Benton, Kentucky, an annual assemblage of members of that community at whichhymns & other songs from a 19th-century tune book, "The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion" are sung a cappella & in a way that gives much of the music...

Profiles STAGE PICTURES by Calvin Tomkins. PROFILE of Rosamond Bernier who lectures on art 40 or 50 times a year. Her lectures are really intimate chats about artists, their friends, their society, & their work. She has transformed the art lecture, illustrated with slides, into something scintillating: a performance, a star turn. Her annual lectures at...

The Talk of the Town Law and China by E. J. Kahn. Talk story about Peking University law school library. The university has decided that, because of the People's Republic's increasing economic traffic with the outside world, it needs a proper international-law library--a decision we heard about from an American lawyer, Jerome Alan Cohen, who has been asked by the...

Comment Comment, Pt. I by Jonathan Schell. Politicians ordinarily like to consider themselves"realists," but in a democracy there are at least 2 distinct realities that must be kept in mind. The first is reality in its usual, primary sense: the reality of the world & its events... The 2nd is reality in a secondary sense: the...

Letter from New Delhi by Ved Mehta. Soon after the writer arrived in New Delhi last August there was a telephone strike triggered by abusive behavior by P.C. Sethi toward operators because of their alleged inefficiency. It is true that the telephone system in India is frustrating & attempts to modernize it have not succeeded. Sethi had...

Fiction Future Candidates for "Colorization" by James Stevenson. Seven drawings with captions like: Snow; Sugar, Flour, Salt; Steam; Whipped Cream, etc. Writer is making fun of the fact that recently old black & white movies have had color added to them...

Comment Comment, Pt. II by William McKibben. About a year ago, in the weeks before the snap election & the subsequent"February Revolution"in the Philippines, we talked with a 47-year-old Irish priest, Father Niall O'Brien who had been held in prison on the sugar-growing island of Negros for many months, facing trumped-up...

The Talk of the Town Reading the Noises by William Finnegan. Talk story about sirens and other noise in New York City, and taxis. Writer and his girlfriend moved from San Francisco to Manhattan. Tells about the various sirens they hear from their apartment. Worse than all these sirens, though, when it comes to destroying sleep is the noise of people...

Poetry Stirred by snow's rare erasure, my sister by Michael McFee. Stirred by the snow's rare erasure, my sister...

Poetry Two Poems by L. S. Asekoff. We sit, strangers, at the familiar table...

Poetry Sundays by Derek Walcott. This is Fame: Sundays...