Comment by Daniel Menaker. Recently we received a letter from a friend who took his vacation on Cape Cod in July. He said that at one point in his dismal career as a philosophy minor in college he learned that some turn-of-the-century epistemologist asserted that there is a fundamental distinction between...

Profiles BEING GREEN by Roger Angell. PROFILE of Roy Eisenhardt, president of the Oakland A's baseball team...

The Talk of the Town Taking Action by William McKibben. Talk story about graffiti on the north side of Prince St., between Broadway and Mercer, and a group called the Graffiti Eraser Club and Poster Paster Haters Society, which went out and erased it. The clean-up party was catered by Dean & DeLuca. Writer talks to Monroe, who...

Dept. of Amplification DEPARTMENT OF AMPLIFICATION by The Editors. A two-part essay on Lebanon by Jacobo Timerman appeared in the Oct. 18 and Oct. 25, 1982 issues of The New Yorker. Mr. Timerman wrote, "This is what I try to do in Tyre and Sidon as I gaze on these ancient cities, reduced to ruins in a couple...

The Talk of the Town Birthdays by James Stevenson. Talk story about Great Aunt Emily (whose 84th birthday was impending). When asked about her favorite birthday, she recalled the year 1904 when she was five. She was staying at a boarding house on Schroon Lake--and one of the old women guests gave her a purse with 5 dollars...

The Talk of the Town Machines by James Stevenson. Illustrated Talk story about the appeal of old-fashioned machines versus modern ones. A lamentable aspect of the Silicon Era is that there just isn't much to look at in the way of machines. Prior to lasers, robots and fibre optics, machines were something to behold. A machine then was...

Books An Old Man's Love by Naomi Bliven.

Reflections THE AUTONOMY OF THE PRESENT by William Pfaff. REFLECTIONS on the situation in Central America. To believe that foreign interventions make or unmake revolution is to deny the responsibility of states and people for themselves. It is in fact unlikely that outsiders of either persuasion can create a political structure which the people do not want. Another mistake...

The Art World (The Art Galleries) The Rookie by Sanford Schwartz.

Fiction Holbein in New York by George W. S. Trow. Parody about the recent Holbein show in the Morgan Library in N.Y. The show was assisted with funding by Mobil. Piece opens with a quote from Rawleigh Warner, Jr., Chairman of the Board of Mobil, stating that Holbein's life could have been a career in oil instead of art. Author...

Fiction The Other by John Updike. Rob Arnold met Priscilla Hunter at Harvard in the 1950's. Rob was an only child from a Baptist family, and Priscilla a twin from an Episcopalian family. Her parents always enouraged her and Susan (her twin)to be different. Susan was accepted to Radcliffe, too, but went to college...

Jazz Fauntleroy and the Brute by Whitney Balliett.

Poetry Field Guide by Cynthia Zarin. The stars are pinned between the leaves...

Poetry Cuidadores De Autos by Stephen Dobyns. It seems like the world's most useless profession...