The Talk of the Town Aspen by Jeremy Bernstein. Talk story consisting of a letter from a friend in Aspen, Colorado. He has spent a part of each of the last fifteen years living there and, in addition to providing a thumbnail history of the town, compares the Aspen of today to that of fifteen years ago. Aspen was...

The Sporting Scene MR. TREVINO AND MR. NICKLAUS by Herbert Warren Wind. THE SPORTING SCENE about the United States Open, which was played last month at the Baltusrol Golf Club, in Springfield, New Jersey. It was won by Jack Nicklaus, with runner up Isao Aoki, of Japan. The story of this match is the story of Jack Nicklaus, who in winning the...

Fiction Supreme Court Decision On Genetic Engineering Causes Patent Office Boom by James Stevenson. Descriptions, with illustrations, of four patents and one patent pending. Some of the descriptions read as follows: After "digesting" an oil spill it "returns" the oil to its original owner. By crossbreeding and fusing several strains of bacteria, it converts polyester into prune yogurt. Splices genes into designer jewelry of...

The Talk of the Town Pondering by Susan Lardner. Talk story about a songwriter who has been thinking of buying a home computer. For a while she's had her eye on microcomputers, which have been available for several years, and she has been trying to come up with some reason to buy one. She has come up with some...

Fiction Lost Letters by Milan Kundera. Tamina, a 33-year-old widow, works as a waitress in a town in the west of Europe. She is a native of Prague. She and her husband left Czechoslovakia illegally, leaving behind a package of love letters and the diaries Tamina kept at her husband's request. Her memory of...

Comment by Jonathan Schell. In a recent significant interview in Time, Gov. Ronald Reagan appears to have come out for a radical change in American policy toward the Soviet Union. On being asked how the U.S. should have responded to recent Soviet aggression, he answered, "Maybe that was the time for us to have...

Musical Events Albertus Magnus by Andrew Porter.

Fiction A Midsummer Night's Dream by Lou Myers. Leon and Mario, two friends, live in the Bronx and in summer like to play-act at the boathouse on the Bronx River. Mario plays bit parts on the weekends at the Butler Davenport Free Theatre, and it is from there that he swipes the costumes the two use in...

Dancing Heart of Darkness by Arlene Croce.

Reflections BY VERNON'S PASTURE by Suzannah Lessard. REFLECTIONS by writer, a Northerner living in New York City, who has spent a weekend in Virginia with the family of a friend from boarding-school days. The friend has two sisters; all three siblings had assembled at the house that weekend for the purpose of dividing up a number...

Books Solo by Whitney Balliett.

Poetry What You Have Come to Expect by Stephen Dobyns. The worn plush of the seat chafes your bare legs...

Poetry The Pier: Under Pisces by James Merrill. The shallows, brighter...